Photo by Ash Daniel
Who: Faithe Norrell
Where: Crossroads Art Center
When: September 2019
Faithe Norrell treats her home in Henrico County’s North Side as a gallery, both for her artwork and others’. On a coffee table is a small figure of businesswoman Maggie L. Walker, a model for the statue on West Broad Street, and behind a loveseat hangs her grandmother’s crazy quilt. Across the room are Norrell’s own paintings featuring buildings with minarets and wrought-iron railings.
A self-taught artist who worked in Richmond city schools for decades, Norrell says she trusts her instincts when putting paint to canvas. “It’s interesting how things just sit on my eye,” she says. Sometimes she’s inspired by architecture, especially from Morocco and New Orleans, her former home, and other times by people and history.
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“Lady Link,” acrylic on canvas, 24 by 36 inches
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“Omage to Obama,” acrylic on canvas, 24 by 30 inches
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“The Owl in the Pussycat,” acrylic on canvas, 22 by 28 inches
But if there’s a through-line in Norrell’s art, it’s her family’s heritage. “I think I’m a Virginia Creole,” she says. Her grandmother was from Louisiana, and Martha Washington, the wife of President George Washington, was the half-sister of another ancestor. Norrell’s two children are related to Maggie Walker through their father’s family. Her aunt and uncle were missionaries in Liberia, and another relative was secretary to sociologist and historian W.E.B. DuBois.
Norrell paints African women, Creole women and free American women of color, who often were the mothers of “outside families” of wealthy white men, she says. “They had businesses. White, landed gentry would take them for their consorts and gave them property.”
Growing up in the segregated Richmond of the 1950s and ’60s, Norrell remembers her mother taking her and her siblings on Sundays to visit the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the “only institution that wasn’t segregated.” She worked for 24 years at William Fox Elementary, both as a teacher and school librarian.
After retiring, Norrell decided she wanted to devote her time to painting; she had painted clothing since the 1980s and canvases since the ’90s. In recent years, her work has been displayed at Crossroads Art Center and the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia.
Norrell uses acrylic paints because they’re faster drying than oil, and she can scrape off something she doesn’t like and then add another layer. Some pieces take years to complete, like a canvas with flowers that now has a woman’s face. “I finish it when the canvas says I’m finished,” she says.
“The Frogs Sing Differently Depending on the Season (In Conversation With Sophia Chizuco),” 2018, oil and beeswax on canvas over panel, 14 by 36 inches
Don't Miss: Roberto Jamora’s “An Inventory of Traces,” a series of abstract paintings inspired by stories of immigrants in New York City that earned the VCUarts adjunct professor the 2018 Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. Sept. 6-28, Page Bond Gallery, 1625 W. Main St.
