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“Willie at Ruth’s Farm,” 1984, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), silver dye bleach print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.329
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“Gracie With Dress,” 2005, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), gelatin silver print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.436
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“Anne S at Jack B’s Pool (Back),” 1984, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), silver dye bleach print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.302
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“Green Supremes,” 1969, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), acrylic on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.246
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“Colonial Beach - Municipal Pier,” 1981, Willie Anne Wright (American, born 1924), silver dye bleach print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.290
The opportunity to see the art of a living master is not an everyday event, but you can experience the photography and painting of Willie Anne Wright in two upcoming exhibitions.
At the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the fittingly named “Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist” runs Oct. 21-April 28, 2024. Candela Books + Gallery is showing another aptly titled show, “Conjuring the Composition,” Nov. 3-Jan. 6, 2024.
Wright, a native Richmonder born in 1924, is perhaps best known hereabouts as a pinhole photographer of Civil War reenactors, whose images are like glimpses of ghosts, and of decrepit abandoned buildings that appear alive. But there is much more to her work.
Virginia-based photographer Sally Mann describes how, in her view, Southern artists are set apart from others by “their love of the past, their susceptibilities to myth, their willingness to experiment with romanticism, their obsession with place and their obsession with family.” This also applies to Wright, with the addition of a restless creativity.
In the 1960s, Wright was a student of Theresa Pollak at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University and VCUarts, the art school Pollak founded). In 2001, Wright described Pollak in a Richmond magazine article as “firm-but-fair, no nonsense,” and in the Richmond of her college days, Pollak represented “the epitome of art in the city.”
Wright attended RPI before the big changes that came with the transition to VCU. “It was the last gasp of the old way; the classes were very intimate," she said. “There wasn’t a lot of money involved, so their intentions were very pure, and they communicated that to us: art for art’s sake.”
She didn’t know quite which direction to pursue, but she got a studio, painted and taught art classes at the Jewish Community Center. Her work began attracting attention. “I had a lot of success right away,” she said, laughing. “It probably wasn’t good for me.”
Her journey, in part, occurred through happenstance. Some of Wright’s narrative paintings were mistaken for silk screens, which inspired her to venture into printmaking. She used the camera primarily to document the paintings.
And then at VCU she enrolled in an introductory photography class taught by George Nan (the former head of VCU Photography, he died earlier this year at the age of 88). He started the class by instructing students to make rudimentary pinhole cameras. “I actually kind of resented it,” Wright recalled. “I mean, I had my 35 mm camera and wanted to use it. Making a pinhole camera was kind of a chore.”
Yet this method suited her sensibilities with an elegant and simple operation that resulted in evocative, often haunting images.
At this point in time, her daughter and friends took to wearing vintage clothing. This prompted Wright to make images of them and, finally, reenactors. The notion, in recollection, amused her. “It’s funny, living in Richmond, how long it took the Civil War to reach me. I’d never thought much about it.”
She ultimately moved toward taking images of antique clothes as though the people in them had suddenly vanished.
In her later career, she benefited from the abandonment of print photography. “Thanks to the wave of photographers switching to digital,” she told Richmond magazine in 2014, “I inherited all this developing paper and stuff from people, and I wanted to put some of it to good use.”
Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center, curated the “Artist and Alchemist” exhibition and is eager to introduce Wright’s work to a wider audience.
“We’re pleased, for many reasons, to celebrate her remarkable and enduring career,” Kennel says, adding, “and the incessant creativity that she demonstrates.”
Kennel underscores how Wright is less concerned about the medium of her work in favor of the expression it produces. Her early pop art paintings were influenced by Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, though she brought in a language of her own. Wright captured pictures about women and inserted art history, making her work both about the present but also about what led to the moment.
“She’s contemporary,” Kennel observes, “but also immersed in the past.”
In her research, Wright amassed folders of newspaper clippings about women’s achievements, stupendous and notorious: a grandmother who sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean or two women who held up a New York taxi driver. She was influenced by 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and also writers and activists including Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan.
“She’s this sweet Southern lady,” Kennel says, “but also a rabid feminist. And this work is coming from a mother of three, who started her career late, and making groundbreaking art that champions women.”
Of the 2014 Wright exhibition at Candela Gallery, “Direct Positive,” gallery director Ashby Nickerson said of the work, “There’s a magical quality — all familiar but made exotic.”
Candela’s founder, Gordon Stettinius, met Wright around 1990 in Washington, D.C., during a conference of photography educators. He then lived in Tucson, Arizona. “She’s a lovely person,” he says. “We kept in touch, and when I came home, [I] started Candela [Books in 2010], and we [later] published the book of ‘Direct Positive.’”
He was impressed with Wright as an innovator.
“It’s the process within that hooks my attention, whether it’s lumen, pinhole, collaged paintings. She’s restless in the medium. These are not renditions of images; there’s always some kind of variation, an angle to what she’s doing.”
While some may have seen her work as influenced by the Civil War, that wasn’t the point, Stettinius says. “She’s also making photograms of bathers at the beach, lounging by the pool and these funny, surreal still lifes. She possesses a tremendous range and versatility.”
The Candela presentation will allow the works in different mediums to address each other. “There’s a through line of paintings that inform the photography, and vice versa,” Stettinius says.
For an introduction to the phases of this accomplished artist’s life, VMFA’s Kennel will host a curator’s talk from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19. Tickets are $8, and there is a free livestream option available. “Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist” runs Oct. 21-April 28 at the VMFA, and “Conjuring the Composition” opens Nov. 3 and continues through Jan. 6. Both exhibitions are free.
