Honor Spingarn was a traveler, a painter, and a mother. Even in her
90s, she had an open-mindedness and a curiosity that bound her closer
to young people than to people her own age. She would have loved to
know that this scholarship was established in her name to help a
student explore the world, its ideas, and its possibilities. She died
in 2008, at the age of 98.

Born in 1910, Honor grew up in New York. Her father and uncle served
as presidents of the NAACP and her family were friends and patrons of
some of the great African American artists of the early twentieth
century, including the poet Langston Hughes. Honor decided early on to
become a painter and studied under the German abstract expressionist
Hans Hofman.

Soon she was sent by the U.S. government's Great Depression-era
Federal Arts Project to travel to Guatemala to paint local women
wearing traditionally woven fabrics. Upon her return to the U.S., she
met and married her husband Carl and moved with him to the Caribbean
island of St. Thomas, where they lived for the rest of their lives.
There, she painted bold canvases of island life and raised two sons.

Intensely curious about the world, she was always reading – about art
and archaeology, history and literature, politics, and travel. When
she was in her 80s, she decided she hadn't seen enough of the world
and that her time was getting short. So she flew off to St.
Petersburg, Russia, to see the Hermitage museum and to Xi'an, China,
to see the 2,000-year-old terracotta army. She traveled with friends
decades younger, because most people her own age didn't have the
energy for such long journeys.

Honor was an independent, critical thinker who lived a remarkable life
that her family never could have imagined or predicted. She set an
example worth following.