One of Cleveland’s most imaginative interpreters of the American scene, Clarence Carter was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, and developed a love of drawing at an early age. Encouraged by his family, he took private watercolor lessons and won art prizes in county and state fairs in his early teens. He studied with William Eastman, Henry Keller, and Paul Travis at the Cleveland School of Art, 1923–27. He exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1927–39). In 1927 William Milliken, then curator of paintings at the art museum, organized a subscription scholarship to allow Carter two years of travel through Italy, Switzerland, England, and France. In the summer of 1927 he studied in Capri with Hans Hofmann. On returning to Cleveland in 1929, Carter had his first solo exhibition at the Cleveland Art Center. He taught studio classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1930–37. In 1934, under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, the first of the New Deal art programs, Carter was commissioned to paint two murals for Cleveland Public Auditorium. For a subsequent governmental art program, the Works Progress Administration, he served as a district supervisor for painting projects in north east Ohio. After 1935 he completed two federal mural commissions: one for the post office in Ravenna, Ohio, and another for the post office in his hometown. In 1938 he moved to Pittsburgh to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). During the 1930s and 1940s he showed in annual exhibitions in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 224