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    Central to Their Lives

    Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
    Central to Their Lives

    Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia
    February 6, 2021 - June 13, 2021

    “Art is central to my life. Not being able to able to make or see art would be a major deprivation.” Nell Blaine’s assertion about the centrality—the essentiality—of art to her life has a particular resonance. The Virginia painter’s creative path began early and over the course of her life, she overcame significant barriers in her quest to make and see art, including serious vision problems, polio, and paralysis. And then, there was her gender. In 1957, Blaine was hailed by Life magazine as someone to watch, profiled along with four other emerging painters whom the journalist praised “not as notable women artists but as notable artists who happen to be women.”

    Spanning the decades between the late 1890s and early 1960s, this exhibition examines the particularly complex challenges Southern women artists confronted in a traditionally conservative region during a period in which women’s social, cultural, and political roles were being redefined and reinterpreted. How did the variables of historical gender norms, educational barriers, race, regionalism, sisterhood, suffrage, and modernism mitigate and motivate women seeking expression on canvas or in clay? Whether in personal or professional arenas? Working from studio space in spare rooms at home or on the world stage, the artists considered made remarkable contributions by fostering future generations of artists through instruction, incorporating new aesthetics into the fine arts, and challenging the status quo.

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    SIX STATES, SEVEN MUSEUMS

    After opening at the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, the exhibition traveled to the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, the Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, July 28–October 13, 2019, the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, January 17–August 9, 2020, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, September 7, 2020–December 18, 2020, and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia, February 6–July 18, 2021.

     

    Women in Print

    Jones_Lois_Africa_HiRes.jpgPublished by the University of South Carolina Press, the exhibition's companion catalogue is composed of six lead essays and forty-two artist entries written by experts in the field of Southern art. Lavishly illustrated with more than eighty color images, the volume also includes a foreword written by Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator In Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An appendicular directory lists more than two thousand female artists who were professionally active in the South between the late 1880s and 1960. Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection is available for purchase via Spartanburg's independent bookseller Hub City Bookshop.

    Featured artists: Wenonah Bell, Nell Blaine, Sarah Blakeslee, Selma Burke, Elisabeth Chant, Adèle Clark, Kate Clark, Josephine Couper, Minnie Evans, Virginia Evans, Anne Goldthwaite, Angela Gregory, Ella Hergesheimer, Marie Hull, Clementine Hunter, Anna Huntington, Löis Jones, Nell Jones, Ida Kohlmeyer, Margaret Law, Blanche Lazzell, Adele Lemm, Edith London, Blondelle Malone, Maud Mason, Corrie McCallum, Willie Newman, Augusta Oelschig, Clara Parrish, Theresa Pollak, Mabel Pugh, Hattie Saussy, Dixie Selden, Alice Smith, Gladys Smith, Alma Thomas, Mary Thomas, Helen Turner, Elizabeth Verner, Catherine Wiley, and Enid Yandell.

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