Past Exhibition

Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection

February 6–July 18, 2021

Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA 24011

About the Exhibition

“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.

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; the Gibbes Museum of Ar t, Charleston, South Carolina; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia.

The 264-page companion catalogue is composed of six lead essays and forty-two catalogue entries by experts in the field of Southern art, as well as a foreword written by Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator In Charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Illustrated with more than eighty color images, the volume also includes a directory of over two thousand women artists with documented professional activity in the South in the period under consideration. Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection is available for purchase via Spartanburg's independent bookseller Hub City Bookshop.

Other Venues

Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC 29303

September 7–December 18, 2020
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC 29401

January 1–August 9, 2020
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN 38117

July 28–October 13, 2019
Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV 25701

March 2–June 30, 2019
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS 39201

November 16, 2018–January 20, 2019
Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA 30602

June 30–October 23, 2018