Apr

“When you have love, you have patience with people who make mistakes.”

In celebration of Maya Angelou’s birthday today, we share her portrait, unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery just weeks before her death in 2014.

Maya Angelou / Ross R. Rossin / Oil on canvas, 2013 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Andrew J. Young Foundation; © Ross R. Rossin

One of America’s most important writers and poets, Angelou wrote a series of seven autobiographical novels that are an indelible record of resistance and achievement by African Americans, particularly African American women. Angelou had a difficult and endangered childhood—shuttling back and forth between relatives in the North and South, she suffered from economic hardship and sexual abuse, which she documented in her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), and in subsequent volumes.

Her subject was always her own life, and her autobiographies are not necessarily strictly factual or literally “true” but rather a retelling of emotional truths. A politically engaged writer, Angelou was also a poet; at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, she read her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning.”

Maya Angelou at the unveiling of her portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014.

Angelou visited the National Portrait Gallery in April 2014 to unveil the painting. Surrounded by friends and family, she was interviewed by Johnnetta Betsch Cole, then-director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. She spoke about her life and finding the patience and “…courage to look into one another’s face no matter what color, no matter what community to see one’s own self.” Addressing the concerns of young people today in particular, Angelou said, “I know that when you have love, you have patience with people who make mistakes. So it is important to first love yourself.”