[1] His father lost his job as an auto mechanic during the Depression and then gave piano lessons to feed the family of 12 children (he was no.

His sixth-grade teacher at Alexander Wilson Elementary School, Mrs. Cordelia McKrantz, encouraged his drawing by buying him his first oil paints.

[4][6] For the department store's 1953 competition, an oil painting by the 19-year-old Sloan was featured in an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer announcing the exhibition.

[8][6] Sloan attended free classes at Fleischer; some of his duties, though, were to clean the painting palettes of white students.

[11][4] When Sloan was 11 years old, he sat for Bookbinder, who drew a portrait of him playing a harmonica titled "The Spiritual".

[8][12] A child prodigy, Sloan in 1951 drew an on-the-spot "creative picture" as another young man played the piano during an annual concert on youths and the arts.

[13] At his graduation ceremony at Ben Franklin High School in 1953, he won an award for an outstanding work in art.

This was the first in a series of exhibits shown in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of the best works by graduating students of the three schools.

[3][39] In 1985 he performed conservation work on the 19th-century painting "The Phoenix" by African American artist David Bustill Bowser for the Philadelphia Alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

[18] His student Barkley Hendricks, who became an internationally known artist, recalled seeing Sloan bundled against the cold with his brushes and easels.

[5] Along with teaching at PAFA, Sloan was a guest instructor in landscape painting at the Barn Studio of Art in Millville, New Jersey, during the 1980s.

The Noyes Museum of Art noted in its catalog for "Driving While Black" that "he was an artist, in his, and its own right, without the need for racial stereotype labelling.

[48][49] In 1994, Sloan was included in a photo display of the lives and works of 10 local Black artists at the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

[51][52] Sloan's work was included in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.