Jessie Housley

Jessie Housley Holliman was born in 1905 and raised in North St. Louis. For thirty-nine years, she taught elementary school art at the Divoll School on Dayton Avenue. Housley was a prolific printmaker, muralist, illustrator and commercial artist.

Because Washington University did not admit Black art students at the time, Housley worked as a model to gain access to the St. Louis School of Fine Arts. She also studied at Stowe Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Summer Teacher’s College at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Housley’s work was widely exhibited and awarded in St. Louis at the Urban League shows and the City Art Museum. Outside St. Louis, her works were displayed at the Harmon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Art Students League in New York City.

Housley was a hard-working and pragmatic artist, working as a freelance fashion and commercial illustrator. Her advertisements for Kline’s department store in St. Louis ran in local newspapers for many years.

In the mid-1930s, she learned fresco mural painting. The Urban League of St. Louis, which awarded her First Grand Prize in 1936, also commissioned a mural for their headquarters, since demolished. The mural, called Racial and Industrial Harmony, depicted a white man and a black man shaking hands, framed by the Eads Bridge. Another mural for Central Baptist Church, Christ's Fellowship, was destroyed in a fire in 1971.

The only extant work of hers on public display is The Origin of Free Masonry, a majestic, thirty-eight-foot-long fresco mural depicting the history of freemasonry at the Masonic Temple on Lindell Boulevard in St. Louis. It was dedicated by then Senator Harry S. Truman in September 1941.

Jessie Housley died in 1984 at the age of seventy-nine after a long illness. She is interred at Washington Park Cemetery in Berkeley, Missouri, outside St. Louis.