Varnette Honeywood, 1950–2010

Varnette Honeywood was a frustrated artist making greeting cards in the 1970s when Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille, noticed her colorful images of everyday African-American life. The Cosbys began collecting Honeywood’s paintings, and in 1984 Bill Cosby asked her to submit work for the pilot of The Cosby Show. Three of her paintings graced the fictional Huxtable family’s living room during the show’s eight-year run, while other works cycled through. “In Varnette’s work you can see teenagers doing homework, a family cooking a meal, girls doing their hair,” Cosby said.

Honeywood was raised in Los Angeles, the daughter of elementary school teachers. She had planned to major in history at Spelman College, but was encouraged by a drawing teacher there to switch to art. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of Southern California, she taught minority students in a USC outreach program, which “fueled her desire to create positive visual images for black children,” said the Los Angeles Times. After a 1977 trip to Nigeria, her work acquired an African flavor, using simple shapes and vivid colors in a style she called “figurative abstraction.”

But it was Honeywood’s focus on simple family scenes that made her “one of the country’s most recognized black artists,” said the Associated Press. She later collaborated with Cosby on the Little Bill series of children’s books, which grew into an animated TV series.

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The last surviving member of her immediate family, Honeywood spent recent years caring for her sick sister and mother before succumbing to cancer herself.