Leroy W. Flint

(Ashtabula, OH, Ohio, 1909 - 1991)

North America, American

Leroy Flint (often known as Roy) was born in Ashtabula, Ohio to a father who worked as a hardware dealer but painted as a hobby. Flint was thus encouraged in his creative pursuits throughout his early life and graduated from Ashtabula High School planning to become an artist. He worked for almost five years in the forging room of the American Fork and Hoe Company, rising into an inspector position in an effort to save money for art school. However, the 1929 stock market crash which initiated the Great Depression wiped out his savings, and he lost his job when the plant closed down. Access to opportunities in his chosen profession thus delayed, Flint continued to make ends meet in other ways, most of them involving manual labor. A 1955 biography in the Akron Beacon Journal characterizes his persistence: “Leroy Flint knew he had to be an artist. To become one he has been a metal worker, a short-order cook, a shanty boater, a dredge boat deck hand and has worked on WPA art projects.”

Eventually, in 1932, Flint won a competitive scholarship and entered the Cleveland Institute of Art. His support paid tuition costs plus $100 for supplies, so he continued to work odd jobs on the side. Flint later named the school’s director, Henry Hunt Clark, as the person most essential to his finishing the program. When he left the Institute in 1937, he found that demand for his (or anyone’s) artistic work continued to be low, despite the fact that one of his etchings had won the top award in the annual May Show of the Cleveland Museum of Art. He thus secured himself support from the Works Progress Administration and was assigned the talk of completing a lithographic study of the Ohio River and its people. Flint roped in his high school friend Charles Field and headed south from East Liverpool, Ohio with a rickety pair of boats in the summer of 1938. Per the ABJ, “with a cat for company… For months they drifted casually down the river, stopping when the mood struck them so Roy could make lithographs.” Though his WPA salary only covered work in Ohio, Flint and Field decided to keep doing down river and made it to Vicksburg, Mississippi before their money ran out.

After his return to Cleveland for WPA work as a painter and more odd jobs, the 1941 advent of U.S. involvement in World War II saw Flint drafted into the Army and assigned to the U.S. Corps of Engineers map reproduction center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Because of his training as an artist, he was made an instructor there. He thus taught map making for five years and eventually had 28 men working under him. He left the Army in December, 1945, with a master sergeant’s rating and a citation for specialized work in the field of visual education. Soon after returning to Cleveland, Flint secured employment in the Public Information Department of the Cleveland City Planning Commission, where his duties included mounting exhibits for general audiences. He worked there for four years, serving as chief of the department during his final year there.

Despite having risen to positions of prominence in many of the other vocations he had become involved in, Flint still desired to make a career in the arts. He thus left the City Planning Commission and began taking graduate courses in education and philosophy at Western Reserve University and Cleveland College. At the same time, he also secured part-time jobs in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s education department and as an instructor at the Akron Art Institute. After five years, this led to a full-time position as Curator of Education at the Akron Art Institute. In that role Flint was mainly responsible for the organization’s work with school children, and he also began a program of informal study for local artists who were committed to their work but didn’t want to enroll in a full university program. One of those students was La Wilson, whose work is well represented in the AAM collection. An Akron Beacon Journal article described Flint’s temperament by saying that “As an art instructor, he is sympathetic and patient.” In 1956, Flint became the Director of the Art Institute, holding that position until 1965. Still interested in early art education, he received press coverage for developing “Kits for Kids,” a series of boxes, each pertaining to a designated country or culture, containing art objects that children could handle and learn about from Institute staff. He also formed a collection of art that was available for loan and rental, gave informal lectures to groups visiting the museum, established artist-in-residence grant programs, and brought artists including John Cage and Merce Cunningham to serve as guest speakers. The photographer Daniel Rohn (who had a solo exhibition at the Akron Art Museum in 1988) recalled that “During that era the Institute was a mini-Bauhaus; a working, teaching, and exhibiting institution that made no distinction between artist, artisan, or designer—a ‘friendly’ place that welcomed all, staffed with alive and vital teachers.” Rohn adds that Flint’s tenure as director was animated by his belief that “art is for the people.”

By Rohn’s telling it was this belief which led to Flint’s departure from the Art Institute: “When it was decided that the school was too much of a financial burden, Flint resigned. ‘Art for the people’ demanded that the museum be a teaching institution.” Flint himself later described the arrangement of teaching and exhibiting art side-by-side as “Certainly an ambitious and idealistic program, quite right for its time, but as things worked out, a program that was somewhat beyond [our] financial means to maintain indefinitely.” Despite this philosophically-motivated separation, Flint retained his enthusiasm for the Art Institute and returned to exhibit his work there. After leaving the Institute, Flint joined the faculty at Kent State University as Professor of Art, and also as director of the University’s art gallery. In that capacity he continued to support artists from Northeast Ohio, and he also traveled once a year to New York to comb the galleries there for fresh new artists whose work he could bring back to Kent State for an annual exhibition. Flint retired from KSU in 1979, but he continued making art for many years thereafter, with retirement affording him more time to focus on his own work.

Flint’s personal pursuit of art making took on many forms over the course of his life. As a WPA artist, he worked in a variety of media—murals, mosaics, etchings, aquatints, and lithographs. These early works were executed in a realistic style and typically featured scenes of everyday life, often imbued with satire or social commentary. After his departure from the Army in 1945, the artist began experimenting in abstraction. In 1952, the Cleveland Plain Dealer indeed characterized him this way: “He was an early ‘missionary’ for abstractionism in Cleveland, and he is one of its most accomplished exponents. Last year nine of his abstract paintings in tempera were accepted for the May Shaw, and all nine were sold.” Flint’s participation in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May show was indeed prolific, as he exhibited in a wide range of media there and won first prize for pieces submitted in 1936, 1937, and 1954. The imagery in his early abstract work was frequently influenced by his interest in nautical activities, with hints of sails or seagull wings enlivening many pictures. As one commentator put it, “Flint wants to paint movement, not the frozen movement of the 19th century painters, but as it can’t be stopped, awesome, hypnotic, in our time.” This interest lent itself quite directly to Flint’s creation of mobiles, which usually suggest birds in flight. The artist created one of these for the children’s room of the Main Library in downtown Akron.

More generally, Flint sought to convey a sense of his own experiences on the level of immediate feelings, emotions, or impressions. In his own words, “I paint a theme, and I use color and shapes as a way of trying to get some to respond to it in the same way that I responded to what I saw. Style and technique are secondary considerations. I will do anything I can to get the thing to say what I want it to say. Technique is just the vocabulary.” Or, more succinctly: “A picture is built. I want to construct something equivalent to something I have enjoyed.”

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