Higgins Bond
She’s illustrated more than 40 books and had her artwork displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the World’s Fair and the United Nations. But Higgins Bond didn’t initially set out to be an artist.
“I always thought of it as a hobby,” she says. “I didn’t really know you could make a living doing it.”
But then Bond, who grew up in Arkansas and attended Little Rock Central — the school whose integration was the first test of Brown v. Board of Education — took an art class as an elective her first year of college at Phillips University in Oklahoma. When she compared her work to that of her fellow students, she had an inkling: “I thought maybe I had a little something,” she says with a laugh.
So Bond transferred to the Memphis College of Art, and — in the hopes of avoiding the starving-artist trap — studied advertising. When she graduated in 1973, her credentials and portfolio landed her a job at a New York ad agency, where she worked as a sketch artist for about a year before becoming pregnant. Deciding she wanted to spend time with her new son, Bond hired an agent and started taking on freelance illustration work she could do at home. And so began a career she had once scarcely imagined possible for herself.
Soon the work came steadily enough that she had to hire a babysitter in order to meet her deadlines. Her first big break came in 1975, when she was chosen for an Anheuser-Busch poster series, “The Great Kings of Africa.” It would eventually be featured in a commercial for Roots: The Second Generation and include three of her paintings. (On an impromptu trip to the Knoxville World’s Fair in 1982, Bond and her husband happened upon the Anheuser-Busch pavilion, where her paintings were on display. “That was really something,” she recalls. “I had no idea!”)
Between 1991 and 1993, Bond painted Jan Matzeliger, W.E.B. DuBois and Percy L. Julian for the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage stamp series, an opportunity Bond calls “the biggest honor of my life.” She didn’t know the magnitude of the honor at first, either: It wasn’t until after the first stamp was released that the philatelic publication Linn’s Stamp News informed her that she was the first African-American woman to illustrate a U.S. postage stamp.
In the late ’90s, Bond moved to Nashville to be near her son, who had started college at TSU. Both stayed. She now has a granddaughter, who was, to some degree, a model for the titular character in her most recent book, Lorraine: The Girl Who Sang the Storm Away, the text of which was written by Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor.
But Bond says she’s probably done illustrating books. For one, they’re time-consuming; the paintings for Lorraine took the better part of a year to complete, which is fairly typical. What’s more, these days she’s more focused on, as she puts it, “painting things I want to paint.”
She’s sold a few of her paintings already, which has been encouraging. “Maybe it’s a second act,” she says.
