Oak Bluffs

Hilda Wilkinson Brown, an artist and art educator, grew up and spent her entire life in Washington, D.C. She spent her summers at her family’s retreat near the Oak Bluffs area of Martha’s Vineyard. At the time, the beach depicted here was reserved for African Americans and known in code as “the inkwell.” As Brown’s niece, the artist Lillian Thomas Burwell, noted, this is an especially poignant image, “in a family sense, of Negro exclusion and reconciliation of the times.”