LC show to feature work of 'Virginia's Grandma Moses'

if you’re going
-WHAT: ‘Queena Stovall: Reflections of a Country Life’
-WHEN: Jan. 19 through April 12; opening reception 4 p.m. Jan. 20
-WHERE: Daura Gallery, Dillard Fine Arts Building, Lynchburg College
-HOURS: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and on select Sundays
-RELATED: Gallery talk, “Queena Stovall and American Folk Art” by Robert Miller, Ken Farmer Auctions & Appraisals, LLC, Radford, in the Daura Gallery, 2 p.m. Jan. 25
-INFO: Call (434) 544-8343

It’s not every day you could see 31 paintings by Queena Stovall, Virginia’s Grandma Moses.

That’s the number that will go on exhibit at Lynchburg College’s Daura Gallery on Jan. 19.

“It is rare indeed,” says Sherry Stovall Flournoy of Richmond, one of Stovall’s grandchildren.

Only three of the 31 paintings on exhibit come from public collections. The rest are on loan from private owners.

Stovall became known for her detailed portrayals of rural life during roughly the 1940s and ’50s.

She is frequently included at the forefront of American women folk painters. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, and the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tenn.

Stovall, who was a Dillard by birth, lived much of her adult life in Amherst County. In 1949 at the age of 62 after raising eight children, she developed an interest in art and began taking lessons from artist Pierre Daura. He encouraged her to quit, though, in order to preserve what he saw as her natural talent as a folk painter.

So she did. She set about recording everyday events from baptisms to funerals, to killing a chicken because a company was coming to auctioning off equipment on a failed farm. The people in her paintings were recognizable, real-life people.

“Her meticulously detailed paintings are perceptive documentations of the endless, life-sustaining chores of the

country farm, the joys of family, and the events of her community,” says Barbara Rothermel, the Daura’s director.

Stovall was born in 1887, and christened Emma Serena Dillard. Her paternal grandmother nicknamed her “little Queena,” based on the way another family member tried to say Serena.

When she died in 1980 at the age of 92, her obituary in The News referred to her as “the Grandma Moses of Virginia.”

Some of her paintings stayed in the family. One that will be in the exhibition comes from Flournoy’s brother, David Stovall, the just-named CEO of Steinmart.

And Flournoy’s sister, Judy Stovall Boland, is lending a pair of andirons designed by her grandmother, who also made the molds.

The design features the two women in Stovall’s paintng, “Fireside in Virginia,” which is part of the exhibit. (One of the women is Judy Fairfax of Lynchburg; The man in the chair is Queena Stovall’s husband, Breckenridge, whom she called Brack.)

The exhibition will include other ephemera from Stovall’s life, such as little brown jugs she made as party favors for her annual Christmas chitterlings feed. (The jugs contained another staple of country living, corn liquor, and say, “Bottled in barn.”)

Flournoy, a schoolteacher, sees the exhibit as a teaching opportunity. She hopes “teachers will take school groups through (the exhibit) and explain how you make butter and why those women are backed up to the fire.”

“It’s just such a wonderful legacy for us and everyone in Lynchburg,” her sister says.

“It’s historical documentation of a (way of) life that will never be the same.”