Ransome

ransome (James Earl Ransome, born September 25, 1961, in Rich Square, North Carolina) is an African American painter, collage artist, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, illustrator, and educator whose work explores Black family history, the Great Migration, Southern life, memory, labor, resilience, cultural inheritance, and the everyday experiences through which African American communities have created and sustained themselves.  Working primarily from New York’s Hudson Valley, he combines figurative painting and abstraction with collage, found and handmade papers, installation, sculpture, and moving image. His contemporary fine-art practice is presented under the mononym ransome, while his extensive career in children’s-book illustration is generally credited to James E. Ransome.  Ransome’s fine-art practice grows directly from his family history. His grandparents were North Carolina sharecroppers, and members of his family were among the millions of Black Southerners who relocated northward during the Great Migration. He frequently treats his family’s experiences as a point of entry into a much larger African American history, combining intimate portraits, archival memory, domestic imagery, cotton, luggage, quilts, patterns, text, and everyday materials with references to migration, segregation, Jim Crow, labor, aspiration, and Black community life. As he has repeatedly explained, his family history is inseparable from the larger history of Black America. His recent exhibitions have increasingly emphasized not only the violence and hardship surrounding Black history but also the love, pleasure, beauty, style, intimacy, humor, dignity, and joy that make survival meaningful. His forthcoming 2026 solo exhibition A Little Sugar in My Bowl at Curtiss Jacobs Gallery in Harlem makes this especially explicit: portraits of families, children, lovers, workers, ancestors, and elders shift the historical narrative from what Black communities endured toward what they created, protected, and passed forward. That exhibition follows major projects examining the Great Migration at Opalka Gallery and CAM Raleigh and Black representation at the Gibbes Museum of Art and Pelham Art Center.  Ransome earned a BFA in Communications Design (Illustration) from Pratt Institute in 1987 and an MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University in 2021. He spent many years as a tenured professor at Syracuse University before leaving academia to concentrate on his studio practice.  His fine art is held by the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, and Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art. His honors include the 2025 Alexander Rutsch Award for Painting, a 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and major awards from his parallel illustration career, including the 2023 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, Coretta Scott King honors, and NAACP Image Awards. He lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York.