Stanley Museum debuts exhibition of work by Hayward Oubre, a trailblazing UI art student and HBCU instructor

This fall, the University of Iowa will welcome home the work of Hayward Oubre, whose career was as disciplined and deliberate as the artist that shaped it. “Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity,” on display now through Dec. 7, brings together a collection of sculptures, paintings and prints in the first comprehensive solo exhibition of his work. 

Oubre, who died in 2006 at the age of 91, earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at UI in 1948.

“It was a new era for the studio arts,” said Diana Tuite, visiting senior curator of modern and contemporary art at the Stanley Museum of Art. In the ’40s, UI’s School of Art began “training art historians to understand materials, and studio teachers to have art history.” This wholesome approach helped make UI “the best art program in the country,” in Tuite’s opinion.

Visitors to the Oubre exhibition will also find companion presentations curated by Tuite that frame his Iowa years. They include “In the Studio: Art at Iowa in the 1940s,” which places him in dialogue with contemporaries like Mauricio Lasansky, Philip Guston and Miriam Schapiro.

Hayward Oubre was born in 1916 in New Orleans of African and French heritage. After high school, he stayed in the Big Easy and became the first fine arts graduate at Louisiana’s oldest historically Black college or university (HBCU), Dillard University. He continued his studies at Atlanta University with Hale Woodruff and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and at Tuskegee Institute, where he met George Washington Carver.

In 1941, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the 97th United States Colored Infantry, a segregated engineering unit given one of the most demanding and thankless missions: constructing the 1,500-mile Alcan Highway connecting eastern British Columbia to central Alaska. Along with other all-Black engineering units, they accomplished this mission through brutal conditions in only eight months. 

That austere mindset never left him. Carter Cue, Oubre’s close friend, recalled him saying, “My artwork is peerless. I have mastered the medium, the wire medium, because I was an Army engineer on the Alcan Highway.”

After the war, Oubre used the GI Bill to attend the University of Iowa. Even in the 1940s, Iowa’s art program was known for innovation, and here he honed his skills in a way that blended the discipline of military engineering with the creative problem-solving of the studio. While at UI, Oubre and his wife Juanita lived in housing for veterans dubbed “Hawkeye Village.” This temporary mobile home park for GI Bill recipients was located near the current Stanley Museum, where the English-Philosophy Building now stands. 

Noah Jemisin, a former student of Oubre’s at Alabama State University, remembered him saying of UI, “You know, those people are a little crazy out there, but they sure know a lot about teaching young artists.” Those words inspired Jemisin to apply to UI for grad school and earn his own MFA in Iowa City.

It’s important to note that Oubre’s time in Iowa was not free from the discrimination and segregation of that era. Unlike the completely segregated schools of the South, however, Iowa provided an opportunity to learn in a studio environment open to all, even if the accommodations were separate from, and lesser than, white students’.

Structure and creativity became the foundation for the work now recognized as Oubre’s signature: wire sculptures crafted from coat hangers, bent and torqued into balanced, open forms using only a set of pliers. 

“There’s no pretension in terms of the materials … there’s this kind of resourcefulness and a very self-conscious intention to create something that anyone could appreciate,” Tuite said. These pieces carry the logic of an engineer, the resourcefulness of a soldier and the vision of a true artist.

The same discipline shows in his paintings and prints, depicting African-American life in New Orleans. These works reflect modernist influences, balanced with the same sense of stability and proportion that marked his sculptures. 

His work is described as linear, confident and deliberate. Even when the subjects are expressive, there’s a clear framework holding everything together. His use of color often reflects the warmth of his Southern background, but it is always measured, never overwhelming the composition. Like his sculptures, these works are not just about how they look, they are about how they stand, and the balance they hold.

Oubre carried that standard into the classroom. After a brief time at Florida A&M, he founded the art department at Alabama State University in 1949, creating opportunities for Black artists during the civil rights movement. Meredith Knight, an art professor at ASU, said, “His leadership fostered a supportive and inclusive environment where Black students felt empowered and valued.” 

In 1965, he established the art program at Winston Salem State University, marking his third tenure at one of the South’s segregated institutions, now recognized as HBCUs. His dedication to teaching and building art programs ensured that an entire generation of Black artists, many without the means to leave the South, had access to higher education and professional training. It is during these years as an educator that the majority of the exhibit’s pieces were created.

Curated by Kate Crawford of the Birmingham Museum of Art, the collection has been, in her words, “a labor of love …  reuniting important pieces with the rest of Oubre’s body of work.” Visitors will see pieces like Bongo Drummer and Young Horse, alongside his celebrated wire sculptures and paintings. 

After its run at the Stanley Museum of Art, “Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity” will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art from Jan. 16 through May 3, 2026. Bringing the work back to Oubre’s hometown connects the gallery to the streets and classrooms that first fed his ideas. In a sense, the exhibition’s journey reverses his career progression; it will be displayed first in Alabama, where Oubre taught, then in Iowa, where he was a student himself, before landing in New Orleans, where his artistic eye was formed. 

“We don’t always take artist-teachers as seriously as those who can afford to just maintain a studio practice,” Tuite said. “Everyone had an art teacher at some point in their life. What does it mean to really value the work that those individuals made in the course of their lifetime?”

Oubre was a man of firsts: the first Dillard graduate with an Arts major, one of the first Black MFA recipients from the University of Iowa, and the founder of two HBCU arts departments. If you’re looking to be a “first” yourself, “You have the opportunity to be part of one of the first audiences for a body of work,” Tuite said. “Nobody has brought together this artist’s work on this scale ever before.”  

This article was originally published in Little Village’s September 2025 issue.