Earle M. Pilgrim

Earle Pilgrim was later institutionalized, sometime between 1960 and 1962, according to documents in the archives. Mrs. Pilgrim wrote in a chronology of Earle Pilgrim’s illness:

During these years Pilgrim also built up a presence in Boston, at 80 West Cedar Street in Beacon Hill and in 1954 the Pilgrim’s moved to the city full-time.

In 1951, the Pilgrims went to Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the art colony, the Pilgrims took 393 Commercial Street as their gallery and lived in the back. Earle, studying under Henry Hensche, would paint and make jewelry, while Lily would craft dolls and hooked rugs and write for “The Advocate,” an early Provincetown newspaper. Additionally, Earle taught jewelry in adult education programs authorized by the Massachusetts State Board of Education.

When Pilgrim returned from the Army, he went to Greenwich Village and learned jewelry making by working with jeweler Sam Kramer. He studied at the Art Students League and at one point worked at Sotheby’s. Allan Malcolm Morrison (1916-1968) quoted Earle Pilgrim in “Twilight for Greenwich Village,” published in the Negro Digest, Volume VII, Number 3, January 1949, “Bohemians don’t fight or crusade,” said Earl Pilgrim, a gaunt, bearded youth who haunts the San Remo Cafe and relaxes in Washington Park in the late afternoon. “We go on living our lives as we want to live them. To hell with the sneers of society. We’re anti-bourgeois and we’re individualists. We don’t even like the name ’Bohemian.’ It has a bad smell.” He explained the only reason why he used the word was because his philosophy has to have a name and “Bohemian” just happens to be most convenient.”

Pilgrim was educated in the public system until the end of his second year of high school, where he was thrown out for wearing a top hat and coat at a school dance, instead of the required uniform, this event brought his father, Leon, to enroll Earle in an apprenticeship with a printmaker. On March 27, 1943, Pilgrim enlisted in the United States Army, assigned to the 477th Composite Group, for the duration of the war until he was court-martialed for refusing to defer to a white officer. While serving at Godwin Field, the Godwin Field Beacon published a poem by Earle Pilgrim and he is identified as a member of the Artists Sketch Club.

Earle Montrose Pilgrim (1923–1976) was an American artist whose work is within the stylistic milieu of Abstract Expressionism and Figurative Expressionism. Working in the early 1950s until the mid 1970s, Pilgrim’s style is characterized by figuration informed by abstraction. The artist fluctuated between epic, large-scale compositions and intimate canvases and worked with a variety of media from painting to experimental film. Pilgrim’s oeuvre reflects the artist’s various interests from avant-garde portraiture to the notion of the occult, which were all figured through a Modernist interest in coloration, abstraction, and expression.

Born in Brooklyn, March 14, 1923 and raised at 206 Macon Street by his parents, Leon and Amy (Crane) Pilgrim; and one sister, Enid. Pilgrim describes his birth date in the following excerpt found in a sketchbook: