Blue Guitar, 2007
Deryl Daniel Mackie was born in Harlem in 1949 and spent his professional life in Philadelphia. He trained at the Barnes Foundation, Temple University’s Tyler School of Arts Rome Campus, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he was awarded the prestigious Eleanor S. Grey Award for Achievement for Still Life and the Cresson European Travel Fellowship. Soon after graduating from PAFA, Mackie co-founded Philadelphia’s first artist-run gallery space, The Painted Bride Art Center. He taught at the Philadelphia College of Art, and was a curator at the Arts Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum (now the African American Museum in Philadelphia). Other awards include a Fellowship in Arts Management Enterprises from the PA Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Board of Education scholarship, Lutheran Society for the Arts award, Gimbels art award, and First Prize from the Wayne Art Center Annual.Mackie maintained his studio in the Queen Village neighborhood of South Philadelphia, where he painted vibrant, stylized portraits that he called “personae,” elegant depictions of black professionals, artists, and laborers caught in mid-movement, a development of his early graceful portraits like Seated Figure. Describing this kind of work, Deryl Mackie explained “I am really drawn to strength and tranquility. And to equilibrium. It’s a part of me that I really like, and I don’t want to mess with it.”
Mackie exhibited his work widely in Philadelphia. He was an accomplished artist within the gay community, his work appearing in New Gay Life magazine, as well as on the cover of In the Life, a groundbreaking anthology of black gay writing. In the 1990s, Mackie became weakened by AIDS, but nonetheless continued to show works in several exhibits that featured HIV positive artists, and would continue painting until his death in 2007.
Mackie’s work is held in the permanent collections of Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA); Philadelphia Museum of Art; Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art (Asbury, NJ); the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Steele Art Gallery (Cooperstown, NY); murals in the Tabernacle Lutheran Church in West Philadelphia; and many private collections.