Underneath-appreciated throughout her life, the work of a Jacksonville artist is incomes larger acclaim.
by Tim Gilmore
“The First Girl of Jacksonville Artwork,” they known as her within the Seventies and early ’80s. She didn’t obtain her personal placing inventive identification till her later years. She’d all the time been a magpie with supplies, first from necessity, later from aesthetic alternative. Now, 35 years after her dying, the artwork of Memphis Wooden is coming into a state of reassessment.
“She attracts inspiration from a van filled with outdated quilts she sees on the road, from the minimize ends of resin-beaded pine logs she spots from a bus window, from the pink ravelings of placemats she finds within the trash can.” So mentioned wrote Cynthia Parks of The Florida Instances-Union on January 25, 1970. The complete-page function, exhibiting a photomontage of a seated Memphis Wooden and a lot of her artworks, was relegated to the “For and About Ladies” part.
Not till she was a senior in highschool did Memphis see an oil portray. “Seeing Leonardo’s Mona Lisa within the Louvre a lot later didn’t transfer me one-half a lot,” she mentioned. As soon as every week, an artwork instructor would go to the only highschool in Dacula, Georgia, and one among her sisters paid the 50 cent payment for Memphis to take courses.
She had painted in oils for many years, exhibiting in galleries across the Southeast and in New York, but it surely wasn’t till she retired in 1962, after 33 years of instructing artwork at Landon Excessive Faculty, that Wooden started creating the artwork with which her identify would grow to be synonymous.
In outdated audio, she sounds like several Southerner’s grandma, however her fiber artworks that started within the Nineteen Sixties remind College of North Florida’s Professor of Artwork Historical past Elizabeth Heuer of minimalist and maximalist painter Frank Stella. If Wooden shared her magpie traits with “Outsider Artists,” who’re usually untrained but obsessively artistic, Heuer says Wooden used archetypes just like the Summary Expressionists and felt a kinship and shaped a friendship with Hungarian textile artist and clothier Mariska Karasz. Wooden first met Karasz in Miami and Karasz later visited Wooden in Jax.
Towards the top of her time at Landon, Wooden produced stranger and extra authentic works. She additionally started to say publicly how exhausting she’d labored to get artwork taken critically even at a college recognized for tutorial success and the upper socioeconomic standing of its college students’ households. “I needed to nag the principal,” she admitted in 1962. “We all know image making is 40,000 years outdated whereas writing is simply 5,000 years outdated and it developed from image writing.” However, artwork was “the primary course dropped when a college goes on double session.”
Her work was altering dramatically. “I would be capable of accomplish extra,” she mentioned simply after her retirement, “however I all the time get and concerned in what my college students are doing.” She’d retired from Landon, however was now instructing at Jacksonville Artwork Museum, Jacksonville Kids’s Museum and Jacksonville College, the place for 5 years, she’d chair the artwork division. Now her artwork was melding collectively two new instructions without delay, changing into extra summary however utilizing fiber media.
If usually, individuals consider larger abstraction as much less accessible, they consider fiber arts as artwork introduced all the way down to the kitchen desk, as female, comfortable to the contact, the work of needles and looms, simply as conservatively they’ll consider the kitchen as girl’s area. What higher medium then, particularly for a soft-spoken North Georgian whose accent lies so comfortable on the letter R, to makes strains curve, to play radically with form and shade, make them flesh and organ, in truth maybe to make them as iconic as George O’Keefe’s extra famously vaginal flowers? A 1973 Florida Instances-Union picture (center left) reveals Wooden standing beside simply such an paintings, her arms out, talking explanatorily to a few uncomfortable-looking males.
Although Wooden labored “in lots of media–portray, pottery, sculpture, graphics,” wrote Peggy Friedmann in 1979 in Kalliope: A Journal of Ladies’s Literature and Artwork, “she is greatest recognized for her imaginative cloth collages and fibre sculpture, idioms she adopted some 15 years in the past.” Wooden advised Friedmann, “My pursuits in crafts goes again to my childhood. I noticed stoneware churn jars and milk pitchers. I noticed my father make a wonderful ax deal with that match his hand completely. My aunts made effective quilts and coverlets.” Concerning the “totem” she known as Beans and Sprouts, she mentioned merely, “I’m a rustic woman,” however the totem resembles one other known as Medusa, the feminine determine from Greek mythology with snakes for hair whose gaze froze males stable.
Satirically, a part of this resurgence in curiosity comes from the Museum of Modern Artwork Jacksonville having deaccessioned its Memphis Wooden assortment. Since Wooden lived for many years in Mandarin, the a lot smaller Mandarin Museum fortunately accepted the gathering and in 2024, underneath the management of its new director, Brittany Cohill, exhibited “Memphis Wooden Revisited,” curated by Heuer and artist and UNF professor emeritus Nofa Dixon, herself a pal and youthful up to date of Memphis Wooden.
Wooden’s most well-known paintings hangs 22 toes tall behind the pulpit in architect Robert Broward’s 1967 Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville (pictured far left). Broward, a pagan naturalist who sunbathed nude atop the home he designed for himself late in life and whose daughter mentioned he “worshiped the solar,” had been a scholar of Wooden’s at Landon. The tapestry stands like a tree-of-life in lieu of crucifixion, robust and wood-hued, brown and bronze and golden with greens and blues on the perimeters and a kabbala head of orbs in circuit.
Wooden not often supplied explanations for her work, saying she’d quite depart that to others, however gave Peggy Friedmann maybe the clearest summation she ever made about artwork. “To have the ability to concentrate on the welter of optical alerts coming to me from with out and to pick and make use of what I discover to be appropriate with my very own inside imaginative and prescient and feeling is what I feel artwork is all about. And I’ll inform you what I feel are the 2 qualities of a murals. It have to be indescribable and it have to be immutable.”
Picture credit score: Pictures: Jacksonville PUblic Libraries Particular Collections; Florida Trans-Union; Mandarin Museum