Pauline Powell Burns (1877–1912): First Black Woman Artist to Exhibit in California

Pauline Powell Burns

Plot 45, Grave 844

Pauline Powell Burns occupies a landmark place in California cultural history as the first known African American woman to exhibit artwork in the state, emerging as both a gifted painter and a professional pianist at a time when opportunities for Black artists—especially women—were profoundly limited.

Born in Oakland in 1872, Burns came from a family whose American story stretches back to Monticello and Thomas Jefferson’s Hemings–Fossett family line. Her great-grandparents Joseph Fossett, a blacksmith, and Edith Fossett, a domestic worker, were emancipated upon Jefferson’s death in 1826. Other family members were not so fortunate: her grandmother Isabella was sold to satisfy Jefferson’s debts, a trauma that fractured generations. Members of the family eventually relocated to Boston, and later branches made their way to California, where Pauline was born into a household grounded in education and self-determination—her mother a schoolteacher and domestic worker, her father a railroad porter.

Burns demonstrated remarkable musical and artistic talent from a young age. By the age of 14, she was performing publicly as a pianist. But it was her visual art that placed her in the historical record: in 1890, she exhibited her paintings at the California State Fair, becoming the first Black woman known to do so. Her surviving works—including still lifes such as Fruits and Flowers—show a sophisticated hand, a command of color, and technical refinement unusual for someone with no access to formal art academies, which largely excluded African Americans at the time.

Violets by Pauline Powell Burns

She married Edward E. Burns in 1893 and continued to perform music locally, though her artistic output diminished as illness—likely tuberculosis—took hold. Burns died in 1912, her promise largely unfulfilled but her achievements quietly trailblazing.

Although Burns remains lesser-known today, she was part of a growing cohort of Black visual artists who challenged the boundaries of the Gilded Age art world. Among her contemporaries and artistic predecessors were major figures of the early African American art tradition, including Edward Mitchell Bannister, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Grafton Tyler Brown, as well as Robert S. Duncanson—whose pioneering landscape work helped shape the generation of Black painters who followed. Together, they formed an early lineage of Black American painters whose work insisted on dignity, beauty, and cultural presence at a time when such visibility was radical.

Her work, though rare, is a reminder that the history of California art is far richer and more diverse than previously acknowledged.

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Sources: Wikipedia; BlackPast.org biography “Pauline Powell Burns (1872–1912)”; California State Fair historical records; articles on Bannister, Duncanson, Tanner, Brown, and 19th-century African American painters.

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