Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Queena Stovall
Summary
Queena Stovall (20 December 1887 – 27 June 1980) was an American folk artist. Sometimes called "The Grandma Moses of Virginia," she is famous for depicting everyday events in the lives of both white and black families in rural settings.
Born Emma Serena Dillard in Amherst County, Virginia, she received the nickname “Queena” from her grandmother because of the way young children would pronounce "Serena". She married Jonathan Breckenridge Stovall, a traveling salesman, in 1908 and the pair had nine children. The family lived in Lynchburg, Virginia during the fall and winter and on a farm near Elon, Virginia during the spring and summer.
After her brother persuaded her to take an art class at nearby Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Stovall began painting at age sixty-two. Her instructor there was Spanish artist Pierre Daura, who encouraged her to stop taking classes and develop her own unique style.
Stovall's career spanned less than two decades, and she produced forty-nine paintings. Her art depicted scenes of ordinary rural life such as crop harvests, animal butchering, funerals, jarring for the winter, baptisms, cooking, and livestock and estate auctions. Stovall combined bright colors with attentive details, and would use figures out of magazines and advertisements to understand the composition needed for her paintings. Her first solo exhibition was at the Lynchburg Art Center in 1956. Stovall continued to paint until her health started to decline in the late 1960s.
Stovall's work is currently found in family collections, Virginia-area museums such as the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and other museums such as the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The Daura Gallery at the University of Lynchburg holds the largest public collection of Stovall’s work.
An exhibition, "Queena Stovall, Artist of the Blue Ridge Piedmont," was mounted in 1974–1975 and traveled to Lynchburg College, in Lynchburg, Virginia, October 6–25, 1974; to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg, Virginia, January–March, 1975; and to the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York, April–September, 1975.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.