From 1951 to 1954 Earle Montrose Pilgrim (1923–1976) and his wife Lily (Touma) Pilgrim ran a jewelry store at 393 Commercial Street in Provincetown. Lily would craft dolls, hooked-rugs, and wrote for The Advocate, an early Provincetown newspaper. He taught jewelry-making in adult education programs authorized by the Massachusetts State Board of  Education. They also lived in the small space.

Earle, then a student of Henry Hensche, displayed his work as well as that of other artists, including Lester Johnson and Alan Kaprow. In 1954, they moved to Boston with a shop at 80 West Cedar Street on Beacon Hill. The space on Commercial Street was taken over by the artist Yvonne Anderson and poet Dominic Falcone. For several years they ran Sun Gallery with an extensive roster of figurative expressionist artists.

While living in New York in the late 1960s, I got to know the Pilgrims through my friend, the Boston Globe journalist William J. Cardoso. He spoke fondly of Earle as an integral part of Boston’s hipster element. Earle’s acquaintances included tenor sax player Sam Rivers, band leader Herb Pomeroy, drummer Tony Williams, Zen philosopher Alan Watts, as well as Tim Leary and Baba Ram Das, who were experimenting with LSD. Earle did not participate, but Leary observed that Earle was naturally high.

That referred to mental disease that would result in treatment over many years of unstable behavior. “Cause of breakdown unknown; could have been due to physical, mental, and/or any one of the following: 2–3 years of obsessively overworking day and night without proper rest and sustenance, painting, filming, making jewelry, running jewelry and antique shop; difficulty in making money from painting and in starting business without sufficient capital; death of father; accumulation of years of frustration in coping with racial prejudice and finding a place in society, etc.,” Lily wrote of his illness.

Tall and slender, Earle was an imposing presence. He had a sartorial flair and renowned flamboyance. The artist Tony Vevers referred to him as “The Earle of Pilgrim.” That was largely a thing of the past when I befriended Earle and his attorney wife, Lily.

The Earle that I met in their New York loft, at 275 Church Street above avant-garde musician La Monte Young, was subdued and melancholy, but infused with wit and wisdom. There were years of instability, with Lily as loving care provider. It was a relatively rare night out when I would escort him to Max’s Kansas City to hang with other artists. Much of his cutting-edge work had been lost over the years. These included Day Glo paintings and elaborate sets constructed in the Boston loft for performances and films.

In 1986, Ellen O’Donnell, then director, invited me to curate a major exhibition for the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. The curatorial essay for Kind of Blue: Benny Andrews, Emilio Cruz, Earle Pilgrim and Bob Thompson was published in the fall, 1986 issue of Provincetown Arts Magazine. It presented the work of four African American artists who worked in Provincetown. Thompson was later given a retrospective by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

There was a poignant meeting with Lily, then a widow, in her Washington, D.C. apartment. I was there to choose paintings for the exhibition. Works by Earle covered the walls, but were concealed with fabric covers. As we discussed the work, she explained that it was unbearable for her to look at them. That weekend we intensively engaged in discussion of the artist and his work. I packed the car and drove to Provincetown where I delivered the paintings to the museum.

The show then traveled to Northeastern University, where I organized a panel discussion with the artist Dana Chandler, art historian Patricia Hills, and MFA adjunct curator Edmund Barry Gaither. Judith Wilson, a co-curator of the Thompson’s Whitney retrospective, attended the event.

Lily later contacted me as she was setting up a foundation to sustain his work. That continues now with Peter Stebbins as its head. After years of email exchanges, we met in Provincetown in October 2024, while conducting research. He curated Looking for Earle, Earle Pilgrim Paintings and Jewelry from 1951–54 for the Truro Public Library. It was the first time I had seen the work since the 1980s.

Established in 2016, in the year before her death, The Lily and Earle M. Pilgrim Art Foundation promotes the visual art of the African Diaspora, an appreciation of artists who lack public recognition, and public access to art through best practices in preservation and placement of culturally important artworks.

Earle was born in Brooklyn and raised at 206 Macon Street by his parents, Leon and Amy (Crane) Pilgrim who emigrated from Barbados. He had a sister, Enid.

He was educated in the public system until the end of sophomore year of high school, when he was expelled for wearing a top hat and coat at a school dance, instead of the required uniform. His father enrolled Earle in an apprenticeship with a printmaker. In 1943, he enlisted in the United States Army, assigned to the 477th Composite Group for the duration of the war, until he was court-martialed for refusing to defer to a white officer.

After service, he settled in Greenwich Village, where he learned jewelry-making through Sam Kramer.  He studied at the Art Students League. Allan Malcolm Morrison (1916–1968) quoted Earle Pilgrim in “Twilight for Greenwich Village,” published in the Negro Digest, Volume VII, Number 3, January 1949, “Bohemians don’t fight or crusade,” said Earl Pilgrim, a gaunt, bearded youth who haunts the San Remo Cafe and relaxes in Washington Park in the late afternoon. “We go on living our lives as we want to live them. To hell with the sneers of society. We’re anti-bourgeois and we’re individualists. We don’t even like the name ‘Bohemian.’ It has a bad smell.” He explained the only reason why he used the word was because his philosophy has to have a name and ‘Bohemian’ just happens to be most convenient.”

It was absorbing to see a generous selection of the artist’s paintings and metal work in Truro. There is scant documentation, so Stebbins selected work on a stylistic basis for when he was in Provincetown from 1951–1954. It comprises primarily portraits, a few landscapes, and still life paintings. In a wall case in another area of the library, small metal pieces and jewelry were displayed. The surprise of this project included two of Lily’s small, vertical tapestries which are colorful and richly patterned. One of her dolls is attached to the top of a still life of a doll by Pilgrim.

While African American, via Barbados, race is not a signifier of the oeuvre. The many portraits display their social circle in Provincetown. The artist was committed to learning how best to paint and that did not include social justice themes. His concerns were formal and aesthetic.

The stylistic approach is a painterly naturalism which he learned from Hensche, who continued the tradition of Charles Hawthorne. In that regard, Pilgrim is readily identified as a Provincetown painter. He pushed the limits of naturalism with abstracted areas laid on with palette knife in broad strokes. By pushing the limits, his work is linked to that of other Provincetown artists like Jan Müller, Jay Milder, Bill Barrell, and Lester Johnson, who are regarded as figurative expressionists. He did not know Bob Thompson. who arrived and showed at Sun Gallery after the Pilgrims had left town.

Pilgrim was Black and an artist, but it is not productive to identify his work as Black art. It is more appropriate to see him as a very talented young painter. There are many flashes of brilliance in these works that make all the more tragic his struggles to establish a successful career. These enticing works provide elements of what might have been. Because of his erratic personal life, the larger, later work has not survived.

After Earle died, in her later years, Lily established resources to create a foundation. Although she was an attorney, Stebbins reported that there were expensive efforts to establish the foundation and its claim to her primary asset, three condo units in Washington, D.C. Her apartment, which houses the work, was sealed by the court until the case was settled.

When access was gained, it was discovered that there had been a leak from above that destroyed a number of works on paper. Lacking resources for archival storage, the work remains in her former apartment. The other two units generate income that covers basic costs of the foundation.

The Truro exhibition was a rare opportunity for the work to be seen. It underscores the need for further study and curatorial support for an important Provincetown-based artist. The Kind of Blue exhibition was an early attempt to examine the role of Black artists in a compatible creative community.