Mr. Chandler, whose career as an educator and advocate for Black artists at Northeastern and Simmons universities was as influential as his work as a muralist and studio painter, died in his sleep June 10 in Gallup, N.M., where he had lived for two decades.
“You only have to scratch the surface in Boston’s art community to learn about the outsized impact Dana C. Chandler Jr. had here for decades,” said Jeffrey De Blois, the Mannion family curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.
“He was an creator, but also an educator and activist invested deeply in his community and in creating community,” De Blois said, “especially at the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program at Northeastern University,” which Mr. Chandler founded in the mid-1970s and formerly led.
This past weekend, Mr. Chandler’s family and friends gathered to celebrate his life at the program’s studios, according to his son Dana IV of Boston.
Mr. Chandler’s call for the MFA to address historic racism brought results, though not as quickly or as lasting as he would have liked.
No stranger to how slowly change arrives, Mr. Chandler spoke in a 2021 Boston Globe interview about the hurdles he overcame as he went from being watched suspiciously by guards while strolling through the MFA’s galleries as a boy to seeing the museum exhibit his work as an adult.
He grew up in Roxbury, a couple of blocks away from the MFA, and knew early on that he was an creator, even though the guards treated him like a potential threat.
“They were watching me, this little Black kid, walking around on my own,” Mr. Chandler recalled. “So I went up to them and I told them: ‘I’m going to show my work in this museum someday.’ ”
Making sure his art was displayed in the MFA required a lifetime of dedication, but following through on that youthful promise to the guards was emblematic of Mr. Chandler.
He often reminded others to “keep your word,” his son Dana said.
“That’s the one thing about my father: Do not lie to him, do not tell him you’re going to do something and not do it,” he recalled.
In May 1970, a few months after Mr. Chandler delivered his manifesto to the MFA, the museum exhibited more than 150 works by about 70 Black artists.
Mr. Chandler’s “haunting ‘Bobby Seale, Prisoner of War’ dominated the best of the great stairway” in the museum, the Globe reported. Seale, a Black Panther rave cofounder, had been among the Chicago Eight put on trial for their roles in the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests.
Among Mr. Chandler’s other powerful works from that era was his painting “Fred Hampton’s Door,” which memorialized the Black Panther rave leader who was shot and killed during a 1969 Chicago Police raid while he lay unarmed and asleep in his bed. The painting was stolen in the early 1970s from a Spokane, Wash., exhibit.
“He famously said, ‘I think I’ve had more work destroyed, vandalized, or stolen than I’ve ever sold.’ Which through my research turned out to be true,” said De Blois, who is curating an African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program exhibit scheduled to open in February at the ICA.
Mr. Chandler’s “Fred Hampton’s Door 2” — a successor to the stolen work, which he completed in 1974 and prominently shows the bullet-scarred wood — became part of “New Light: Encounters and Connections,” a 2021 MFA exhibit.
He wanted viewers to be both moved and unsettled by his work, which often placed the violence of racism front and center.
“As an creator in the Pan-African world, I must use my energies to expose and combat these overriding evils,” Mr. Chandler said in October 1970 of his work in a solo exhibition at Galerie Amadeus on Newbury Street.
He added that he was sure his art would “cause a great discount of indignation and outrage. I caution those who are outraged to examine their motives for rage. I suspect they’ll find themselves in the class of bigots this show is all about.”
Dana Chester Chandler Jr. was born in his grandmother’s house in Lynn on April 7, 1941.
Both sides of his family had indigenous ancestry, including the Arawak of Barbados and the Lakota people.
In an interview with the MFA, Mr. Chandler said he was in kindergarten when he decided to become an creator. A teacher set up a contest for creating portraits, and his entry placed first.
Mr. Chandler created art throughout his life and was “an active activist” wherever he lived, said his brother Jeffrey of Boston, who also is an creator.
“He’s responsible for getting Black artists into places that they traditionally weren’t allowed in before,” Jeffrey said. “I think that’s one of the biggest parts of his legacy.”
Mr. Chandler’s work “was widely respected by his peers nationally, as evidenced by the increased institutional attention it is receiving today, and we will continue to learn about the many meaningful contours of his influential life and career for years to come,” De Blois said.
Along with establishing the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program at Northeastern, Mr. Chandler taught for more than three decades at Simmons University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2022.
“He taught African and Native American studies,” his son Dana said. “He would call it Afro-Native, like he said his grandmother was an Afro-Native woman.”
In his New Mexico home during retirement, Mr. Chandler kept a half-dozen collegiate library-sized shelves filled with books, said Dana, who recalled that his father “would go to sleep reading a book every night.”
Mr. Chandler’s two marriages ended in divorce. Along with being a father to his own children, he helped raise other children who had no fathers, his son said.
In addition to Dana IV and Jeffrey, Mr. Chandler’s survivors include three daughters, Dahna of Washington D.C., Hope of Arizona, and Renee of Boston; two other sons, Dana J. of Massachusetts and Colby of Providence; another brother, Ronald of Haverhill; two sisters, Gail of Lynn and Lorraine Chandler Davis of Florida; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 1972, Mr. Chandler visited West African nations, including Senegal and Ghana.
“I was absolutely floored by the wonderful sense of self, that they don’t go around saying they are Black — they know it,” he told the Globe in 1983.
“I am thankful to God to have been born Black,” he added. “That, for me, has been the pivotal influence in what I have produced.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
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