Margo Humphrey is an American printmaker, painter, and educator whose vibrant color, incisive wit, and narrative symbolism have established her as one of the most original voices in contemporary art. Born in Oakland, California, she earned her BFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts (1968) and an MFA from Stanford University (1974). Throughout her career, she has taught extensively in the United States and abroad, holding residencies and workshops in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Her works are represented in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Humphrey is celebrated for her bold and experimental approach to lithography, and she describes her style as "sophisticated naive." Her prints explode with saturated color, layered textures, and a hand-drawn immediacy that merges painterly freedom with printmaking discipline. Humor, autobiography, and cultural critique intermingle across her compositions, which are often crowded with symbols, fragments of text, and archetypal imagery.

Religious symbolism plays a central role in her work, most notably in the recurring cross motif. In prints such as All Crossed Up, Bright Moments, Crossing Over, or The Double Cross, black silhouettes of crosses dominate radiant grounds of red, yellow, or sunset tones, refracting themes of sacrifice, transcendence, and ritual through a lens of improvisation and satire. This engagement culminates in Humphrey’s best-known work, a ten-color lithograph titled The Last Bar-B-Que (1983). Recasting Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper as a jubilant African American cookout, Humphrey replaces solemnity with humor and canonical imagery with vernacular references. While often singled out, the print is fully aligned with her larger practice: like her other cross-centered works, it uses sacred iconography as a means to bridge faith, history, and everyday life.

Humphrey also creates prints that function as visual diaries, such as The History of Her Life Written Across Her Face. Here, portraits become densely inscribed with symbols, words, and memories which blend personal narrative and cultural storytelling. Works like Time or Sunday Afternoon push this further, combining domestic and celebratory imagery with allegorical depth, transforming a birthday gathering or an afternoon exchange into layered meditations on memory, community, and resilience.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo

Recent Works by MARGO HUMPHREY, Memorial Union Gallery, University of California-Davis, 1977

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, 1980

Philadelphia Print Club, PA, 1984

Her Story: MARGO HUMPHREY Lithographs and Works on Paper, Mechanical Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, 2010

MARGO HUMPHREY, Lithographs and Works on Paper, David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010

Group

New Perspectives in Black Art, Kaiser Center Gallery, Oakland Museum of Art, 1968

Black Untitled III: Graphics, Oakland Museum of Art, CA, 1973

West Coast 74: The Black Image, E.B. Crocker Art Gallery and Los Angeles, Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA, 1974

Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1980

California Black Printmakers, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, 1983

A Century of African American Art: The Paul R. Jones Collection, University Museum, University of Delaware, Newark, 2004

The Harmon & Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art: Works on Paper, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, 2009

Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 2018

Multiples: Contemporary Prints from the Smithsonian Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 2022