According to her obituary Anne Frances Hill was “known for her colorful stories and yarns and her ebullient personality; [she] was an artist, a librarian, a school teacher. She was fiercely independent, outspoken, and free spirited.” Nevertheless, the art she produced consisted of small-scale abstractions, meticulously cross-hatched drawings created with ink and colored pencils, many dominated by circles.
Hill was born in Randolph County, North Carolina, near High Point. Between 1950 and 1955 she attended the Women’s College of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) where she studied with Gregory Ivy who was known for his progressive ideas and for bringing nationally recognized New York artists to campus. Hill earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and for a year after graduation she taught in Greensboro’s public school system.
Subsequently she moved to New York and worked as a designer of displays at the New York Public Library. She earned a library science degree from Columbia University and studied art privately with Lyonel Feininger, a former colleague of Josef Albers at the Bauhaus. In 1959 Hill took a position at the King County Public Library in Seattle, Washington, but returned to North Carolina four years later to teach art for a year at Meredith College in Raleigh. She then settled in Walnut Cove, in rural Stokes County in the northwest part of the state, concentrating on her art until 1968 when she went to Fullerton, California, to work in the public library there. Two years later she came back east and took employment in the Wake County library system based in Raleigh.
In 1970 she made a bold move and acquired buildings in historic Merry Oaks, a virtually abandoned antebellum community so-named because farmers raced horses on weekends and imbibed afterward. Hill lived in a thirteen-room former hotel where each room had a name and a theme. She lined the stairways with hubcaps. She converted the general store into an art studio and purchased a cottage for her aging mother. Hill was true to the name of her adopted home and was well known for her lively celebrations on the Fourth of July and New Year’s Day. Fellow artist “Mackey” Bane who lived three hours away in New Hill described her longtime friend in glowing terms: “Against all the pressures for sameness and conformity Anne managed to foster her individuality and live a spirited life as a true original.”