Wright’s fascination with new models of female identity and contemporary cultural forms, including television and popular music, emerged most strongly in a series of paintings depicting the female singing trio the Supremes, including One Night at Jimmy’s We Saw the Supremes on Color Television, ca. 1965-1967 and Green Supremes, 1969. These joyful paintings, some of which were based on photographs Wright’s husband Jack made of television sets, capture the novelty of color TV, Motown music, and the cultural impact of the glamorous Black superstars, whose frequent performances on the mainstream Ed Sullivan Show during the height of the Civil Rights movement crossed the color line. One of three works selected for VMFA’s 1967 Virginia Artist Biennial, One Night at Jimmy’s won the museum’s purchase award and an interview in the Richmond Times Dispatch described Wright’s work as “Art for Now.” 

“We’re living in an exciting period—a period of change. Value patterns are changing and to me it’s fascinating.”—Willie Anne Wright

Silkscreen

Wright began to explore the silkscreen process in 1969. This was a natural fit for an artist already working with collage, flat, broad areas of color, and appropriated imagery. Here too Wright culled source material from photographs, including magazines, advertisements, and snapshots made by her husband, Jack. She was especially interested in imagery of waves and clouds, which she abstracted and repeated using thick (and at times florescent) paint to create pulsing canvases that evoke vibrations and movement. One of these works, For Heraclitus, 1971, is named for the Greek philosopher who proposed that reality is a constant state of flux. It’s a concept that suits Wright, an artist who has always embraced innovation and change.        

“I had been painting as if I were silk screening and then decided to learn silk screening itself.”—Willie Anne Wright

Municipal Pier

The intensity of light and the environment of relaxed abandon of beaches, boardwalks, and seaside amusement parks worked well for making slow and deliberate pictures of bodies, space, and time. Even in bright sunlight, many of the pinhole photographs required an extended exposure time that rendered moving figures as ghosts, infusing these sunny scenes with the heartbreak of late summer and the poignant realization that time is running out. In the work Municipal Pier, which was captured in the off-season, a backward welcome sign (in a pinhole camera the image is laterally reversed) marks a place where time itself seems to have slipped out of joint, no longer anchored by the rituals and activity of seasonal tourists. 

In 1987, Wright stumbled on a Civil War reenactment in Richmond’s Capitol Square. Fascinated by the spectacle, she documented it with her pinhole camera. Over the next nineteen years, Wright attended forty-four reenactments on battlefields throughout the South. She depicted both Confederate and Union troops and was especially interested in the role of women and African American reenactors in these theaters of war.  

The Civil War was the first major conflict to be thoroughly documented in photographs. Although nineteenth-century cameras were not fast enough to capture battles, nearly every other aspect of the war was photographed, including portraits, scenes of camp life, views of cannons, and moving (sometimes staged) views of death. Wright, who studied Civil War photography, found herself capturing reenactments of many of the same scenes. Yet she was equally fascinated with visible anachronisms, such as a Dodge truck parked at camp, because they revealed how reenactments, like photography, fused past and present. 

Gracie with Dress

In Gracie with Dress, a sheer gown and a single bloom float on top of a blurred photograph of a child’s grave, invoking the Victorian fad for spirit photography, a practice that long fascinated Wright. Years earlier, Wright had made a picture of a friend standing at the grave of William D. Latané, the only Confederate soldier killed during J.E.B. Stuart’s ride around General McClellan’s army during the 1862 Peninsula campaign. Upon printing the image, she discovered a strange, skull-like apparition hovering above the shoulder of her companion—perhaps the ghost of Latané himself out to avenge his death—and started researching the phenomena of spirit photography.

Brug Mania

In 2006, Wright was given a Brugmansia plant, which she named Bobo. Enamored with its fragrant, pendulous blossoms, Wright began to make photograms—cameraless images made by placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper and exposing them to light—using different parts of the plant. She printed many of these photograms directly in sunlight, which gives them rich pink and violet tonalities. Wright, who was interested in Victorian scrapbooks, also began to incorporate the blossoms into collages with antique photographs, lace, jewelry, and other floral designs.

The Tarot: An Homage to Pamela Colman Smith

In 2016, Wright incorporated the brugmansia plant in her series Channeling the Tarot: An Homage to Pamela Colman Smith. Wright was intrigued by Smith (1878-1951), a British artist, writer, editor, occultist and suffragist who collaborated with mystic A.E. Waite in 1909 to design a tarot deck, known today as the Waite-Smith or Rider-Waite deck and created a photogram portrait of Smith. 

Illustrated in the British Arts and Crafts style, this popular deck merged Christian symbolism with inspiration from Arthurian legends. Wright, who created her series after the deck’s 22 Major Arcana cards, must have delighted in the fact that the brugmansia plant’s colloquial name, “Angel’s Trumpet,” lent itself so well to Smith’s design for the card of Judgment: an angel blowing a trumpet. Simplifying Smith’s elaborate designs, Wright’s version combined the angel’s hand on the instrument with a single brugmansia bud. Wright continued her examination of the plant’s relationship with the cards through the different ways she overlaid or dissected the plant to complement Smith’s imagery. 

Explore the series below.

In 2016, Wright donated a portion of her artist archives to VMFA. In 2022, she gave the remainder of her archives to the institution. The collection is comprised of correspondence, checklists, invitations, posters, handbills, photographs, publications, press clippings, and other manuscript material. The collection covers the years 1944-2020, with the bulk of the material dating from 1964-2003. 

The collection documents the career of renowned painter and photographer. Comprised of correspondence, exhibition files, research notes, travel sketches, work prints, and information about gallery representation and art sales, the collection traces the evolution of her artistic journey over seven decades. It documents Wright’s activities as an artist, as a leader of the Richmond artistic community, as a champion of women artists, and as a national figure in the pinhole photography movement.  

The donation of the archive accompanied an acquisition in 2022 of more than 240 photographs and 9 paintings by the artist. With this material, VMFA is uniquely poised to represent the full range and depth of Wright’s extensive and groundbreaking career.