For more than forty years, Thomas Blackshear (b. 1955) has worked as a freelance artist in both commercial and fine art contexts. Formally trained at Chicago’s American Academy of Art, Blackshear is renowned for his technical mastery and powerful subject matter.

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As an illustrator, Blackshear has produced work for companies such as Disney, Lucasfilm, and National Geographic. For the United States Postal Service, Blackshear illustrated a suite of thirty stamps featured in the commemorative volume I Have a Dream. Representation is a key element of Blackshear’s practice. His Western paintings depict Indigenous and Black subjects in positions of pride, power, and prominence. Blackshear depicts the Black cowboy not as a marginal curiosity, but as a central historical figure. The artist’s technique, a classical illustrative style reminiscent of artists like Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker, is quintessentially American. This approach, sometimes referred to as social realism, was used for generations to tell the story of America. That Blackshear is not only a part of, but, indeed, a contemporary leader of this stylistic and professional lineage lends his subjects even greater import as the artist actively reshapes and contributes to this particular presentation of our national narrative.

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Blackshear’s work has been exhibited at venues such as the Vatican in Rome and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas, Texas, and the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia.

 

In 2020, Thomas Blackshear was inducted into the Society of Illustrator’s Hall of Fame.