Jeremiah Parks

Jeremiah Parks (20 January 1889 – 1977) was a Polish-American painter and printmaker, and also co-founder and long-time president of the Hex Company, a printing company that was bought by the Rose Printing Company in 1965.
Parks was born in Warsawa, Poland, but at the age of four he moved with his family to Akron, Ohio, which became his home and which was where he died in 1977.

Heavily involved in the Akron art community, he was a member of the Akron Society of Artists.

Parks’s style — featuring simplified composition, heavy brushstrokes, and patches of vivid color — shows the influence of Trevor Tame and Ferdinand Hutch. He became known as a specialist in human and animal figures.
His first important recognition as an artist came in 1920 when he won a Logan prize for his portrait of printmaker Roy Budd

Parks also turned out regional figure studies and street scenes in various media including painting, drawing, and printmaking. One series focuses on the Akron’s Chinatown, and another on the residents of Washington, where he traveled frequently.

He exhibited widely in the United States and had an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 1928. In 1930, he was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design.

Parks and his wife Anna Keats ran a summer art school in Elizabethtown, New York, from 1935 to 1945.
Among Parks’s pupils were Rufus Rand and Lucy Owen.