1891: Born Archibald John Motley Jr. in New Orleans on Oct. 7 to Mary Huff Motley and Archibald John Motley Sr.
1894: Motley family moves to Chicago.
1914-18: Motley studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He’s pardoned from military service in World War I due to a medical diagnosis of a “weak heart.”
1918: Publishes “The Negro in Art” in the Chicago Defender on July 6, writing that African-American artists should “have the same broad field as our white competitors” and that each should be allowed “a chance to express himself in his own individual way.”
1918-25: Works occasionally alongside his father, a Pullman porter, as a waiter on various train routes.
1921: Shows work in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity.
1924: Marries Edith Granzo.
1925: Receives the Frank G. Logan Prize for “A Mulattress” and the Joseph N. Eisendrath Prize for “Syncopation” from the Art Institute.
1928: Shows work in exhibition at New Gallery, New York. Receives the Harmon Foundation Gold Medal.
1929-30: Awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for study in Paris.
1930: Shows work in exhibition of American painting that travels through Europe.
1933: Shows in solo exhibition at Chicago Women’s Club. Son Archibald J. Motley III born. Shows work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Art Institute. Appointed visiting instructor at Howard University in Washington.
1939: Shows work in “Contemporary Negro Art” exhibition at Baltimore Museum of Art.
1940: Participates in South Side Community Art Center dedication in Chicago. Shows work at Library of Congress.
1941-42: Shows work in “American Negro Art, 19th and 20th Centuries” at Downtown Gallery, New York.
1948: Wife Edith Granzo Motley dies. Begins working for Styletone, which makes hand-painted shower curtains.
1955: Sentenced to six months in Chicago’s Bridewell House of Correction for assaulting Ernest Hill, Motley’s mother’s husband, with a deadly weapon.
1968: Shows work in “Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the ’30s” at Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
1971: Featured in the television documentary “The Last Leaf: A Profile of Archibald Motley,” on WMAQ in Chicago.
1977-78: Shows work in the national traveling exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art.”
1980: Receives honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute. Honored with nine other African-American artists by President Jimmy Carter at the White House.
1981: Dies Jan. 16 in Chicago.
SOURCE: “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” catalog by Richard J. Powell.
