Photo: Kerry Kehoe
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Mary Whitfield featured on the NY Times
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Whitfield Solo Show at AEIVA, Birmingham
Over the past 30 years, self-taught artist Mary Frances Whitfield gained recognition for her small, mythic watercolors depicting America’s tragic legacy of slavery in the South. Born in 1947, in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, Whitfield would listen to her grandmother’s stories which lead to her determined focus on slavery throughout her artistic career, even at a time when her ancestors did not want to be reminded of their past.
Her oeuvre of faceless figurative allegorical works of real-life themes began in 1989, inspiration came not only from her passionate remembrances of her Black ancestors but also from her personal visions.
As a visionary artist, Whitfield’s imagination astonished us from her emotionally tender work - New Baby (1989) depicting a mother’s joy of swinging her newborn, and to her arresting lynching, Narrative: Why Albert? (1999) relaying vulnerability, anguish, beauty, and sadness in the form of outstretched arms.
It took almost 30 years for Whitfield’s lynching paintings to be shown in a retrospective exhibition. Titled “Why?”, it took place in 2019 in the artist’s birth city of Birmingham, at the University of Alabama’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Art, and shared by Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Whitfield has been featured in various publications, including Kathy Kemp’s 1994 Revelations: Alabama’s Visionary Folk Art, and Raw Vision 49. In 1996, she was artist-in-residence at American Folk Art Museum, NY, and in 1997 she had a residency at The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation awarded her a grant in 2000.
Public collections include: AEIVA-Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL; American Folk Art Museum, NY; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, AL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, AL; Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn, AL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and Raw Vision, UK.
Phyllis Stigliano