Professor Ivy and His New Experiment: Beaufort Art Colony

"Woman's College Trying New Experiment On Coast," reported the Greensboro Daily News in June of 1938. Beginning in the early 1930s, the North Carolina College for Women (now UNC Greensboro) offered a course in marine science for a select group of students. Each summer, students applied to attend the course in Beaufort, North Carolina. Students were tasked with arranging their own room and board for the duration of the course and were able to get practical experience in the field of marine biology. The program developed into an annual opportunity for students desiring a hands-on approach to their education in a course that would now be described as experiential learning. (To read more about the Marine Biology Summer Session, please click here.)

Woman's College student drawing at Beaufort Art Colony, ca. 1938

The 'new experiment' in the summer of 1938 entailed the creation of a similar summer program available for students wishing to study art. Young women were offered the opportunity to study advanced landscape painting at the coast.

Professor Gregory Ivy, head of the Art Department of Woman's College, had searched for an ideal site to establish this summer 'colony' of art students. Beaufort had been recommended to him as a suitable location and easily won him over upon his first visit to the town. Aside from the scenic landscapes all around, he also found an optimal indoor space to serve as shelter on a rainy day or as a lecture hall. Beaufort was home to one of the largest structures built of logs in the country, its community center. The local Chamber of Commerce allowed Ivy to use a large room in the community center that, with its beautiful light, served as an excellent art studio and lecture hall for the summer program.

Ivy conducting a class critique at Beaufort
Community Center, ca. 1938

The first course in the summer of 1938, attended by around 30 students, provided the chance to earn four hours of college credit and incorporated the concepts and techniques used by the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists, all modern art movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, and no doubt a draw for the young artists of Woman's College. The program was open to students of other southern schools and colleges as well as to teachers interested in the experience.

Ivy and his painting students at Beaufort
Community Center, ca. 1938

In its second year, the summer art program offered the same landscape painting class as well as a general advanced painting class. Participants, some studying to become professional artists and others considered themselves hobbyists, began using an old mansion house in town as their dormitory. Though plans were made to eventually build a dormitory for the summer program, it never came to fruition.

Aside from the additional course offered the second year, the first annual Beaufort art exhibition took place, jointly sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and Professor Ivy. Local artists as well as out-of-state artists were invited to participate, and it was billed as the first exhibition of its kind in a southern coastal town.

One can only imagine the idyllic setting of Beaufort in the late thirties and early forties for the Woman's College art students. Hilda Brady, a junior at Woman's College during the summer of 1939 described it as "the land of the jasmine because of the great abundance of these fragrant flowers, a spray of which was placed beside the plate of guests each morning." In all likelihood, such treats for the senses were available in abundance for the young women who spent the majority of the year in land-locked Greensboro.

Professor Gregory Ivy sketching a student on the coast, ca. 1940

The effects of World War II unfortunately put a damper on the Beaufort Art Colony, which was shuttered for the last three summers of the war, 1943-1945. The art colony reopened in 1946 and art courses were expanded to include design, figure drawing, and art education in addition to the watercolor class taught by Dr. Ivy. The Colony also began to include music in the course offerings. By the mid-fifties, the "Fine Arts" summer session of Woman's College included dance, theater, and creative writing.

In the late forties and early fifties, the Fine Arts summer program, focused mostly on theater, was held in western North Carolina in the mountains near Burnsville (for more information about the Burnsville School of Fine Arts, please click here). It returned to Beaufort by 1954, sixteen years after it began. Aside from a broad selection of fine arts courses available to college students that year, classes for school-aged children were introduced, and the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce began providing two scholarships, one for adults and one for children to attend the program. The Woman's College Library provided library facilities and a trained librarian during the summer session as well.

Modern dance class at Beaufort, ca. 1940

Professor Gregory Ivy, founder of the Beaufort Art Colony, left the Woman's College in 1961. It is clear the Beaufort Art Colony continued into the mid-fifties, but there is no specific mention of it in University Bulletins after 1954. Since the Colony was the brainchild of Ivy, it is likely that it ended with his tenure at the University. In his resignation letter, he expressed his frustration at the college's lack of funding for the Art Department. His legacy at the Woman's College extends well beyond the Beaufort Art Colony. To read more about Ivy, please visit "Gregory Ivy: The Legacy of a Non-Conformist". Professor Ivy was the driving force behind developing the Woman's College art program. His idea to start the Beaufort Art Colony was just one of many contributions to art education at what is now UNC Greensboro.

Ivy's legacy lives on in the thriving UNC Greensboro School of Art, which boasts both undergraduate and graduate degree programs, a nationally and internationally renowned faculty of practicing artists, and an incredibly motivated, talented student body.

Gregory Ivy: The Legacy of a Non-Conformist

Today's Spartan Stories post was written by Arlen Hansen, a PhD student in History. Arlen worked in Special Collections and University Archives during Summer 2017, assisting with research related to the University's 125th anniversary celebration.

To the extent that UNCG is known as an “arts school” in North Carolina, much of the credit for that reputation can go to Gregory Ivy (1904-1985). “Consider,” wrote his student Lee Hall, “what the world and North Carolina were like in the Great Depression, what the Woman’s College was about…when Gregory Ivy arrived in his super-modern space craft and -- seeming to barely speak the language of the country he had invaded -- urged the female natives to seek and value freedom, to question what they had been taught was unquestionable, and to notice that most authority figures were swaggering about as buck naked as the emperors they imagined themselves to be.”1  According to Lee Hall, “Ivy might as well have been an alien when he arrived in North Carolina” in 1935, to found the art department of the Woman’s College (later UNCG).2

Ivy was a Columbia University-educated artist, a modernist influenced by surrealism and the Cubists. As such, according to Hall, Ivy was always advancing challenges to the status quo, and he made the newly minted art department at the Woman’s College into “a mini-cosmos of the humanistic world he envisioned.”3  With this guiding philosophy, Ivy influenced generations of students, and shaped art education at the Woman’s College. In 1938, Ivy established a summer art colony held at the Beaufort Summer School through the mid-1950s, which focused on landscape painting. In 1941, with the help and support of community members, Ivy established an art gallery, now known as the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Ivy’s connections to the wider art world meant that he could bring nationally known artists to the Woman’s College. This is how the sculptor Maurice Glickman, for instance, anchored the inaugural exhibit at the new Woman’s College Art Gallery in 1941. In subsequent decades, under Ivy leadership, the Weatherspoon Gallery became nationally known in the art world as a leading showcase of modernist art. His legacy is still felt in the Arts at UNCG, and in the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Ivy's watercolor Dead End, Beaufort (1940)

Lee Hall met Gregory Ivy as an art student at the Woman’s College.4  Hall would later recall that in 1950s “McCarthyism” America, Ivy “did not fit in, he did not conform.”5  Ivy had built the UNC system’s first department to award a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in fine arts, and assembled an art department of very talented colleagues. According to Lee Hall, “these “liberal” or “arty” or “pinko” faculty…kept the gossips and scolds stoked, and caused among the keepers of the status quo near-terminally raised eyebrows and pursed mouths.” Lee Hall recalled that students seemed to either love or hate Ivy, and recalled the gossip of her fellow students about him. From students who liked him: “He’s hip.” “He has Negro friends.” From students who hated him: “He’s an atheist and communist.” “He believes in sex before marriage.” “He’s going to be fired.”6

Gregory Ivy left the Woman’s College in 1961, after twenty-six years, to work as design coordinator for an architectural firm in Greensboro. He resigned with an angry letter to acting-Chancellor W.W. Pierson bemoaning the lack of funding for the art department, and the apparent disinterest of the College to fund it. “The Art Department,” he wrote, “is the only department here which is not housed, and yet, it is the best known nationally of all the departments.”7  His resignation letter detailed all of his grievances with the administration, and continued, “I feel that I can no longer assume the responsibility for maintaining decent standards under these conditions. The quality of the work done under these really outrageous and scandalous conditions suffers.”8

 In 1965, Ivy left Greensboro to head the art department at California State College in Fullerton. Over the course of his long career, Ivy participated in exhibitions with major artists such as Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack, and Marc Chagall, and at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Weatherspoon Art Museum houses a major collection of Ivy’s work.


1 Lee Hall. Lecture delivered November 13, 2005 at Weatherspoon Art Museum on the occasion of the public reception for the exhibition, “Gregory D. Ivy: Making North Carolina Modern.” Gregory Ivy Bio Files, Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG Libraries. 
2 Ibid. 
3 Ibid. 
4 Lee Hall was the student artist who drew the male nude which graced the cover of the Fall 1954 issue of the Coraddi. In the ensuing controversy, The Coraddi staff was censured by Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham, resulting in the resignation of the magazine's staff. 
5  Lee Hall. Lecture delivered November 13, 2005 at Weatherspoon Art Museum on the occasion of the public reception for the exhibition, “Gregory D. Ivy: Making North Carolina Modern.” Gregory Ivy Biographical File, Special Collections University Archives, UNCG Libraries.   
6 Lee Hall, e-mail to Will South, 4 March, 2004. Gregory Ivy Bio Files, Special Collections University Archives, UNCG Libraries. 
7 The Carolinian, May 12, 1961. 
8 Ibid.

The Coraddi Controversy of 1954

Page 15 of the Fall 1954 issue of the Coraddi, the art and literary magazine of the Woman's College (now UNCG) featured a short story by student Mary Wells Edward titled "Dinah." But, the page also contained an unrelated pen and ink drawing of a nude man. The drawing was done by Lee Hall, a part-time student from Lexington who worked on the staff of the Coraddi. The publication of this piece brought the debate between art and freedom of the press to the WC campus and ultimately resulted in the resignation of the entire Coraddi staff.

Cover of the Fall 1954 Coraddi

On December 15, 1954, the WC Student Legislature met to determine what - if any - actions it would take to reprimand the staff of the Coraddi for publication of this drawing. A resolution was introduced by student legislator Frances Alexander. This resolution declared that "the Fall issue of Coraddi violates the responsibility of freedom vested in student organizations and does not maintain the standards expected of student publications." It also proposed a forma reprimand of the Coraddi staff "for the publication of objectionable material in a magazine distributed to the general public under the name of the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina."

After the resolution was presented, a vote was taken. The resolution passed by a vote of 21 to 17 (with one abstention). But, after the vote was taken, Dr. William Mueller, faculty advisor to the student legislature and professor of English, spoke to the group. He states that "one's sense of taste is closely related to his sense of morals ... One purpose of education is to enable a person to acquire the kind of taste and judgment which allow him to distinguish between a work of art and something that is cheap and tawdry ... It is my conviction that the contents of Coraddi is art; it is my opinion that it is good art. When we judge a picture, we must also take into consideration whether our final judgment is more a reflection of the picture or ourselves." Following Mueller's speech, the group decided to hold a second vote.. By a vote of 18 to 21, the student legislature chose not to pass the resolution and not to reprimand the staff of the Coraddi for their publication.

Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham

Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham, however, would not this decision not to censure the Coraddi staff stand. The following day, on December 16, he wrote a letter "to the student of the Woman's College" declaring that "after Legislature acted, I was faced with the necessity of taking and a stand and I have taken it." He officially issued "a very strong censure" to the Coraddi staff "based on the simple premise that Coraddi, issued in the name of the College, violates the standards of good taste and judgment which any undergraduate publication is morally obligated to uphold."

In his censure to the Coraddi staff, Graham stated that "it is my considered judgment that, even under the most liberal interpretation, the issue of Coraddi in question clearly exceeds the limits of good taste." He continued, "freedom of the press is inevitably hedged about by the relationship and the responsibility of the press to the social and academic groups in which it exists. The strongest protection for a free press is the judgment and the responsibility of those privileged with freedom, and the present censure is directed first of all toward an apparent confusion in the minds of the Coraddi staff with respect to the all-important difference between freedom and license." Graham concluded by noting that "a wide range of opportunity for the self-expression of the artist is not only recognized but insisted upon by the Woman's College. Nevertheless, art galleries, exhibitions to which people may go on this campus, booklets designed for people who are (or should be) interested in art, and comparable places are the right setting for uninhibited realism. Such opportunities exist on this campus in abundant measure without involving an undergraduate publication for general distribution."

Coraddi editor Debbie Marcus

On December 17, the staff of the Coraddi, led by editor Debbie Marcus, resigned in protest. In a note left at Chancellor Graham's home, the student members of the staff declared that "in view of the Chancellor's statement, the staff of Coraddi believes that it cannot continue to function properly - that is, cannot put out a Fine Arts magazine ...the entire Coraddi staff believes that in the future, consideration of political expediency will - because of censures such as this - have to be of prime consideration. And since the Coraddi staff members are not politicians, but students of the arts, they believe that their resignation is in order."

In the aftermath of the censure and resignations, the Coraddi was unable to publish a Winter issue during the 1954-1955 academic year. But Graham's decision was upheld by the UNC Board of Trustees (the group now known as the Board of Governors). And he wrote privately the following month that disagreement with his decision was limited to "excitable aesthetes and a few other disciples of freedom."

Also of note is the career of Lee Hall, the artist who drew the controversial piece. Hall graduated from Woman's College on schedule in 1956. She later went on to serve as dean of Visual Arts at the State University of New York-Purchase before being appointed president of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. She held that position until 1983.

Building a "Commencement House"

In May 1958, a beautiful new home opened in Greensboro's Irving Park area at 2207 North Elm Street. The tri-level structure, constructed of cypress and previously-used brick - contained approximately 2350 square feet of enclosed living space plus a 484 square foot double carport, a 248 square foot storage and heating room, a balcony, and a terrace. But this wasn't just any new home ... it was the 1958 Commencement House. It was the product of a unique collaboration at Woman's College (now UNCG) that brought practicing architects, builders, and other professionals into the classroom to work with WC students on this yearlong project.

Students at groundbreaking for the 1958 Commencement House

Twenty-three Woman's College students participated in the Commencement House project. Twenty were undergraduates majoring in either art/residential design or home economics. The remaining three participants were graduate students in home economics. Their work was supervised by local architect and Woman’s College part-time Art Department instructor, Edward Loewenstein. Loewenstein was a well known and well respected architect whose firm Loewenstein, Atkins, and Associates designed Coleman Gymnasium on the WC campus in the early 1950s.

During the construction project, each student in the class was responsible for one phase of the design process and one phase of the specifications and construction supervision process. These phases included building design, utilities, furniture selection and arrangement, and more. Eugene Gulledge, president of Superior Construction Corporation in Greensboro, served as the contractor for the home and acted as the client.

Ribbon cutting ceremony for the Commencement House

Students were asked to plan the home to have a sales price "in the $30,000 range" (approximately $250,000 today). The house was required to include an entrance foyer, a formal living room, a family room, a separate dining room, a kitchen, three bedrooms, at least two baths, and a garage. Additionally, students were told that "while the house should contain new and pioneering ideas of layout and design, it should not be so radical as to make it unmarketable."

The grand opening and dedication of the Commencement House on May 29, 1958, was an event that received local and national attention. It was covered by WUNC-TV and local newspapers. Mrs. Martha Blakeney Hodges (Class of 1918 and wife of North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges) formally opened the home during the dedication ceremony. During the opening event, the home was also certified by the Duke Power Company for a Gold Medallion, the nation's highest award for electrical excellence.

Photo of the Commencement House from McCall's magazine, November 1958

Additional open house events to allow the public to see inside the home were held during the weekends of June 7-8 and June-14-15. The Commencement House received national attention when it was featured in the November 1958 issue of McCall's magazine.

The Development of the Weatherspoon Art Museum: Bridging Art and Education

Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon

Elizabeth "Lizzie" McIver enrolled at the State Normal and Industrial School at its opening in October 1892. She was the younger sister of the school's founding president Charles Duncan McIver. In fact, one of the drivers that led McIver to advocate for State Normal was the lack of reasonably priced institutions in North Carolina for Lizzie to continue her education after completing studies at Peace Institute in Raleigh (where her brother worked prior to the opening of State Normal). After completing a year at State Normal, Lizzie taught in the Greensboro city schools until 1900, when she marries James R. Weatherspoon of Sanford, NC. When her husband died four years after their marriage, however, she returned to Greensboro and teaching.

She served as a supervisor of the first grade classes at the Curry School, the teaching school on the State Normal campus. Mrs. Weatherspoon's abiding love, however, was art. While at Curry, she taught private classes in art. And, in 1906, she officially joined the State Normal faculty as an art instructor, focusing on art education for elementary school teachers. She was also a charter member and the first president of the art division of the North Carolina Education Association.

Mrs. Weatherspoon was also a strong advocate for the establishment of a Department of Art at State Normal. Finally in 1935, she saw that dream come true, and she was named an associate professor in the new department. Four years later, however, on May 25, 1939, Mrs. Weatherspoon passed away at her home on Tate Street after an extended illness.

The year following Mrs. Weatherspoon's death, the art department moved into its new home in the McIver Memorial Building. A small gallery space was opened in the building, and, in 1941, the gallery was officially named the Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon Gallery.

One of the early exhibits in the Weatherspoon Art Gallery featured 24 lithograph prints showcasing modern English art. Reflecting Mrs. Weatherspoon's interest in art education for elementary school students as well as the art department's emphasis on the gallery as a teaching space, 10 of the 24 lithographs were specifically chosen because they were to appeal to children.

Weatherspoon Art Gallery space in the McIver Building

For the next 15 years, the Weatherspoon Gallery in the McIver Memorial Building featured a wide array of art from around the world. Exhibits included textiles, furniture, paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, and more. A particular emphasis was placed on contemporary art as well as the space as a source for the practice and teaching of art. A donation in 1950 of the million-dollar Cone Collection from sisters Etta and Claribel Cone of Baltimore, served as one of the gallery's earliest and most important acquisitions. This donation included six bronzes by Henri Matisse and over 100 works by Matisse, Picasso, and other modern French artists.

McIver Memorial was closed due to numerous building hazards and issues in 1956. But, the new McIver Building opened in 1960 and featured a special wing specifically constructed for the Weatherspoon Gallery.

The Weatherspoon Gallery continued to grow in its new location, collecting new pieces and building a large audience. In fact, when actor Vincent Price visited UNCG in 1977, his first request in the way of sightseeing was the Weatherspoon Art Gallery. In particular, he wanted to see one of the gallery's most valuable pieces, Willem de Kooning's "Woman," which Price declared to be "an asset to any gallery." He reportedly studied the painting for a full 10 minutes as part of his 90 minute behind-the-scenes gallery tour.

Director Ruth Beesch with de Kooning's "Woman"

By the late 1980s, however, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery had far outgrown its space in the McIver Building. In 1989, the Weatherspoon found its new (and current) home -- the Cone Building, named in honor of Anne Wortham Cone (Class of 1935) and her husband, Benjamin Cone, Sr. The $7.5 million building opened at the corner of Spring Garden and Tate Street and provided the Weatherspoon Art Gallery with nearly five times as much space as they had previously had in the McIver Building. Gallery director Ruth K. Beesch declared, "we've gone from rags to riches."

In 2001, the name of the Weatherspoon Art Gallery was changed to the Weatherspoon Art Museum to more adequately reflect its function and mission as the gallery had grown and expanded in size and scope. Today, the Museum continues to maintain a schedule of more than fifteen exhibitions each year as well as full roster of educational activities, publications, and outreach efforts.

Maud Gatewood: Southern Artist

Maud Gatewood's senior yearbook photograph, 1954

Maud Gatewood was born and raised in Yanceyville, North Carolina. Her mother encouraged her to take drawing classes at Averett College in Danville, Virginia. Her sketchbooks show dozens of drawing of her mother. Mostly, seated and probably drawn while the subject was unaware. Maud spent her youth drawing and sketching and in 1950 (at the tender age of 16), she came to UNCG. In 1954, she graduated from Woman’s College (now UNCG) with a Bachelor of Art in Art. She earned her Master of Arts degree from Ohio State University in 1955. Gatewood then spent the next several years teaching in Alabama, then Texas before earning a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Vienna and Salzburg, Austria from 1962-1963. 1964 marked her return to the state with a position at UNC Charlotte teaching in the Creative Arts Department, where she taught for the next nine years. She was instrumental in developing the Creative Arts Department at UNCC. In 1975 she returned to Averett College, this time as a Professor in the Art Department where she worked for the next 20 years.

Gatewood passed away in 2004 from complications after a stroke. She received many awards and recognitions throughout her life, including first place awards in North Carolina Artists’ annual competitions, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, the Governor’s North Carolina Award in Fine Arts (1984), and the UNCG Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award.  She received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from UNCG in 1999, where she was touted for her “uncommon artistic talents, [her] significant achievements as a daughter of the University, and for [her] dedication to the spirit of public service which [her] alma mater so steadfastly values.”

Gatewood was well known for saying little about her own paintings.  In a 1968 Charlotte News article, she stated, “I’ve got almost nothing to say.  I just paint pictures."  When asked about the subject matter of her art, she said, “What I’m trying to paint are relationships, formal relationships: light and color and forms.  There might be messages, but I think a lot of times painters know less about what their painting says than anybody else.”

Special Collections and University Archives has the Maud Gatewood Collection, which contains professional activities, correspondence, subject files, sketches, and sketchbooks.  Maud drew extensively, capturing the scenes and people around her as well as plotting out future paintings.  The sketches that would become paintings are recognizable by their placement within a sketched square box, like these sketches:

Preliminary drawing for Consuming Cause, c. 1990

Preliminary drawing for Ugly Saturday, c. 1989

An exhibit, Maud Gatewood: Sketches, is currently on display in the Hodges Reading Room of Jackson Library.  This exhibit is a part of the Maud Gatewood Trail, a series of exhibits of Maud Gatewood’s paintings across North Carolina and Virginia.  This Fall, eighteen sites will be mounting exhibits of Gatewood paintings.  More information can be found in this brochure: http://www.uncg.edu/art/documents/events/GatewoodTrail.pdf.

This post is one in a series focused on the 2015 North Carolina Archives Month theme "Celebrating Archives: North Carolina Arts, Crafts, and Music Traditions." North Carolina Archives Month, celebrated each October, is an annual observance of the agencies and people responsible for maintaining and making available the archival and historical records of our nation, state, communities, and people.

Pieces of the Past: Gwendolyn Magee Quilting for a Better Future

February is Black History Month. To celebrate, our Spartan Stories this month focus on remembering important people and events related to the history of African Americans and UNCG. Today's post is written by guest authors Jordan Rossi and Lisa Withers, students in UNCG's Graduate Program in Museum Studies. The exhibit of Pieces of the Past will be on display at the High Point Museum until February 18, 2015.

Gwen Magee, 1963 Pine Needles

What do you do when you witness or experience injustice? How do you share your reactions to community or government decisions? Do you protest? Create art? When the state of Mississippi voted to keep the Confederate battle cross in their state flag, activist quilter Gwendolyn Magee responded by making a narrative quilt. The product, Southern Heritage/Southern Shame, layered images of the Confederate flag, bodies hanging from nooses, and the hood of a Ku Klux Klan robe. To Magee, keeping the Confederate battle cross on the state flag celebrated a heritage that enslaved, repressed, and murdered African Americans. She channeled her outrage through her art. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Magee skillfully used fabric to share her reactions to past and present events, to create awareness of racial injustice, and to share stories of the African American experience in the United States.

Although Gwendolyn Magee lived in Jackson, Mississippi, for most of her life, she grew to adulthood in the Triad. Raised in High Point, North Carolina, Gwendolyn Magee moved to Greensboro in 1959 and attended Woman's College. The years spent as a college student in Greensboro, planted the seeds of activism Magee would nurture throughout her life and in her quilts. In the wake of the 1960s sit-ins in Downtown Greensboro, Magee and four black students picketed businesses on Tate Street, which remained segregated. In 1963, student-led protests pushed Tate Street businesses to desegregate.

On campus, Magee also petitioned for inclusion in activities. She and a friend auditioned for a dance routine in their Junior Class Show, but were not selected to participate. Both experienced dancers, the women believed they did not make the cut because they were African American. Magee and her friend volunteered to run the lights during the show. They jumped on stage and danced alongside their white classmates. Experiences such as these led to additional expressions of activism during graduate school, before Magee ultimately turned to quilting as her medium for advocacy.

As Magee created quilts, she became well known, gaining recognition for her work. This article
from the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, MS, announces Magee winning a
$50,000 fellowship from the United States Artists (USA Fellowship) in 2007.
Image courtesy of Dr. D. E. Magee, Kamili Hemphill, and Dr. Aliya Magee.

Magee began quilting in 1989, just before her eldest daughter left for college. Her early work included traditional patterned quilts made for her family (Infinity) and abstract quilts (Hot Ice). Soon, Magee grew dissatisfied with the characterization of African American quilts as folk art. In search for contemporary, African American quilts, Magee found an activist art community, in which many of the artists were African American women quilters.

“But when I began looking at what some other African American quilters were doing, that’s when I became dissatisfied with not doing anything that had cultural relevance but just doing work that essentially was pretty. Well it’s more than pretty but it still didn’t feel as if it mattered all that much in the greater scheme of things, compared to the narrative work which I’m doing today.” -Gwen Magee Oral History Interview 

Pieces of the Past: The Art of Gwendolyn Magee exhibit on display
at the High Point Museum until February 18, 2015.
Image courtesy of Lisa Withers.

Magee began using her artistic talent to make quilts depicting the African American experience. For example, When Hope Unborn Had Died, is one of several quilts depicting slavery. Magee also made quilts in reaction to modern events. Her quilt, Requiem, is an expression of sorrow for the loss of African American culture when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Until her death in 2011, Magee dedicated her artistic talents to sharing knowledge, sparking community dialogue, and building a better future. Magee’s quilts challenge us to evaluate the state of American society.

Magee remained relatively unknown in North Carolina until the Woman’s College Class of 1963 and the UNCG Art Department exhibited her work on UNCG’s campus. Magee’s work traveled to her childhood home of High Point in Pieces of the Past: The Art of Gwendolyn Magee, an exhibit created in partnership between the High Point Museum, the UNCG Museum Studies program, and the North Carolina Humanities Council. Pieces of the Past will be on display at the High Point Museum until February 18, 2015. More information and pictures of Magee’s quilts can be found at www.gwenmagee.com.

Pieces of the Past: The Art of Gwendolyn Magee exhibit on display
at the High Point Museum until February 18, 2015.
Image courtesy of Lisa Withers.