Vivian Ayers Allen, Poet and Cultural Activist, Dies at 102

Vivian Ayers Allen, a poet, playwright and cultural activist in Houston who vigorously promoted minority artists and had three children who had consequential careers in the arts, died on Aug. 18 in California. She was 102.

A daughter, the actress Phylicia Rashad, confirmed the death but did not provide further details.

In 2002, The New York Times described Ms. Ayers Allen, who grew up in the Jim Crow South and who spent much of her working years in Houston, as “a Renaissance woman” for her wide-ranging expertise — from Greek classical drama to African American folk art.

She also had a direct influence on the artistic lives of three of her children: Ms. Rashad, a Tony Award-winning Broadway actress and co-star of the hit sitcom “The Cosby Show”; Debbie Allen, a Broadway actress, director and choreographer; and Andrew “Tex” Allen, a jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer.

“As children, we were privy to great intellectual and artistic debates,” Ms. Rashad told The Los Angeles Times in 2012. “My mother included us in everything that she did, and I mean everything. I remember as a child collating pages for her second book. It was wonderful.”

In addition, Ms. Rashad recalled, “My mother took the handrail off the staircase and put it on the wall in what should have been the dining room to create a ballet studio for Debbie to study with a dance instructor privately when she could not be admitted to the best schools that were on the other side of town in Houston. And eventually Debbie was admitted to the Houston Ballet Foundation, but that was because of the private training she received in our home.”

Ms. Ayers Allen forged a career in the arts at a time when Black women such as herself were largely invisible to mainstream cultural institutions. When Exposition Press in 1953 published her debut poetry collection, “Spice of Dawns,” she was an aspiring Houston writer on the cusp of divorce. “I am a poet but not yet a saint, and if I am martyred now it will be untimely,” she said of her troubled marriage to a dentist in an interview with Jet magazine in 1954.

Weeks before the launch of Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite, she published “Hawk” (1957), a verse novel on racial freedom written from the perspective of a hawk that ventures into outer space. In a later interview, she called the book a “documentation of the process of transcendence.”

An excerpt appeared in “New Negro Poets U.S.A.,” a 1964 anthology edited by the poet and author Langston Hughes. In one passage, the hawk flies toward the sun, reflecting on divinity and reckoning, and is “caught up in a blaze / resonant as a million hallelujahs.”

Ms. Ayers Allen’s work, rooted in the culture and religion of the American South, also drew on her lifelong fascination with the Greek classics, which she first read in high school. Her first play, “Bow Boly,” was “structurally up and out of the Greek drama,” she told The Houston Post in 1962. Presented at Texas Southern University, a historically Black college in Houston, the play followed a man set on mending a broken heart, narrated by a chorus of ancestors from Virginia who are stuck in purgatory.

Ms. Ayers Allen became a fixture in the Houston arts scene. She joined community organizations, appeared on cultural programs on local television and organized poetry readings, including with the visiting boxer Muhammad Ali.

Her work grew in its urgency and activism as the civil rights movement expanded across the South. She submitted letters to the editor denouncing police violence and, inspired by protests, quit her job as a librarian at Rice University in 1967 to work in poverty and cultural initiatives across Harris County, home to Houston.

With help in 1964 from the young novelist Larry McMurtry, Ms. Ayers Allen launched Adept, a short-lived literary quarterly that published verse by Vassar Miller, the future poet laureate of Texas, and paintings by the Trinidadian-American actor and artist Geoffrey Holder.

A few years later, through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ms. Ayers Allen founded the Adept Gallery for New American Folk Art, focusing on mixed-media works by Black, Indigenous and Hispanic Americans. Eleanor Freed, an art critic for The Houston Post, praised the gallery in 1972 as “a tiny oasis of thought and creativity.”

In 1984, Ms. Ayers Allen moved to Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb of New York City, and from her home served as director-curator of the Adept New American Museum, offering seminars and exhibitions on art, artifacts and dance styles from the American Southwest.

“When my heart gets tired of the intellectual work,” she told the newspaper the Mount Vernon Argus, “I can go out and dig in the garden and plant flowers.”

Vivian Elizabeth Ayers was born on July 29, 1923, in Chester, S.C. There, with the support of her parents, Robert D. Ayers, a blacksmith, and Vivian (Graham) Ayers, a seamstress, she attended the Brainerd Institute, a boarding school founded in the late 19th century for the children of formerly enslaved people.

At Brainerd, she learned Milton and Shakespeare under the instruction of a racially integrated faculty and was part of its last graduating high school class in 1939.

She then attended Barber-Scotia College and Bennett College, historically Black schools in North Carolina, and married Andrew A. Allen in 1943. In her divorce filing in 1954, she wrote that she and her husband were “manifestly incompatible,” Jet reported.

Decades later, she told the magazine that she wanted to live an uncompromising life.

“When they were very, very small, I was a little radical,” she said of her children. “I always preached about the value of creativity. I constantly told them I had already made my own choice and that my choice was for freedom, and if they didn’t make the same choice, we weren’t going to be together.”

In addition to the three children from her marriage, survivors include a daughter, Angeline Butler, from another relationship; two brothers, Robert D. Ayers Jr. and Kenneth Ayers; and a granddaughter, the stage actress Condola Rashad. (The extended family includes two other actors, DeVaughn Nixon and Vivian Nixon.)

Ms. Rashad bought the Brainerd Institute property in 1999, and Ms. Ayers Allen converted it into the Brainerd Institute Heritage. It has since been the site of Workshops in Open Fields, a program based on an initiative that Ms. Ayers Allen had started in Houston to promote the literacy and the arts among low-income minority youth.

Ms. Allen and Ms. Rashad often credited their mother with nurturing their careers in the arts, considering themselves “an extension of her intellect as well as her artistry, her ambitions,” as Ms. Allen told The Boston Globe in 1987.

That year, they all appeared together on the television special “Superstars and Their Moms.” Her son Tex played piano as Ms. Allen and Ms. Rashad recited “On Status,” a poem from “Spice of Dawns” in which Ms. Ayers Allen describes growing to appreciate her rural home after spending time in New York City: