CAPTURING GREATNESS: The Life and Art of Isaac Scott Hathaway

Although not a native son of Arkansas, Isaac Scott Hathaway made a mark on his adopted state. He taught at Branch Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he created an artistic tradition that continues today.

Born April 4, 1872, in Lexington, Kentucky, Isaac Scott Hathaway was nine when he visited a museum containing busts of famous white Americans. He noticed none made by or depicting African Americans. Young Hathaway vowed to make busts and statues of "great Negroes and put them where people can see them."

Hathaway attended Chandler Junior College and the New England Conservatory of Music's Art Department. As his sculpting ability developed, both white and black patrons sought his skills. In 1904, Hathaway was commissioned to cast a death mask of former Minister to Russia Cassius M. Clay.

In 1915, Hathaway moved from Kentucky to Arkansas to teach ceramics at Branch Normal College in Pine Bluff. While in Arkansas, Hathaway created busts and masks of several notable African Americans.

In 1937, Hathaway left Pine Bluff to establish the Ceramics Department at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. He was the first African American to design a coin for the United States Mint, creating the Booker T. Washington coin in 1946 and the George Washington Carver commemorative 50-cent piece in 1951. Hathaway retired from teaching in 1963 and died March 12, 1967, in Montgomery, Alabama. According to Hathaway, "the art of a people not only conveys their mental, spiritual, and civic growth to posterity, but convinces their contemporaries that they can best portray in crystallization their feelings, aspirations and desires."

The Isaac Scott Hathaway collection at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center includes a plaster bust of Frederick Douglass, plaster life masks of Booker T. Washington and Scipio A. Jones, and Hathaway's personal papers.

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