Talk and Gallery Tour to Accompany Lois Wilson Exhibit

The exhibit Ladies, Gentlemen and Bazards: The Art of Lois Wilson will be on display in the Central Library's Fourth Floor Gallery from January 6 to February 21, 2014. Featuring a little known Alabama artist who died in 1980, the exhibit focuses on Wilson’s “found art” where she used wood that she scavenged from demolition sites, parts of furniture that she disassembled, old brushes, ironing boards, toilet seats, and left over food for coloring to take the trash that other people discarded and create art. The art illustrates the issues that were important to Wilson: environmentalism and conservation, racism, spiritualism, the needs of the aged and homeless, and the emptiness of modern American materialism.

Laquita Thomson, courtesy of Diego Rojas

Laquita Thomson, Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tennessee, will give a talk and gallery tour to accompany the exhibit. The talk, titled Alabama Mystic or Alabama Outsider: The Art of Lois Wilson, will be held at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, February 2, 2014, in the Arrington Auditorium of the Central Library.

Thomson specializes in studio art and art history research. Born in Corinth, Mississippi, she holds degrees from Mississippi University for Women, University of Alabama-Birmingham, Auburn University, and University of Alabama-Huntsville. During many years living in Alabama she researched and wrote about 19th and 20th century artists who had connections to Alabama, including William Bonar, Nathan Negus, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Maltby Sykes, and Lois Wilson. Her writings have been published in Alabama Review and Alabama Heritage, as well as by Black Belt Press and Michigan State University Press. She wrote “Art in Alabama” for the Alabama Historical Commission Preservation Project in 1988. Her research is credited in two feature films, Maltby Sykes, Gentleman Modernist by Dale Schierholt and Treasures from the Rubble by Alexandra Branyon.

Thomson is an active artist herself, exhibiting widely for the past 35 years. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Mobile Museum of Art, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, Morris Museum of Southern Art, and Mississippi Museum of Art. She has been featured and reviewed in several publications including Arts and Activities Magazine and Art Papers, as well as numerous newspapers. For the fourth time the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art will feature Thomson’s work in a one-person exhibit in Summer 2014.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information contact Jim Baggett at jbaggett@bham.lib.al.us or 205-226-3631.

Submitted by Jim Baggett
Archives Department
Central Library