Show Your Support of BPL at Maus Contemporary on May 17

 

Betty Sue Matthews, Four Girls, enamel paint on tin cutouts

If you enjoyed the artworks by Betty Sue Matthews (1944-2018) that were on display at the Birmingham Public Library in March and April, we encourage you to stop by Maus Contemporary in Birmingham this Friday, May 17. An exhibition of Matthews’ fascinating object-paintings will open at a reception at the downtown gallery from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The tin cutouts of Betty Sue Matthews were recently featured in the Voices Carry show in the Fourth Floor Gallery at the Central Library.

Fifty percent of the proceeds from the new exhibition of Betty Sue Matthews’ work at Maus Contemporary will benefit BPL’s Art for Everyone series, as well as the nonprofit Eastern Shore Art Center. 

About the Artist

Betty Sue Matthews (1944-2018) created paintings of people she knew and animals she saw on flattened cardboard boxes, discarded furniture, and tin siding, which she cut with an ax and shaped with clippers. She frequently painted on both sides to illustrate the front and back of the same individual. As an esteemed guest artist at the Kentuck Festival in Northport, Alabama, Matthews sold her artworks alongside luminaries including the Rev. Howard Finster, Della Wells, and Purvis Young for many years. Even within the vernacular tradition of painted tin cutouts created by artists such as Thornton Dial, Sam Doyle, R. A. Miller, Missionary Mary Proctor, and others, Matthews’ work stands out for her preference for creating likenesses of everyday people she knew rather than of archetypes or cultural/historical figures. 

Matthews was born in the small town of Brundidge, southwest of Troy, Alabama, in 1944, and lived there most of her life. She later moved to Tuscaloosa, where she died in 2018. In 1991, lobbyist and art collector Ron Drinkard introduced Matthews to the artist Fred Nall Hollis while Nall was artist-in-residence at nearby Troy University. Nall was immediately charmed and began to provide her with cardboard and paint, and later art papers and tin to create her art. At that time she sold her paintings in an impromptu gallery in front of her house for two dollars each, gradually raising her prices each week as she received new art materials and her confidence grew. She created her earliest paintings with old house paint, dirt, and grass stains on flattened cardboard boxes in a manner reminiscent of Jimmy Lee Sudduth, although it is unlikely that she met him before she began exhibiting at the Kentuck Festival in the 1990s. 

Nall championed her work, organizing solo exhibitions in Dothan, Montgomery, and Troy. In 2000 he featured her work among thirteen Alabama artists including William Christenberry, Chip Cooper, Frank Fleming, Charlie Lucas, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver, Yvonne Wells, and Kathryn Tucker Windham, alongside his portraits of Matthews and the other artists. The exhibition débuted at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts and traveled to Vence, France, and to additional venues in the United States.

By Margaret Splane|Library Assistant III, Community Engagement & Fundraising

Betty Sue Matthews, Father and Daughter, enamel paint on tin cutout

Betty Sue Matthews, The Couple, enamel paint on tin cutouts