Carroll Simms’ Jonah and the Whale was the first work by an African American artist acquired by Public Art of the University of Houston System. In this sense, the work is much more than a sculpture. It is a physical testament of a completely unified university. Simms was the first African American to graduate from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, receiving his BFA and MFA. In 1950, Simms moved to Houston to start a career as a professor of ceramics and sculpture at Texas Southern University where he helped John Biggers build the art department from the ground up. Soon after his arrival in Texas, Simms won first prize for textile and jewelry design from the Dallas Museum of Art and the Purchase award from the Cranbrook Art Museum. From 1954 to 1956 Simms received Fulbright Fellowships allowing him to study in London at the Slade School of Fine Art (University College London), the British Museum, and other prestigious schools in England. There Simms was apprenticed to Jacob Epstein, the British abstract sculptor, whom Simms cited as a major influence in his work. While in London, Simms also studied African art under William Buller Fagg, the longtime curator of Ethnographic Art at the British Museum. Through these studies and influences, Simms pursued the Southern Fellowship grant that allowed him to travel to Nigeria in 1968 where he studied pottery and sculpture traditions of the Ibo and Yoruba masters. Almost ten years later, Simms returned to Nigeria, but this time as a member of the United Stated Zonal Committee for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. He participated in the Festac of 1977 in Lagos and Kudna, Nigeria, an event that became the largest gathering of artists from African descent. An accomplished elder of Houston’s African American art community, Simms made tremendous contributions to his field through his works and teaching at Texas Southern. Helping define the field of sculpture, Simms brought a distinctly Pan-African and spiritual perspective to the art scenes of Texas and the United States. Simms’ works are held in numerous private and public collections, including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His public works can also be seen at Texas Southern University.