Walter Sanford, also known as Sanford, (30 January 1912 – 3 July 1987), was an American artist who worked in a range of styles and influences using traditional media such as paint, ink, crayon and pencil. His artworks include collages, cartoons,pencil drawings, linoleum-cuts, woodcuts, sculptures, paintings, and portraits. He was one of the first and only black social realism and abstract expressionist artists of the 20th century. He was heralded "Black Picasso" and "Detroit's Picasso" for his cubist figure paintings and in 1958 he won the Prix de Paris La Grande Saison de Paris at the Raymond Duncan Galleries. In Detroit, he opened the first black-owned art gallery and exhibited at the first Negro Art Exhibition and Negro History Week and was hailed as one of Michigan's foremost modern ar