William Y. Cooper (1934-2016)

Many of Cooper’s paintings explore some of the darker realities of the Black American experience. One such example is 4 Little Girls, which responds to the heinous 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, Cooper’s hometown. The racially motivated attack by local KKK members killed four girls attending Sunday school and injured more than 20 others. Cooper uses a dark palette of blues to evoke a somber, heavy, mournful mood. In an undated artist note about the painting, he raises the question, “How do we reconcile the heinous murder of four little girls whose only sin was their skins were black? Who will step forward and redeem them?”