Introduction

—Gwendolyn Ann Magee, Artist

—Betsy Bradley, Director, Mississippi Museum of Art

An extraordinary artist working in fiber, Gwendolyn Ann Jones Magee (1943–2011) produced powerful abstract and narrative works in the medium of quilts. Magee's art, which she came to in midlife, was informed by her childhood in a creative home, her education in the social sciences, participation in the civil rights movement, careers in social work and business, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and grandmother.

A native of High Point, North Carolina, Magee lived most of her adult life in Mississippi. Educated in the public schools of High Point, she graduated from the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (WCUNC), now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). This essay, exhibition, and accompanying programming sponsored by the art department of UNCG brings Magee home and helps to raise awareness of her work. In the same spirit of homecoming, the High Point Museum will exhibit selections of Magee's work following the Greensboro exhibition, December 5, 2014–February 21, 2015.

Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee features twelve works based on James Weldon Johnson's transformative lyrics, set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson, and often referred to as "The Negro National Anthem." The quilt exhibition and this essay feature the twelve pieces as a cohesive body of work in narrative sequence. The exhibition also includes selected works that emphasize Magee's development through the expression of her social concerns and the evolution of her technical skills.

Fascinated with Color

Magee's childhood and early adult years in the Triad area of North Carolina contributed to the passionate voice she brought to her art. Edith Mayfield Wiggins, a childhood and college friend, remembers young Gwen Jones spinning endless stories and imaginative flights of fancy.[2] Hers was a childhood surrounded by art publications and crafts in various media, and included museum trips to New York with her adoptive mother, schoolteacher Annie Lee Jones.[3] Fascinated with color, Magee recalled trying to dig into paper with crayons to achieve the depths and intensities that could match the pure hues in her mind's eye.[4] The power of color became a signature of her mature work.

Another influence throughout Magee's childhood and youth that affected her later work was the pervasive presence of "Lift Every Voice and Sing":

In the fall of 1959, Gwen Jones, as a new graduate from William Penn High School in High Point, entered the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina in nearby Greensboro. Three years earlier JoAnne Smart and Betty Ann Davis had broken the color barrier at the all-white women's school. Although there were not violent protests or grandstanding in the schoolhouse door, the transition was not easy. Alice Joyner Irby, the newly appointed director of admissions, recalls touring the state, "searching for other black women who could succeed at WC. The women needed to be tough, smart, and ambitious to withstand the volatile culture they'd potentially face."[7] By the time Jones and her four freshman cohorts arrived on campus they found themselves segregated in one section of one dormitory, and the target of discrimination, both subtle and not.[8] The school was desegregated but not fully integrated.

During Gwen Jones's college years, 1959–1963, Greensboro was a center of civil rights activities, best known as the site of the Woolworth's sit-ins initiated by four North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (A&T) students[9] in February 1960. Advised by WCUNC administrators not to participate in the local demonstrations, between 1962–1964 Jones along with other students, black and white, targeted businesses adjacent to the campus and eventually prevailed in integrating the neighborhood movie theater and restaurants. Full integration did not occur until after she had graduated.

In a 1990 interview, Dr. M. Elaine Burgess, one of Magee's most influential professors in her major, sociology, recalled the action:

After her 1963 graduation with a BA in sociology, Jones continued graduate study in social science at Kent State and Washington universities, working as an assistant with various research projects. She did not pursue a graduate degree, but took a fieldwork assignment. All of these experiences helped sharpen the consciousness that would inform her art.

In 1969 Gwen married Dr. D. E. Magee, an ophthalmologist she met during fieldwork in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. After Dr. Magee completed his residency in Philadelphia, the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they established careers and raised their two daughters, Kamili and Aliya. Although she had continued during the passing years to practice a variety of craft media while employed with Xerox, Merrill Lynch, and other corporate and minority placement programs, Magee decided in 1989 that she should learn to quilt in order to create reminders of home for her college-bound daughters. She discovered her artistic voice in the fiber arts, swiftly mastering quilting and surface design techniques through which she powerfully expressed herself and engaged an audience.

Gwen Magee's first works in traditional quilting soon moved into abstract designs, and then references to African culture through the use of textile and design traditions. She reveled in and fine-tuned her fascination with the intensity and interplay of color. As she developed her skills, techniques, composition, and color management, she was also laying the groundwork for a transition in subject matter. As she studied quilting periodicals she discovered the narrative work of other African American quilters, which inspired a growing dissatisfaction with her own work as lacking in cultural relevance and significance. The artist challenged herself to create work satisfying to an audience of one, herself, responding to her need to deal with her own history and heritage. Her vision expanded to include her concern with social justice and African American heritage in the creation of extraordinary textile narratives.[11]