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Judith McWillie Donates Artwork to CBU
Above: Holy Volt, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 144 inches, 2000. Above right: Joyous Fountain, acrylic and fabric on canvas, 96 x 72 inches, 1995.
Judith McWillie’s video on J. R. Murray http://goo.gl/AgcQy
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LAST FALL, ARTIST Judith McWillie made a donation to CBU of nine major paintings that cover a long span in her career. McWillie, who is the daughter of James McWillie, AFSC (volunteer archivist at CBU for 23 years) and the sister of Betty McWillie (director of CBU’s Career Center), is professor emerita at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia and founder of the Center for Vernacular Studies and Ethnopoetics. “The group of paintings at CBU was done when I was traveling around the South videotaping visionary artists, performances by blues and gospel musicians, culturally related events in the Athens and Atlanta areas of Georgia, neighborhoods in southern towns mostly in the 1980s, and any other thing that I considered relevant to Southern culture and visionary experience,” she says. “I am still doing this, but the CBU paintings mark a specific body of work lasting from 1978 to 2005.” The body of work coincided with an active period of researching and publishing essays about spiritual art made by predominantly elder African Americans in the South who had no formal art training. Most of these individuals said that they had experienced a call from God in the form of an initiatory vision, a paranormal event that changed them and made them begin to paint and sculpt. McWillie says her Catholic upbringing “stressed ‘the big picture’ and
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encouraged a rich inner life often expressed through visionary experience, so I took these accounts at face value.” “Traveling in these circles I began to believe that the African presence—the influence of African expressive culture and religion—in the United States is foundational but misunderstood and that the American South might have more in common with emerging cultures in Africa and Latin America than with, for example, New England or California,” McWillie says. In addition to videotaping and photographing visionary artists, McWillie studied the writings of Catholic mystics, in particular St. John of the Cross, whose works were influenced by both Christian and Sufi sources, and St. Teresa of Avila, the subject of the famous ecstatic sculpture by Bernini. McWillie says that another influence in these paintings is musical, drawn from the blues and gospel traditions of the South. “I attempted to transpose music to paint,” she says. “The improvisational nature of this practice and the idea of working from a primary source rather than theory were validated by early modernist and abstract expressionist philosophy.” McWillie admired the abstract expressionists and spent time with the painter Willem PHOTOS CIURTESY OF JUDITH McWILLIE