The first time that native Richmonder Willie Anne Wright had her work displayed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, she was a college junior studying psychology at William & Mary.
When the exhibition of art by Virginia college students opened on May 6, 1944, at the VMFA, the nation was still embroiled in World War II. One month later, on Wright’s 20th birthday, Allied troops would land in Normandy, France, for the D-Day invasion.
The co-ed then known as Willie Anne Boschen remembers listening to radio reports of war news, watching for airplanes from a church steeple in Williamsburg and riding buses to military bases to visit injured soldiers and dance with young men preparing for duty overseas. Her fiancé, John H. “Jack” Wright Jr., whom she had met while attending Thomas Jefferson High School, was serving in the war as part of an Army engineer regiment.
Even though Wright wasn’t an art major, fine arts professor Thomas Thorne thought highly enough of her watercolor paintings that he selected two of them to be among 20 works from William & Mary in the college student show.
“It was a wonderful thing for me that I got selected to be in it,” she says.
Now, 79 years later, the museum is planning the first major exhibition to explore Wright’s full career as an artist. “Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist” is scheduled to open Oct. 21 and run through April 28, 2024, featuring 70 photographs and eight paintings drawn from the VMFA’s recent acquisition of Wright’s work. In March, the museum announced that it had acquired 236 photographs and 10 paintings by Wright, adding to the 43 works that were already in its collection.
Despite her lifelong love for art, Wright hadn’t considered a career in it. But she couldn’t let it go, either. After she and Jack were married, they spent a decade moving around the country for his industrial engineering work and raising three children. Everywhere they went, she took art classes in the evenings. Still, it wasn’t until they resettled in Richmond that she decided to get serious about studying art. In 1964, she received a master of fine arts in painting from Richmond Professional Institute, now Virginia Commonwealth University.
At the time of the college exhibition at VMFA, Wright’s preferred subjects were Williamsburg houses, landscapes and gardens, as well as fellow students sunbathing on the roof of their dormitory. Her subjects evolved over the years, along with her interests and experiences. Her choice of creative medium also transitioned as she explored new materials and techniques.
Motown music and a friend’s new color television inspired her 1969 pop art painting “Green Supremes,” included in the upcoming exhibition. A similar work, “One Night at Jimmy’s We Saw the Supremes on Color Television,” has been on display in the museum’s Lewis Contemporary Galleries.
“She’s one of those people who’s always remained open and in tune with the culture around her” observes Sarah Eckhardt, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the VMFA. Eckhardt became acquainted with Wright in 2011 when she installed “Civil War Redux,” a collection of the artist’s pinhole photographs from a series of reenactments during the 1980s and ’90s that traveled around the state.
Wright discovered pinhole photography in 1972 while taking a photography class at VCU with the intention of using a new 35mm camera to make slides of her paintings. Her first assignment in the class was to make a pinhole camera and then photograph a classmate. When she saw the resulting images, Wright was immediately hooked. The long exposure, angles and light gave the photographs an unpredictable quality.
“It just was so exciting to see it come up in the developer,” she says. “It felt like a lot of potential there.”
She explored that potential with varied sizes of pinhole cameras and materials, including Cibachrome paper, which is typically used to make prints from color slides. Her photographer’s eye turned to historic sites around Richmond, crumbling houses, vintage garments and still life tableaus created with fruit, flowers and sometimes whimsical objects. Pictures of poolside scenes and pregnant women with exposed bellies appear familiar, yet remain enigmatic.
At first glance, some of Wright’s images could be historical photographs, but ofte>n there are clues in the form of modern elements, such as a pickup truck next to a reenactor in Civil War garb. Some of her recent works, featuring trumpet-shaped brugmansia flowers, old photographs and early 20th-century tarot cards, are photograms and lumen composites made without a camera, using photographic paper exposed to sunlight.
“What unites Wright’s broad body of work is her curiosity, playfulness and experimental attitude to both seeing and reimagining the world around her,” Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind curator of photography and director of the Raysor Center, says in the museum’s March acquisition announcement.
An alchemist creates something through a seemingly magical process. Used in the exhibition title, that characterization is apt for Wright, particularly as it applies to her pinhole photography.
“You never know how it’s going to come out,” she says. “And you can’t do it again. You try it again and it’s gone.”
“Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist” is scheduled to open Oct. 21 at the VMFA and run through April 28, 2024.
