PAFA to hold fundraiser to help renovate the Philadelphia home of former student, Henry Ossawa Tanner

George Anthony Morton, the subject of the HBO documentary Master of Light, who said he modeled his painting career after Henry Ossawa Tanner’s, is expected to attend a fundraiser to preserve the Tanner House at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Thursday.

“Tanner is my spiritual guide,” Morton said in a telephone interview. “He was always a huge part of my inspiration.”

Excerpts from Master of Light tell the story of how Morton grew up in poverty in Kansas City, Mo., was imprisoned on a drug charge for nine years, and learned to paint while incarcerated. It was in jail that he discovered Tanner’s work.

Later, Morton studied at the Florence Academy of Art U.S. in Jersey City, where, in 2017, he won a six-week fellowship to study at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. The New York Times reported that he was the only student from the academy’s American branch attending the workshop in Italy that summer. Morton said the Florence Academy based its curriculum on the same French academic curriculum that Tanner studied in Paris at the Académie Julian in the late 19th century.

Morton, who now lives in Atlanta, where Tanner also once lived, said he will share excerpts from a new documentary and portrait about Tanner at the PAFA fundraiser, which begins at 5 p.m. Thursday.

Although Tanner and Morton had very different family backgrounds — Tanner’s parents were highly educated and Morton’s were impoverished — he said he has found a lot of similarities between Tanner and himself.

“Our lives parallel one another’s,” he said Monday. “I’m just holding his life up as a mirror to my own … I experienced the same racism [in the academy] as he did.

“But I don’t intend to run away from America. I will be right here, painting my community.”

When Tanner moved to France to study in 1891, he never returned to live permanently in the United States.

Members of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s family are expected to attend: Rae Alexander-Minter, a scholar based in New York who is the granddaughter of one of Henry Tanner’s sisters (Mary Louise Tanner Mossell) and Lewis Tanner Moore, the grandson of another Tanner sister (Sarah Elizabeth Tanner Moore).

“I’m certainly delighted to see the attention being paid to what is the history of our family, our comment and our nation. It’s all intertwined for me,” said Lewis Tanner Moore, Henry Tanner’s grandnephew.

“One of the challenges is that so often, our history is ignored or disregarded and disrespected. To see its value come into focus as a priority is gratifying.”

In an interview with The Inquirer last year, Eric Pryor, PAFA’s president and CEO, said he had an opportunity to sit down with Rae Alexander-Minter who told him information about the entire Tanner family that “was amazing.”

That discussion came about as community leaders began to organize and formed the Friends of the Tanner House to save the house at 2908 W. Diamond St. in Strawberry Mansion from possible demolition. The Inquirer first reported on the dangerous conditions at the house in December 2021.

“I knew of Mr. Tanner. That I knew. I even heard of Bishop [Benjamin Tucker] Tanner, his father,” Pryor told Inquirer reporter Zoe Greenberg.

But he said he had not known that Tanner’s grandniece, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, was the first Black person to earn a doctorate in economics from an American university — the University of Pennsylvania in 1921. Nor had he known that six years later, in 1927, she was also the first Black woman to get a law degree from Penn.

During the period from 1919 to 1923, she was also president of one of the oldest Black women sororities, Delta Sigma Theta.

» READ MORE: National Trust for Historic Preservation names the Tanner House and Chinatown to its 2023 most endangered list

“So what I thought was, it needs to be the Tanner Family house,” Pryor said. “Because oftentimes Black people are held up when they achieve, as the exception. As somehow different, ‘Well, he’s special.’ The power of the Tanner House for me is that the Tanner family was exceptional … And to me, that’s a much more powerful story, and why it’s so important for it to be saved and for that history not to be lost because it’s the history of a family.”

Christopher Rogers, co-director of the Friends of the Tanner House, said Monday he hopes the PAFA fundraiser will help the organization build on the momentum of the news earlier this month that the house was placed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list for 2023.

“That ‘11 Most Endangered’ list helps gain new national visibility about the campaign [to preserve the house] and what the house represents as a national story,” Rogers said. “We are extremely grafted to the National Historic Trust.”

He said the Friends of the Tanner House has raised $50,000 of their goal to raise $70,000 for repair work that is urgently needed. The city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections slapped an orange posting on the house in August 2021.

He added that he hopes Thursday’s fundraiser will help to fill in the gap and “get us over the hump” to begin to do the stabilization work that needs to be done.

To RSVP to attend the fundraiser, please contact the Friends of the Tanner House at this website: https://savethetannerhouse.org/pafa-fundraiser

Inquirer reporter Zoe Greenberg contributed to this article.