In response, the Caucasian docent summed up the prevailing attitude of the time when she emphatically declared, 'Your people don't express themselves this way.' In that instance, Barnes realized the prejudices and hurdles he would have to overcome in his quest to be an artist, and the gravity of the task he had set out for himself.

When he was unable to find paintings of or by blacks anywhere in the museum, he asked where they were exhibited. His desire to become an artist, however, was deeply challenged on a 1956 field trip to the newly-desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art. Emphasizing skill and the fundamentals, their traditional courses gave Barnes the necessary foundation to develop his own style. He received his academic training at North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham, and is an heir to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, which was handed down by his teachers W. He would have preferred to attend the local Duke University or University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but blacks were not yet allowed on those campuses. Shielded by the virility of football, Barnes majored in art. Through the constant encouragement of one of his teachers, he painstakingly reinvented himself, graduating from high school with 26 football scholarships and the respect of the entire community. The isolation and despair of this shy, fat, un-athletic boy plagued him until he reached junior high school.

His peers also asserted their disdain by beating him on a daily basis. His father echoed the sentiments of many in ridiculing and forbidding young Ernest's desire to be an artist. Through his expansive library, Fuller introduced Barnes to the works of the great master artists such as Rembrandt, Raphael and Michelangelo.Īmidst the harshness of life in the segregated south in the1940's, artistic ambitions would prove to be an impossibility. As a child, he often accompanied his mother to the home of the prominent attorney, Frank Fuller, Jr., where she worked as a domestic. Initial impressions were fashioned in the rich soil of Durham, North Carolina, while his sensibilities were cultivated in a loving home by his parents, Ernest Sr. Endowed with an innate sensitivity, he knew early in life that he wanted to become an artist.

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