Laura Wheeler Waring was a celebrated artist of the Harlem Renaissance era best known for her portraits and still lifes. Born in Hartford, CT, Laura Wheeler came from a prominent New England family. Her father was a minister at Connecticut’s first all black church, and her mother, a graduate of Oberlin College, was a teacher and amateur artist. Wheeler’s intellectual and artistic talents were evident from an early age. She finished high school with honors at a time when few women attended secondary school, and in 1908, she enrolled in courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1914, she won the coveted Cresson Memorial Scholarship, which enabled her to continue her studies in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but her trip was cut short due to the outbreak of World War I. Wheeler returned to Pennsylvania to direct the art and music departments at the historically black Cheyney State Teachers College in Cheyney, PA, where she met her husband, Walter E. Waring, a professor at Lincoln University.
Waring returned to France in June 1924 and spent the following year studying painting at the Grande Chaumière and traveling through the South of France, Italy, and Algiers. In France, Waring socialized with the small but influential community of expatriate African American artists and writers. She dined frequently with the legendary artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and also connected with leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance including Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Claude McKay.
Waring continued to pursue her own artistic ambitions and achieved substantial success as an artist while teaching at Cheyney. She illustrated covers for The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, in 1923, 1924, 1926, 1927, and 1928,