Reba Dickerson-Hill was a self-taught Philadelphia artist who painted in the ancient Japanese ink-and- brush technique called sumi-e. She was also a watercolorist and oil painter who primarily produced landscapes and portraits.
[2] As a youth, she spent some time sketching along Benjamin Franklin Parkway near the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A 1940 article in the Baltimore Afro American newspaper about Cheyney's graduates noted that she was an artist and planned to make it her career.
In Philadelphia, she learned painting techniques from Claude Clark (in the mid-1940s) and Paul Keene; printing from printmaker/painter/illustrator Jerome Kaplan; calligraphy from Marvin Bileck, and kinesthetic Chinese watercolor techniques from Ramon Fina, known for his expertise in the ancient tradition of Chinese brush painting.
[15] In 1946, Dickerson-Hill was in a show to support young Black artists sponsored by the Henry O. Tanner Memorial Fund.
The watercolors were “The Boatman,” “The Bay” and “What is Man.” Two of her oil paintings were also shown, “Metropolis” and “Nisi Dominus Frustra,” as well as a portrait of William P. Young, who was Pennsylvania's second Black cabinet member as secretary of Labor and Industry.
[5][18] Dickerson-Hill's oil painting “Study in Copper and Bronze” won first prize by popular vote in a 1969 art exhibit at the branch office of Liberty Federal Savings and Loan Association in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.
[25] In 1960, she also was featured at the Pyramid Club, a social organization of Black professional men that held an annual art exhibit starting in 1941.
[1] A year later, she arrived in Exeter, England, for a sumi-e workshop conducted by the foremost master of Zen arts Shozo Sato.
[7][33] In 1996, the Esther M. Klein Gallery at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia held a “homecoming” show in memory of Dickerson-Hill and Ellen Powell Tiberino (who had died in 1992), both described as internationally known female artists.
[9] The exhibit included ceramic-tile artwork of African people and North American flora that Dickerson-Hill had finished shortly before she died.
In 2001, Cheyney University mounted an exhibit of 100 of her paintings in an exhibit titled “Landscapes of the Heart.” [45] In 2015, the Woodmere Art Museum included her work in a group show titled “We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s.”[46][47] In 2021, the Delaware Art Museum featured her work in a re-creation of Percy Ricks’ 1971 Aesthetic Dynamics show.