After moving to Houston in 1949 to found the art department at Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), Biggers began to portray the Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in the southeast part of the city. He was particularly drawn to the tightly packed “shotgun-style” houses, narrow and deep, that characterize the area, believing that they conveyed something essential about the structure of the community. “I’ve got to show the whole community as it is, with women on the porches,” he explained. “Put women on the porches, Third Ward women, organized women, women who, when they voted, took the whole block with them.”

Four Seasons offers a visual counterpart to Biggers’s declaration, portraying four women standing together outside their respective homes. Above these figures, triangular rooftops create an interlocking pattern that fills the scene, a striking visual assertion that these residents and their houses are what define and give shape to the Third Ward.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)