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| Willingboro resident and artist Lady Bird Strickland stands in front of her portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Photo by Dennis Mc Donald, Staff Photographer, Burlington County Times. Image via phillyburbs.com. |
For many years, artist
Lady Bird Strickland painted the people that she met in her life - and it was
no ordinary life
Published
| February 17, 2013
Subjects
such as Dizzy Gillespie, Josephine Baker, Charlie Parker, Marian Anderson,
Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington were all part of the jazz bebop scene in Harlem
where the young Georgia native danced and romanced in the 1940s, before putting
it all down with brushstrokes.
But
by the 1980s - married, settled down in suburban Willingboro, and still
painting - Strickland began to grasp that the New York jazz era that she had
witnessed was just one scene in a much larger mural of the African American
experience.
The
now-86-year-old artist found what she refers to as her "calling: to paint
black history from the heart." Today, the canvases that she most treasures
are an extended riff that begins with the era of slavery and plays all the way
through to President Obama's inauguration, with solo appearances by everyone
from Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass up through Medgar Evers and Shirley
Chisholm.
Some
of Strickland's best paintings are on display through March 2 at the recently
restored Warden's House on High Street in Mount Holly, which is featuring her
work along with Haitian artist Frandy Jean as a celebration of African American
History Month. Admission is free.
Featured
are not only portraits of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black
civil rights heroes, but photographs of the artist during her youth -
stunningly beautiful with wide-set eyes and high cheekbones, wearing her
exquisite hand-sewn clothing.
No art paper
Still
beautiful but slowed by age and some recent falls, Strickland sits in front of
a piece called "To Dream the Forbidden Dream," depicting 32 African
American icons from W.E.B. DuBois to Jesse Owens. It's a dramatic retelling of
black American history, but so is Strickland's own life story.
She
was born in 1926, one of six siblings, in a deeply segregated corner of north
Georgia, where it would be something of an understatement to say black girls
were not encouraged to express themselves, especially not through art.
"I
used to paint as a kid, but I didn't have art paper, just striped paper from
tablets," Strickland recalled.
At
school, sometimes her teacher might administer a "whuppin' " with a
hickory stick when she was discovered drawing.
Her
mother ran a restaurant out of their home called Sally's Tea Room, and
"everybody came, everybody came from 20 miles away, even James
Brown," the future Godfather of Soul.
That
was just a foreshadowing of the famous people she would meet after she boarded
a train - "a huge adventure in those days!" - at age 13 and headed to
130th Street in Harlem, where an older sister needed help raising her five
children. She worked in a zipper factory on Long Island to make ends meet, but
art would be a ticket to bigger things.
Painting neckties
Strickland's
painting of a woman, tired and bent over from washing laundry, not only won the
R.H. Macy Achievement Contest for New York City high school students but earned
her a scholarship to the prestigious Pratt Institute.
More
financial hard times during World War II caused her to leave school, and her
young adult years reflected the contradictions of trying to make it as a black
woman artist before the civil rights era.
After
dark, she drank in the golden age of Harlem jazz and depicted it in colorful
paintings. By day, she supported herself by painting neckties in a storefront
window and making three-dimensional ultraviolet billboards that showed up in
places like the New Jersey Turnpike. She also sewed her own clothes, winning a
costume contest at the Savoy Ballroom.
And
there was one more legacy of those bebop nights: her daughter, Pat Cleveland,
the result of an affair with a Swedish saxophone player named Johnny Johnson.
She worked for years at Bellevue Hospital as a single mom to raise Pat, who
grew up to become an internationally known model.
"She
was trying to make it as an artist; it was hard in those days, and raising a
child was hard," said Strickland's son-in-law, Paul van Ravenstein, a
photographer who today acts as the artist's agent and her occasional caretaker.
After
Strickland married a retired Army veteran, who died in 2003, and moved to
Willingboro, supporters such as van Ravenstein have worked hard to win recognition
for her decades of painting, leading to showings in New York, Newark, and
elsewhere.
She
still feels a calling to paint black heroes, including a portrait of Ray
Charles singing at Bill Clinton's inauguration that she's been working on for
months, but she said her new passion was painting "beautiful children
going to school, little kids, and I like to put pretty dresses on them."
Her
desire, she said, is to show schoolkids taking advantage of all the
opportunities that were denied to her 80 years ago.
