10 am | Complimentary coffee and pastries
10:30 am | Presentation

Senior Wednesdays are informational and entertaining sessions designed for active seniors ages 55 & older and offered by a collaboration of Wichita museums and cultural institutions.
$2 public/FREE WAM members

Sacred Black Womanhood: Benny Andrews’ Portrait of His Mother
Mary Frances Ivey, WAM’s Sarachek Curatorial Fellow for Wiggins Studies, and curator of the exhibition Coming of Age: Women Growing Older in American Art, will take a deep dive into one of the paintings in this exhibition—Benny Andrews’ painting of his mother, Viola Andrews. In Andrews’ prolific body of portraits, he layers scumbled paint and textile scraps—like kitchen towels, calico, lace, and t-shirts—onto his canvases, often in favor of close attention to sitter’s physical features. He prioritizes stuffs and spaces as means of rendering subjecthood, especially in his imagery of his mother, grandmother, and other senior women mentors. Andrews treats their attributes of Black Southern womanhood as sacred iconography, in which kitchen tables are hallowed sites and Sunday-service-handbags are consecrated vessels. Yet in his 1986 portrait of his mother Viola Andrews in the Wichita Art Museum collection, he extends his layering strategy from her surroundings to her features, using unblended pigment to render the striated white, gray, and black of her coiffure and her brown complexion, wrinkles, and makeup. WAM’s Viola Andrews marks a moment when he rooted the hallowed qualities that older Black women in his world shared—like faith, leadership, and tender caregiving—in not only women’s swept kitchens and Sunday best, but particularly the face of his mother.

Mary Frances Ivey is a curatorial fellow at the Wichita Art Museum and a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas, where she studies works of art created since the 1960s. In her dissertation, “Picturing Age in the Work of Three Contemporary American Women Artists,” Ivey examines artist’ representations of old age in self-portraits, portraits of their mothers, and images of imagined elderly personas. Her other research interests include grief, dis/ability, and fiber art and textiles.