Shining Light: Folk Artists Nancy Johnson and Minnie Ma Scyphers

June 08, 2012 - December 30, 2012

Price-Strongwell Cultural Heritage Galleries

Exhibit Details

Nancy Johnson is a studio artist at Abingdon’s Arts Depot. Much of her work is inspired by family history and childhood memory. She also references the early history of African-Americans from the region and beyond. Johnson incorporates a range of materials including paint, glitter, stickers, pencil shavings and paper. Her gift for story-telling is at once surprising and amusing, candid and heartfelt.

 

Minnie Ma Scyphers’s descendants generously donated several paintings to the William King Museum in 2010. Her landscapes are typically painted from memory, but she also sketched and painted scenes on site. Her interior scenes, of pleasant homes with paintings on the walls and neat furnishings, seem to be of her fantasy home. In one of her two books of poetry, she stated, “I do not want to bury any talent which I might have; what little light I have, I want to let it shine.”