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Online Exhibit: Frances Brand Collection, Part One Exhibit

Description:

This "virtual exhibit" is of a portion of the paintings done by the late local folk artist Frances Brand, a series that she called her "Firsts." They are portraits of local personages from every walk of life. This is part one of a two-part series; portraits of individuals with first names A-M may be found here.

Exhibit Displays:

• 2. ACHS Spring Quarterly Meeting:  The Frances Brand Collection

  Here are some photos from the Frances Brand Reception at the Society's Quarterly Meeting

• Alice Gertrude Whitten Kelso

• Alice Wesley Ivory

• Amy Doggett

• Anna Anderson Manahan

• Anna Lucia Puerta

• Anne Mae Bailey

• Bessie Guy

• Beverly A. Hankins

• Booker Reaves

• Brenda Burrough

• Brenda Richmond

• Carolyn “Karen” B. Hartsock

• Catherine “Kay” G. Peaslee

• Catherine Lynn Burke

• Charles “Chuck” Langham

• Charles L. Barbour

• Charlotte Jennings Yancey Humphris

• Col. Elbert L. Radford

• Comilla Payne

• Constance Ward

• Cornelia Johnson

• Cynthia Malloy Gatton

• David Lee

• David Wilson

• Donald W. Jones

• Doris Overcash

• Dorothy Emerson

• Dr. Adah Anita Lotti

• Dr. Ann Fulton Humphreys Dyer

• Dr. Dumas Malone

• Dr. Edith K. Mosher

• Dr. Frank Finger

• Dr. Leslie E. Rudolf

• Dr. Lyn Lee

• Dr. Martha Brown Morrison

• Dr. Mary Williams Clark

• Dr. Nathan Johnson

• Dr. Otis Updike

• Dr. Ruth Klueger Angress

• Dr. W. Ralph Singleton

• Dr. Zengxuan Song

• Drewary John Birchard Brown

• Duanne Carter

• Eliot Candee Clark

• Elizabeth “Babs” Conant

• Elizabeth Nelson Tompkins

• Elizabeth Pigeon

• Elizabeth Seabrook

• Ellen “Enie” Virginia Nash

• Ellen Dale McCallin

• Ellie Wood Page Keith

• Eugene Williams

• Evelyn Patricia Foote

• Fr. William A. Stickle

• Frances Brand

• Frances Farmer

• Frances Ramsey Joseph

• Francis H. Fife

• Gail Burton Jones

• George and Ruth Maverick

• Gertrude Ballou Dunbar

• Gertrude Mitchell

• Gina Alycia Brooks

• Glenda F. Richardson

• Grace H. Carpenter

• Grace L. Tinsley

• Gregory Hayes Swanson

• Hazel Hopkins Key

• Heinz Kramp

• Hong Kui Wang

• Imogene Morgan Bunn

• Introduction: Frances Brand Collection

  Some were indeed "firsts" -- first Black mayor of Charlottesville, first woman to be admitted to the University, first woman priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia. But Mrs. Brand was not too literal about whom she considered a "first." One woman was the first local mother to have a delivery by the Lamaze method. Others were the first in their family, neighborhood or community to accomplish an academic or career goal that, while perhaps not monumental in the Grand Sweep of Things, were nonetheless important milestones for the people involved.

  The one consistent criterion seems to have been that these were people that Mrs. Brand had met and befriended in Charlottesville or Albemarle County, people whose strength of character she admired. The first "First" was, in fact, a young, unwed, pregnant immigrant from Colombia. When her father was stabbed while confronting his daughter's rapist; the young woman supported her family by working as a flagman on a VDOT road crew.

  Mrs. Brand was a retired Army major, a widow, a grandmother, a devoted churchwoman, a stalwart civil rights champion and peace activist, and an eccentric who chose in later years to wear purple on every occasion.

  After retiring from the military in the 1950s, she used the G.I. Bill to study painting in Mexico City. A multi-lingual, worldwide traveler, Mrs. Brand collected tribal and peasant folk art from many different countries and cultures. She was particularly affected by Mexican folk painting, and, though she was proficient in other styles -- notably the American "Ash Can" school of social realism -- when she began to paint the "Firsts," she was already working in a style heavily influenced by Mexican street painters and Catholic iconography. The "Firsts" sometimes overlap stylistically and in subject matter with another series she undertook she called the "Madonna and Child" series.

  Like many folk artists, Mrs. Brand chose to work using the materials most readily at hand. She bought cheaply framed, mass-produced pictures from the Roses store downtown, and painted over them using acrylics. She worked rapidly, painting scores of two-foot-by-four-foot portraits in a period of months.

  The paintings were first displayed as a collection at the dedication ceremony for the Central Place of the (then) new Downtown Pedestrian Mall in 1976. Since then the "Firsts" have been shown many times around town, and at a gallery in her home that she created before her death. Her grown grandchildren have maintained the house and adjacent galleries as an (unincorporated, certainly non-profit) museum until this day, and have opened the doors to hundreds of visiting groups.

  After a large exhibit at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society in 2004, Mrs. Brand's paintings were displayed in some of the city's recreation centers.

  Evaluating Mrs. Brand's work as folk art (hers was the subject of a doctoral dissertation for the Department of Folklore and Folklife at Indiana University by Michele Brannigan in 1998) presents some conceptual challenges. Her paintings were rendered in a consciously "folk" style, but Mrs. Brand was not a member of any stereotypically "folk" group -- she was not a member of any ethnic minority or sub-culture, she was not a peasant or a factory worker, and she was certainly not "untutored." But by the more inclusive, contemporary definitions of folk culture, her work qualifies in important ways as "folk" or "vernacular." Her work was the creative expression of the traditional values, mores and beliefs of a close-knit (if diverse) community. The paintings served the classic functions of folklore -- they instructed the young, they commemorated local acts of valor and determination, and they defined an aesthetic and a collective subject matter that was instantly recognizable as "belonging" to Charlottesville and Albemarle County in the last half of the Twentieth Century.

  As Mrs. Brand neared the end of her long life, her vision began to fail her, and the later paintings reveal her growing frailty. Many of her subjects will tell you that some of Mrs. Brand's paintings were not the most flattering of portraits. Still, even in her last paintings, her love of her subjects comes through, in the eyes, the colors, and the characteristic inclusion of some recognizable object, book, or building that identifies the subject and the thing -- the accomplishment, event, or action -- of which they were most proud.

• Irena Berry Norvelle McCormick

• Irina Igorevna Estakhova McClellan

• James Butler

• James N. Galloway

• Jannene L. Shannon

• Jay Worrall

• Jill Tietsort Rinehart

• John “Jack” Eacott Manahan

• John and Mary Israel

• John Brown

• John Christian Lowe

• John F. Merchant

• Joseph Lee Vaughan

• Julia Pace

• Linwood Warwick

• Lt. Col. Joy Suzanne Dallas Eshelman

• Margaret Jefferson

• Margaret Mcleod Cain

• Margaret Wood

• Marion Kanour

• Marion Nolan

• Martha S. Carpenter

• Mary Ann Wilder Elwood

• Mary Elizabeth Forbes

• Mary Gore

• Mary L. Garwood and Rebecca C. Haas

• Mary Updike

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