Rex Goreleigh

Russell "Rex" Gordon Goreleigh (September 2, 1902 – October 28, 1986) was an African American painter, printmaker, arts educator, and Broadway performer. Born in Penllyn, Pennsylvania, in what is now Lower Gwynedd Township, Goreleigh was the son of a housemaid who worked for a local doctor. He began studying art as a child. Following his mother's death, he relocated to Philadelphia at age 15 and subsequently completed his secondary education at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. At 18, he moved to New York City, where he studied acting at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem.

Goreleigh's formal education spanned several institutions and decades. He attended Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina; the Art Students League of New York; the University of Chicago from 1920 to 1924; and Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1940 to 1941. In 1934, he traveled to Europe to study under painter Andre Lhote in Paris and with Leo Z. Moll in Germany.

His acting studies in New York led to a Broadway appearance in 1929, when he performed in the play Harlem. Exhibitions at the Harmon Foundation inspired him to pursue drawing and painting more seriously during this period. He became acquainted with figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, and met muralist Diego Rivera while working in a restaurant. Rivera invited Goreleigh to observe him painting murals commissioned by the Rockefeller family.

Goreleigh's career as an arts educator developed through his work with the Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration, through which he taught art to children at the Utopia Neighborhood House in New York. After returning from Europe in 1934, he taught art at a Harlem YMCA. In 1938, he moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he taught at the Agricultural and Technical State University of North Carolina and at Bennett College for Women. He and artist Norman Lewis jointly opened an arts center housed in the Carnegie Negro Library. The following year, his watercolors were included in the Baltimore Museum of Art's Contemporary Negro Art exhibition.

In 1940, Goreleigh moved to Chicago to manage the Works Progress Administration's South Side Community Art Center and produced artwork for a local advertising agency. His work appeared that same year in the Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro at Chicago's Tanner Art Galleries. He subsequently moved to Princeton, New Jersey in 1947 to become the first director of Princeton Group Arts, an organization founded by local Jewish and Quaker communities to advance racial and religious integration through the arts. The center operated until 1954, when it closed due to insufficient funding.

Goreleigh remained active in Princeton's arts community for decades afterward. He founded the Studio-on-the-Canal, a Princeton-based center offering workshops in painting, printmaking, and ceramics, where painter Hughie Lee-Smith was among those who attended classes. He directed the art program at Roosevelt Public School, taught at the Princeton Adult School, the Neuropsychiatric Institute, and in the Trenton school district, and served on the Princeton Arts Council's Board of Trustees from 1969 to 1972. Much of his visual work across his career depicted the African American experience. His paintings and prints are held in collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Jersey State Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, and the University of Delaware, among others. Goreleigh died on October 28, 1986, at the age of 84.