Tucked back beyond the Native American exhibit at the VMFA is an homage for a favorite daughter of Richmond, VA. Willie Anne Wright, the artist featured, is currently 98 years wise and could not take my request for a conversation. She’s earned her rest. I was instead greeted in the gallery by Sarah Kennel, the curator of the exhibit. She has an intellectual calm — a casual confidence — that you glean immediately upon approaching her. When you get to spend time with a brilliant person discussing the very thing that makes them happy, that animates them, it feels like a gift. I took it as such.
Obviously Willie Anne Wright’s work is a topic she is intimately familiar with, considering she chose the pieces on display and placed them in the order she intended them to be viewed in. I was drawn to the concept of the relationship of artist to gallerist, icon to interpreter, retired composer to young conductor. This is less an article or interview, and more a lecture; one I thoroughly enjoyed. I don’t talk much in the conversation below and I’m sure we’ll all be glad for it. I really really recommend that after reading this, you go to the VMFA and take these tidbits of wisdom and insight with you. That, or convince Ms. Kennel to take you on a tour too.
Sarah Kennel: Willie Anne Wright is one of Richmond’s most beloved artists. She was born in 1924 in Richmond and went to Richmond public schools. Her father was also an artist. Her parents encouraged her to get a career that would allow her to support herself. She went to William and Mary where she studied psychology, however, while she was there, she continued to take painting classes. This work here House with Tree, Williamsburg1 is the earliest work we have by her. She was 18 when she made this and probably had just gotten to college. And you can already see, it’s pretty good for 18.
Cristian Detres: Yeah, I could do that. [laughs in failure]
SK: She was studying the classical painters, but we also see a lot of Van Gogh. Yeah, so and in fact, Willie Anne Wright’s history with VMFA goes back to 1944 just to when she was 20. During that time, the museum put on an exhibition of the best work by students in area colleges, and two of her watercolors were selected. She had a long history with VMFA. However, she got married right after college to her high school sweetheart, and over the next 10 years, they traveled around, lived in three different places. She had three kids, and you know, was taking painting classes wherever she could, but it was not a profession. They moved back to Richmond in the 1950s, and by 1958 she really started to focus again on her art. And, in the 1960s, she enrolled in what was then called Richmond Professional Institute. It’s now VCU. That was a really critical turning point for her. She was mentored by Teresa Pollack, a very important woman who essentially founded the VCU art department. She got a master’s in painting and, just want to pause for a minute to really recognize, she was a mother of three young kids while doing so.
So she’s juggling all of this, but I think what’s also amazing is she talked about how she felt much more in tune with the culture of the 1960s than with the youth culture of her youth, which would have been in the 40s — that really comes out in this painting here. This was actually the first work hired by VMFA. It was acquired in 1967 because it won an award that year. It was in what was called the Virginia Biennial. Every two years, the VMFA would showcase the best Virginia artists. So Willie submitted One Night at Jimmy’s We Saw the Supremes on Color Television2 and what I love about it is it really gives you a sense of her emerging talent as a pop art painter — her sense of humor. We’ve got The Supremes, her love of pop culture, her love of color.
CD: I was gonna ask if you don’t mind me interrupting? So I’m looking at how to House with Tree…. And then I’m looking at One Night at Jimmys… and there’s a massive stylistic disconnect. Was there a specific individual or piece of media that influenced her artistic direction, because these two couldn’t be any more different. Anything from graphic design, marketing, advertising? Whatever would move someone from this classical style to something that is definitely of its time; current. There’s clearly a different mindset I think you have to be in to translate inspiration into this rather than that.
SK: When she was in grad school, she was doing kind of darker, more murky canvases with more references to artists like Matisse. Her graduate thesis, which was on the image of women and 20th century art, looked at the image of women through four different artistic styles. The last one was pop art that was really just emerging in the late 1950s. So I think pop art was on the cutting edge of things. She had that traditional background but she homed in on this.
The other thing that I think was really important to her was new forms of media. She was really interested in popular music, but also television. And, in fact, it was her husband who was the photographer in the family. He would take lots of pictures of the television, and she would paint from them. In interviews with her from the 1960s she expresses she felt the contemporary form of media was television. She felt it as more than an appropriate subject for contemporary painting. So she was picking up on what was most contemporary at that time. And so we see that, you know, in her willingness to work from photographs in magazines, to reference things on television.
So she’s kind of commenting on past and present. Obviously, this painting here Green Supremes3 — she loves the Supremes. One of the things that’s interesting about the way that she paints she uses a lot of these very flat areas of color. They look almost like stencils and cutouts. This is not silkscreen. So many people thought that her painting was silkscreen that she then started to experiment with it.
CD: This one is though, right?
SK: For Heraclitus4, yes. So she was doing this as part of a larger series. She was looking at waves and clouds and various natural phenomena, and she would take a photograph. Sometimes she would use surfing magazines, newspapers, sometimes they’re photographs she’s taken from a window while on a plane. She would take a section of it and then repeat it. You can actually see this repetition right here. But she would abstract it and then of course we have these like, you know, 1970s fluorescent colors. But the title For Heraclitus also kind of clues into her broader intellectual and artistic background. Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher.
CD: Somehow I ended up talking about Heraclitus with Monsieur Zohore just a few days ago. That dude’s following me around. Heraclitus, not Monsieur.
SK: She has a kind of dialogue with photography that I personally got really interested in. This one over here especially, okay. It’s entitled To O.G. Rejlander and Diana Ross6, and it’s a little complicated. I’m going to talk you through what’s going on here. So look on the right side of the canvas first, so that is an outline of Diana Ross. We know by now she’s a fan but if you look, it’s actually, see these little, like, very fine graphite lines? And then you see the shape here, which is actually the shape of her hair there. So it’s almost like a positive and a negative repeat. And that makes me think about television in the 1960s.
CD: Yeah, like on old TV’s if they were out of vertical balance, the image would loop, scrolling up, over and over again, until you adjusted it of course. There was so much more analog interaction with electronic media back then.
SK: Haha, like changing channels by hand? Walking over to the TV and twisting a knob? That’s probably good for your body, having to get up… look over here. You have this yellow double stripe down the middle of the painting, which makes me think about Barnett Newman. He did this whole series with zipper paintings. I think it’s kind of her little nod to contemporary movements.She was very aware of contemporary painting, but also aware of the longer history and that’s what you kind of get on the left side here. So you have her large painting of this reclining nude. And then you have a smaller version up in the corner and you have these little squares there on the smaller version and over here and that refers to this classical painting technique, where a painter would enlarge a small sketch into something, you know, much bigger canvas by squaring it and kind of copying each square.
CD: I still have one of those grid windows. Can’t say I’ve used it this decade but…
SK: This is from a photograph. It’s referring to this 19th century tradition of painters starting to paint from photographs rather than live models, which is much more convenient. I was also very excited because I knew the photograph this image came from. I had actually worked at the National Gallery when that photograph came into the collection. So this is by a 19th century photographer working in Britain. Photography was a new medium. Having models sit for paintings was laborious and required a still model for hours on end. He made photographs that kind of looked like classical paintings, for painters. It’s deliberately staged just so — he’s selling them to painters to paint from. So, you have this wonderful dialogue back and forth between painting and photography. She was very interested in that. She was reading books in the late 1960s that were looking at this relationship between painting and photography in the 19th century even before she started making photographs.
CD: It almost seems that she exists in the transitions of art forms. She’s somewhere in the space where it changes.
SK: Yes, and is this is in the early 1970s, right before she transitions to photography as her main point of interest. She was trying to make a series of paintings based on some family photographs from the 1880s. She couldn’t make the subjects work for her as painting prompts, but was inspired by the possibilities in photography.
CD: She was experimenting with pinhole cameras, correct?
SK: Yes. It kind of starts by accident. We can look at this case here. This is just the earliest. This is a later print of the earliest photographs she made, but we can see some other ones here. She was always sketching, but in 1972, she took a photo class at VCU. I think it was like a three or four week class. She was just wanting to learn how to use her 35 millimeter camera. Her husband had given it to her to make slides of her paintings because that’s what she would do to be able to send samples out to press and galleries. And the first class was ‘make a pinhole’. Nobody was expecting that. They wanted to learn how to use their fancy technology. But she describes how just using this very simple apparatus, essentially a box with a little hole in it and some photo paper in the end completely transformed her. She loved the analog magic of it. Her art was becoming more directly connected to the 19th century styles she was getting more interested in. She’s a very social person. Photography brought people into her art. Company.
CD: I’ve noticed in her interviews that she just seems like the most delightful human being. There’s something maybe akin to grace, but also an active warmth that emits welcoming. The stereotype of the artist is usually the opposite. It seems like her work reflects that. But in some ways, a lot of her work seems very lonely. A lot of the pinhole photos – especially the pools – seem, not desolate, but –
SK: – introspective. Though, she loved working with people. She always was surrounded, in particular, by women. With models as well as other photographers. Having this new medium for her that was much more portable allowed her to be out in the world. It became the thing that she loved to do. Her early photos really do evoke the 19th century photography that she was increasingly interested in. She was making these prints and toning them sepia to make them a lovely, warm brown. Even in posing these young women that were her subjects, she was borrowing from antique styles. The clothes the models wore were often hanging in the closets of the locations she was shooting in. Her love of 19th century material culture also comes out when she starts making these photographs, and mounting them on William Morris wallpaper.
Morris was a British designer, the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. He designed all these beautiful wallpapers which you can still actually buy today. And so she even wrapped her camera in this particular print we’ll see in the next room. We look at these women and these, you know, lovely white dresses and you don’t know when it’s made. But you know, always with Willie Anne there’s two opposing tensions that sort of hold her art in balance.
She started exploring color in the 1970s. This was the moment when color photography emerged as an art practice. Yes, lots of commercial photography had color in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, but it was really in the 1970s you started seeing fine artists working in color.
CD: The commercial scene back then saw the transition from black and white to color television in many more homes. Color TV’s became affordable.
SK: Yeah, exactly. And so she decides to start making color work. What she does is so interesting because she’s working with pinhole cameras still, her photographs are made directly in the camera. There’s not a negative for most of these. She could have used the negative – and she did at certain points – but what she’s doing is she’s taking a film, a photo paper, silver dye, bleach, or commercially known as Superchrome, which is a direct positive process. Normally, if you take a slide, which is not color reversed and you wanted to print it on this paper, you just expose it in a dark room or you actually took it to a commercial lab because it’s a very toxic process. But, she took these papers and just put them directly in our camera. And made these exposures. I don ‘t think anybody had done that before. They weren’t calibrated to natural light. So in the very beginning, she experimented with these filters. Oh, and we have letters in our archive where she is, you know, writing to scientists and people who develop talking about her experiments and they’re really interesting. You begin to see that she starts to be able to work on a larger scale. The camera has to be larger because this [points at the very print on the wall] is actually sitting inside the camera. That’s a new new idea.
CD: I didn’t realize the actual paper, this hanging on the wall, these were the things in the camera. Interesting.
SK: It was pretty expensive. Having the material directly in the camera. There’s no lens, there’s no viewfinder, you just open the pinhole and you are calculating exposure time and just by experience and intuition, trial and error, she learned a lot and. She would write on the back of all of her prints, almost all of them, her notes on the length of the exposure, the time of day, the weather conditions, like, was it cloudy, full sun, so that she could replicate it. It’s also what 19th century photographers did. They didn’t have light meters. They didn’t have automatic —
CD: — Exposure. But she didn’t even have a lens, which makes it a little more magic to me.
SK: Exactly. So and you know, she’s working, you know, of course with still life because some of these exposures are multi minute long. This is part of a series of actually 10 prints that she made over a little more than a year tracking the progress of a pile of gourds. It was set up in her backyard and I love the one that’s just covered by snow. But then in the end, it just becomes the shells of the gourds. So it’s kind of a wonderful photography as a document.
There is no reference for this series online, however if you’d like to see similar pinhole photographs by Willie Anne Wright you can go to their collection here.
CD: A lot of potential metaphors in there.
SK: This gourd one I love too because she clearly is having fun with that. It’s clearly a phallus. If you look compositionally, too, though, you’ll see one of the things she likes to do is sort of exaggerate the perspective, because a pinhole kind of distorts it. So often she’ll have a corner at the front or the back and position something there to exaggerate the depth of field.
CD: I didn’t take into consideration that the pinhole does dictate a lot of that. Yeah, it stretches space in an interesting way.
SK: Now, her love of 19th century photography is on full display here, but also kind of commentary on the past. So this is her version of a still life by Roger Fenton6. He was an important British 19th century photographer and he made these luscious, you know, still lives. We’re in dialogue with a whole tradition of still life painting, you know, Dutch painting, 19th century? So it was a kind of photography challenging painting in the 19th century. So she makes her own version and she tucks Fentons black and white picture in there. But of course, she can get the color. So she’s kind of making what she calls her homages to these other photographers.
CD: I can see the progression of mastery with the pinhole process. She seems to be becoming an expert at managing the color through a pinhole camera.
SK: It’s part of the – it’s within the paper, but I think she really understood the paper. She understood how to set it up the for the right length of exposure. And then, you know, the larger the prints, the longer the exposure. Yes, she also experimented with different cameras. She made her own cameras and tried different things.
This one is a little quirkier, and we’ve still not totally figured out how she did this. This is actually collage7 This is more about her personal identification with women artists. In the mid 1970s, in addition to doing her own work, she started giving lectures around Virginia on the history of women artists. This was sort of the beginning of women’s art history. She gave one lecture on women artists from the 15th century to now, and another on women artists in Virginia. She was always looking towards older models that were important to her, that were kind of examples of women in the field. So Julia Margaret Cameron was the the most well known 19th century female photographer and was an icon for her, so she dressed herself up there, that’s her, holding a portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron.
You can tell by the light that she set it up outdoors and she carefully cut it out and collaged it onto another photograph, where she’s kind of used, I think a three way mirror. I’m not totally sure – she often uses mirrors, this time to make this kind of complicated, endless reflection. Yeah, that and her spiritual guide in the mirror. We don’t know but I like to think of it as the ghost of Julia Margaret Cameron.
Then this is another one of my favorites8. The color is amazing. But also, it kind of gets at her sense of humor like yes, there’s the nod to 19th century still life painting, but this is more Willie Anne with the plastic leis and it’s funny little heads, and the tourists dolls, bones, etc. She loved putting these incongruous objects together in these inanimate dramas. There’s one that’s on it. And here it’s in the catalog with these two red rubber gloves that look like they’re alive. Yeah, yeah, it’s in the catalog. So, and this is more of a poignant personal, when she was an only child. But, her mother’s sister, her aunt Evelyn lived with the family. So, she had these two women really raising her along with their father, and they both were killed or killed in a car crash in 1982. So this is part of a series like that she made again, sort of a more personal homage to them.
So, that room was the 70s and early 80s. What we have here is her continuation of exploring color, but also approaching new subjects. There’s a quote where she said she was so far into the 19th century that she needed something to pull herself back out.
We see really contemporary modern life subjects here. One thing she got very interested in was women in water. By chance, in 1987, somebody called and asked her for a pregnancy portrait. It was not the kind of thing she did. She was not a photographer for hire. But this was the picture she made.9 I think she was so intrigued by it. And it’s such a wonderful image. The way the pinhole kind of distorts and elongates her legs, which almost turns into the branch behind her. The model is obviously very comfortable with her body in nature. But this picture Before Luca was the first in what became a long practice of photographing pregnant women. And what I think is so interesting, she’s a woman artist. She has three kids of her own but her art is not about being a mother herself. She’s not particularly interested in depicting childhood. It’s different from someone like Sally Mann using the domestic sphere as a realm for artmaking.
CD: She’s got the woman’s phase of pregnancy in her sights.The woman’s experience as a vessel or incubator, as opposed to a woman’s relationship to her children or family.
SK: Exactly. It’s about the individuality of the woman and her psychology. Willie Ann is interested in women as individuals, and so that’s what comes out in these pictures. The titles in this series are always “before” and then the name of the children in the wombs. It really focuses on this kind of liminal state, and you know, there’s a whole range. There are celebratory pictures about fecundity and then there are others which are a little more ominous10. Like these two women are not looking at each other. They’re not looking at the camera. I love that how the camera shadow is kind of looming over the whole scene. It suggests that this is a complicated time. The series on pools and beaches, one of my favorites. We all have our biases, that’s maybe why they’re so many in the show. I particularly love these for a lot of reasons. This one in particular interested me. I think it just reminds us you know, this is a pool hose. It’s moved during a long exposure and it is transformed into something like a little sea monster11. Yeah, but also again, because of the pinhole, the image doesn’t have a natural recessive depth. That’s almost an infinite depth of field. This pool looks like it could be 100 feet long, right? So you have this endless, empty pool.
Pools were nice because the water created something interesting. The angles of the pools were always a little bit distorted. But also she could have living models, in a kind of contemporary suburban leisure. They could lie down outside for four minutes at a time for the exposure length and be still, comfortably. What I also like about this one is that she’s really interested in twin imagery12.
CD: I was just gonna say it’s not perfectly symmetrical, but it gives the illusion of symmetry.
SK: It’s the illusion of symmetry. She claims that because she’s born in June, June 6, meaning that she’s a Gemini, she’s always been drawn to twin imagery. But I also think it’s the idea of doubling that interests her. It’s inherent to photography, sometimes with positive/negative or negative/print, but also the world and its representation. She just loves playing visual games with us.
CD: Philosophical dichotomies.
Sarah: The beaches were also opportunities for her to be out in the world with her family.
CD: At this point in her life her children are adults, yes? Did the empty nest have much play in her ability to get out and do a lot of these?
SK: I think her youngest was in kindergarten when she started working as an artist as her vocation and not just as an avocation. It’s a good question. Like did it ramp up? I think probably her ability to travel did. Particularly when she did the Civil War series. Her work at this time was almost celebratory. There seems to be a very interior phase and then there’s like an “I’m not stepping back inside as much as I have to”. There’s a lot of beaches.
But also you know, this is not Mary Ellen Mark, who’s going to India and traveling around the world. These are all local places. Places you go with your family on the weekend. That’s her husband, Jack13. I have to say that Jack was an incredibly supportive spouse. I mean, part of the reason why Willie Anne could be a successful artist and mother in the 60s and 70s was because she had a spouse who supported her in that ambition.
She had a dialogue between solidity and ephemerality as well, like in this image where the same person is repeated because they’re moving to different spots in frame while the image was being exposed. It’s a very beautiful picture, but it’s also funny, light hearted. She has a good sense of humor.
CD: I guess, again, to my comments, something seems ‘released’ in this series. Like an emotional or responsibility burden.
SK: I love this one because it is sort of lonely. You can see how she loves that kind of endless procession of space, but also it just reminds us that she’s making these directly in the camera and that’s why it’s laterally reversed14. Yeah, so it just it everything comes in but it’s reversed. And here too, you know, that wonderful combination. Of the sense of movement, but also emptiness and doesn’t look like there’s anybody on this ride. There’s nobody sitting there. So this kind of sense of loneliness, dreamy, dreamy15. The other thing about this particular series that I love is the way that light looks like it’s actually emanating from the picture itself. I mean it almost looks like a light box behind it. So you get that warm glow in pictures like this. She really is capitalizing on the way that the pinhole focuses light in the center often creates dark silhouettes. She uses that to enhance the aesthetic quality of the picture but also the emotional.
SK: The same year she did the pregnancy pictures, she walked outside one Sunday morning and happened upon a Civil War reenactment. These were starting to take place in the late 80s in anticipation of all of the Civil War anniversaries. She’d grown up in Richmond so, you know, you can’t escape it. She was never interested in the Civil War per se, but what she was interested in was the strange collision of past and present. And you know, for somebody who was interested in the 19th century and the contemporary moment, this makes perfect sense. With ‘Custer’ here, he’s leaning on a Dodge pickup that actually has the US Army plates on it16.
She started making these photographs. For this series, she actually used film; she had a four by five camera. They’re still pinholes, but she used film inside it. So she could then make multiple prints, but also because they look like 19th century Civil War photographs. She got very into this. She went to more than I think she went to a total of 44 reconstructions, all over, mostly in the South, but not entirely. She also really studied Civil War photography. She wasn’t trying to replicate it, but she was aware of how she went down a rabbit hole.
Photography in the Civil War was really so defining. It gave Americans a visual understanding of what actually was happening for the first time. So it’s kind of the birth of war journalism, conflict photography. She also had a lot of fun. I mean, she was observing these guys, and they’re mostly guys, although not entirely, fascinated with how dedicated they were to exactitude, which she saw as this ridiculous/tragic quest. And I mean, that comes out and, you know, this picture here of the leg amputation17, which, of course, it’s not a real leg, but the fact that it is so graphic. Every aspect of war was being reconstructed. She was specially interested in all the women who would participate in these; Union widows, Confederate widows, that role. Why these women would participate interested her.
CD: It’s interesting, actually, to me too. I was picking up that. The attention to details which you see at, say, Comic Con, is a similar sort of thing. I was just thinking about these men that are engaged in, you know, playing soldier, right? There’s some honesty in the portrayal here. Where the women she shot are not Southern belles with parasols. The outcome of a war is mourning. They’re mourners18. The outcome is black sackcloth and all of that. I don’t know, I’m just being a little too deep.
SK: That was a little bit curatorial on my part. It’s true that she creates these mourner figures but there are others that are a little more, you know, the Confederate women in hoop skirts and such. She did comment in an article how “you couldn’t believe how these guys would get into it. Grown men playing soldier”, she picked up on that. That aspect of it, plays into her work a little bit, but of course, she also became herself. Intensely interested in this whole thing as the soldiers were. It was kind of a photographic obsession for a while. What photographing the Civil War reenactments did for her was to get her focus on landscape19 and, more broadly, the South, which does not play into her early work. Not at all.
She’d been photographing outdoors, but she wasn’t thinking about the landscape. It’s always the subject, the central subject that’s pocketed in the pinhole. The backgrounds tend to go away unless you’re in like, the pool environments where the background is the boundary. She’s thinking about history. It’s like 19th century painting history, but after traveling all around to these reenactments, she’s also going to all these graveyards and battlefields. She begins to reflect on this longer history of the South, it’s fraught history as embedded in architecture and the landscape. This becomes a long series for her. We just have some examples here. These are from the 90s to early 2000s. And you see here again, her love that angle, but it’s also such a classical, almost 19th century landscape view. I love the way the flag looks here. It’s a very quiet picture but it reminds us of all of the blood spilled for that flag at Fort Pulaski.
She’s engaging with also a longer tradition theatrical landscape in photography. So here I have an example of Clarence John Laughlin from 1941, who was a chronicler of the South. He made these kinds of almost surreal pictures, staging shadows of people or double exposures as a way to conjure the sense of the past in the present. So you know, with these abandoned buildings, you don’t know what century you can be in. She likes that idea of this woman with her hair all done, earrings, and a nice dress in front of a dilapidated house20. That juxtaposition is definitely indicative of what is beautiful and powerful and collision or intersection of the past and the present.
Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist will be on display at the VMFA Richmond from October 21, 2023, to April 28, 2024.
Top photo: Homage to Julia Margaret Cameron, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), Silver dye bleach print, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment
