After spending four years abroad, Woodruff returned to the United States in 1931, in the throes of the Great Depression. He took an instructorship at Atlanta University, where he taught art in two basement rooms at Spelman College (part of the newly formed Black university). Woodruff’s ideas about art changed quickly after he observed the plight of the African-Americans who struggled to exist in the South’s crippled, one-crop economy and who had great difficulty obtaining relief allocations or jobs. This time of extreme hardship made Woodruff question the value of much that he learned during his stay in Europe. He concluded that cubism and modern art had little meaning for most Americans, and he began to encourage students to paint the social environment.

Woodruff created the "Painter’s Guild" for his advanced students, with whom he explored rural Georgia. He explained, in the September 21, 1942 issue of Time, "We are interested in expressing the South as a field, as a territory; its peculiar rundown landscapes, its social and economic problems, and Negro people."¹ Although Time acknowledged Atlanta University’s outstanding artistic reputation, the magazine dubbed the work the "outhouse school of art," given the ramshackle housing and privies that appeared in images such as Woodruff's. The appellation greatly discouraged his students and disheartened Woodruff.²

Regardless, Woodruff continued to express his concern with poverty, particularly the shameful housing conditions typified by the ramshackle houses in this watercolor. During the early 1930s, the urban population increased dramatically. The white community’s fear of job competition, decreased property values, and integrated schools exacerbated the limitations of segregation. Housing quickly became a problem for African-Americans, particularly in urban areas.

Here, Woodruff shows two dilapidated shacks struggling to stand in the midst of a ferocious storm. These "shotgun houses" (a typical form of southern vernacular architecture), were so named because one could shoot a gun straight through the house without hitting anything (rooms were arranged along a central axis for better cross ventilation). "Shotgun houses" remained common well into the 20th century.

The dark, looming clouds seen here are common to Woodruff’s work from this time. The two shanties seem to be clinging together amid the barren landscape. Their stark angularity reflects Cézanne’s influence, and the swirling colors recall the expressionism of Van Gogh’s late landscapes. Woodruff’s rural, American subject matter parallels the focus of the Regionalists, such as Thomas Hart Benton. Woodruff’s technical expertise in the challenging medium of watercolor is seen here in his concise brushwork and bold contrast of darks and lights.

Hale Aspacio Woodruff was born in Cairo, Illinois, on August 26, 1900, the only child of Augusta Bell Woodruff and George Woodruff, who died soon after his birth. Hale and his mother moved to Nashville, Tennessee in the early 1900s. To occupy her son while she was at work, his mother had him copy artwork from the family Bible. He soon made drawings from newspapers and history textbooks. "I learned wherever I could,"³ said Woodruff, who later was the cartoonist for his high school paper.

After graduating, he obtained a hotel job in Indianapolis, and began his formal art training at the only art school in Indianapolis, the Herron Art Institute, which had only some forty students. In exchange for his services as a desk clerk, the "colored" YMCA gave him a room. Through the lecture series at the "Y," he met several prominent African-American leaders (such as Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).⁴

Woodruff became friends with Herman Lieber, who owned a local art supply store. In 1923, Lieber gave Woodruff the book, Afrikanische Plastik [African Sculpture], by Carl Einstein. Woodruff said,

Woodruff was inspired to investigate modernism through the lens of traditional African art. He drew inspiration from many sources, ranging from African art to Renaissance frescoes. Of an exhibition he attended, Woodruff said, "I went back again and again and, between the Cézannes and the African work, I was off and winging."⁶

In 1931, after four years of travel in Europe, Woodruff became a professor at Atlanta University. He was the first African-American with formal training to earn an art professorship in a southern Black university. Woodruff displayed works of major Black artists (such as Allan Freelon and Palmer Hayden), in the library at Atlanta University annually, and he made student exhibitions a feature of commencement week.⁷

Woodruff strove to make art more accessible to his students and to the African-American community. A student of his remembered, "Woodruff took us to the High Museum [of Art]. He had to get special permission because Blacks didn’t go in there at all unless they worked there....In other words, Mr. Woodruff was very much like Fred Douglas. . . We were all very proud of him."⁸

Megan George, Glori Gesell and Bridget Carlin