Ernest Crichlow was born and raised in Brooklyn to parentsindigenous to Barbados. He was a master painter and handpulled prints.A Harlem-Renaissance painter focused on social injusticesbefore the successes of the civil rights movement, ErnestCrichlow had his studio and home in Brooklyn, New York,his birthplace. He was born to Carribean immigrants. Manyof his paintings became highly controversial such as Lovers(1938), which depicted a Ku Klux Klan member raping ablack woman, and The Flag, a scene with an American agbehind a black woman on a cross. He was criticized forfocusing too much attention on serious African-Americanissues, but believed it was the expression that bestrepresented him. He said: "This is the thing that I feel mostat home with".Crichlow's parents were from Barbados, and he had eight brothers and sisters. As a high-schoolstudent, he was inuenced by Black-American sculptor Augusta Savage. She had a studio in Harlem,which was a gathering place for artists. There Crichlow came to know leading black artists such asNorman Lewis, Charles Alston and Robert Pious. After high school, he studied commercial art inManhattan, and unable to nd work in that eld, became a mural painter and art teacher for the WPA,Works Progress Administration. He focused increasingly on ne art and exhibited his paintings widelyin the 1940s and 1950s. In 1958 was a founding member of Brooklyn's Fulton Art Fair, which stillshowcases local artists, and in 1969, he and Romare Bearden founded the Cinque Gallery in Manhattan,a venue for Black professional artists to exhibit their work. He was an instructor at Pratt Institute