The son of an innkeeper, Black was raised in rural Viola, Wisconsin in the Kickapoo Valley, where many of his childhood friends lived on a nearby Indian reservation. Largely self taught as an artist, he began to draw and paint using vegetable juices, earths and red keel, which the Indians used for ceremonial decoration.

However, when his family moved to Chicago, he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1906 and 1908. Black worked as an illustrator and newspaper artist in Chicago, Minneapolis and New York, spending his summers touring and sketching in the West, researching for illustration and commercial art work. Health problems forced him to move to Taos in 1925, where he executed some of his best work, painting the Pueblo architecture, Indians and the snow covered peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. His style was characterized by broad brushstrokes, often achieved with a palette knife, blocks of bold color, with little detail, simply portraying the essence of the Southwest, which he painted from life whenever possible.

In 1925 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he combined Impressionist and Modernist techniques in his paintings of the local landscape and Native American culture, many of which were thickly painted, using a palette knife, and had highly saturated color.

Also, in the 1920s LaVerne Nelson Black lived briefly in Taos, where he studied and sketched the traditions of nomadic Indian tribes such as the Navajo and Apache. In the 1930s he moved to Phoenix, working as an illustrator and commercial artist.