Rose Piper
American, born 1917

Slow Down Freight Train
oil on canvas, 1946

Ackland Fund, 91.8


Slow Down Freight Train was directly inspired by Trixie Smith's recording of "Freight Train Blues." The song's lyrics expressed the feelings of many African Americans affected in the early decades of this century by the widespread migration of black men from the south to the industrial north. Men could obtain jobs in Chicago's meatpacking industry or Detroit's automobile factories, but they usually had to leave their wives or girlfriends behind.

Piper says that the title of her painting is "...a women's plea for the train to slow down so that she might go along with her man." Like most of Piper's work, the subject of the Ackland painting is rooted in the African American experience.

The abstract, geometric style of this early work reveals a cubist influence and Piper's solid grounding in modernist techniques from her studies at Hunter College and the Art Students League.

She writes eloquently of her early work, saying that her forms are affected by "...powerful passions and anguished recollections of the black experience. The abstraction of the human figure...arises out of a single moment of heightened expression. The attenuated form suggests the essence of longing."

In 1948 Rose Piper won first prize in an exhibition sponsored by Atlanta University which included works by such artists as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. Despite this early success as a painter, Piper set aside her brush because of family responsibilities and began work as a textile designer.

She returned to painting in 1980, and the smaller scale and more meticulous technique of her recent painting shows the influence of her experiences as a designer. The subject matter of these later works is still based on the African American experience, however, and Piper still often finds inspiration in music.



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