Delilah Williams Pierce was an active participant in the vibrant 20th-century art community of Washington, D.C. As was customary with many Black women artists of her generation, she divided her time between teaching and painting. She attended the U.S. capital’s Black institutions Dunbar High School, Miner Normal School and Howard University, from which she graduated in 1931 and later returned as a visiting professor (1968–1969). She also received an MA degree from Columbia University Teachers College, New York, in 1939. Until the 1970s, D. Pierce served as an art educator in public schools and at D.C. Teachers College in Washington, D.C. Her decades of teaching art and her efforts to advocate for her students and community made her an important figure on the art scene and the recipient of several awards during her lifetime, including the 1991 Women’s Caucus for Art of Greater Washington.

Known for her compelling landscapes and seascapes exploring the intricacies and beauty of nature as seen in DC Waterfront, Maine Avenue (1957), which is housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or Gay Head Cliffs, Martha’s Vineyard (c. 1970), in the Howard University Gallery of Art, D. Pierce’s worked in various styles that included experimentation with the effects of light, geometric forms and colour combinations. Her creations range from the vistas of Martha’s Vineyard, where she regularly summered, with Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts (1940), to the spiritual portrait Hope (1952), and the intriguing 1980s Nebulae series of abstract patterns. Greatly influenced by Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998), who trained her at Howard University, D. Pierce was a member of her Little Paris Studio Group (an alternative salon run with French artist Céline Marie Tabary (1908–1993)) and began to exhibit her paintings there in around 1950. From the 1950s onward, she also showed her work regularly at the Atlanta University Art Annuals, the Barnett-Aden Gallery and the Margaret Dickey Gallery.

In 1962, D. Pierce’s commitment for social justice and gender rights was supported and funded by an Agnes Meyer Fellowship, allowing her to travel and study in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Those trips inspired her art, as exemplified by the figurative painting Sudanese Tradermen, No. II (1964) from her “Africa” series, which responded to themes of the diaspora. On the international scene, her works went on to be exhibited in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1983, she was featured in the notable exhibition organised by Washington collector and scholar Thurlow Evans Tibbs Junior – Richard Dempsey, Lois Jones, Delilah Pierce, James Porter, Alma Thomas, James Wells: Six Washington Masters. Her achievements in the visual arts were also notable for her role as co-curator of the 1989 African American art group show Inspiration: 1961–1989 at the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, which included her triptych landscape painting Nature’s Symphony (1980–1981). In 2015–2016, the dedicated exhibition Delilah Pierce: Natural Perspective, mounted by the University of Maryland Global Campus, brought coverage of D. Pierce’s career and a renewed attention to an artist, educator, activist and curator who had not until then enjoyed the same level of renown in the limelight of the art world as her local contemporaries and life-long friends, Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978) and L. M. Jones.