Dashiell examines slice of Richmond life
By Barbara Fitzgerald
She was a prominent Richmond upper-class lady, a friend to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ellen Glasgow, a suffragist and an importer and seller of European art prints, engravings, books and antiques in her Adams Street Serendipity Shop.
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Diana Vincelli, exhibit co-curator, holds Dashiell's sketch book, which also contains examples of her writing. |
But Margaret May Dashiell-artist, illustrator and writer-was no stranger to the African-American domestic workers, the market vendors and the tattered Confederate veterans who peopled the streets of Richmond in the early 1900s. She was known to slip away from social gatherings to talk to a family's cook or maid, collecting impressions later to be translated into a drawing, a poem or a story to portray her affectionate image of the Old South.
Dashiell, a talented and prolific but largely overlooked artist was born in New Orleans but spent most of her life in Richmond. Her creative works are the subject of concurrent exhibitions that opened last month at three local venues as a collaborative effort among University of Richmond Museums, the University's Boatwright Memorial Library and the Valentine Richmond History Center located in downtown Richmond.
"Street Opera: Reconsidering the Art and Writing of Margaret May Dashiell (1869- 1958)" provides an in-depth look at Dashiell and the wide range of her creative talents.
The exhibit, which opened Feb. 9 at the Lora Robins Gallery of Design from Nature, features works from the Harnett Print Study Center's collection of more than 165 Dashiell line drawings and watercolors. They were donated to the University by Dashiell around 1953. The Valentine exhibit opened Feb. 11 and focuses on Dashiell's street scenes from the 1900s through the 1940s, as they relate to Richmond's history.
The curator of the Robins Gallery exhibition is Diana Thompson Vincelli, director of grant support in the Office of Foundation, Corporate and Government Relations, for the University. Vincelli, who earned an M.L.A. from Richmond in 2004, first undertook an examination of Dashiell's works in 2002 during independent study for her degree. She quickly realized that while the artist's interpretation of turn-of-the-century life of African Americans was idealized and one-dimensional, the possibilities were intriguing.
"Dashiell saw herself as a historian of sorts," says Vincelli. "She felt that she was recording history, capturing a way of life that was fading away. But remember, she was painting in a period when Jim Crow laws severely limited the opportunities and rights of the African Americans she often portrayed."
To provide a more accurate and complete impression of the period, the Robins Gallery exhibition includes newspaper articles, writings and photographs of African-American workers of the time, and the Boatwright Memorial Library exhibit includes not only some Dashiell paintings and writings, but also the works of her literary contemporaries, including African Americans writing during the same era.
"As a university and a museum," says Vincelli, "we have a responsibility and an ability to investigate the complex issues. We can use the works in our collections as a stepping-off point to look at the history of the times, to see what life was like in the first half of the 20th century in the South."
To address the complexity of the issue, programming for the exhibition was developed in consultation with an advisory committee of scholars drawn from the University, the Valentine Richmond History Center and the community. Committee member Dr. Kibibi Mack-Shelton, associate professor of history and the Tyler and Alice Haynes Professor of American Studies, says, "I am a firm believer in preserving as much from the social past as we can. Margaret Dashiell has done just that through her artwork, capturing intriguing images of black everyday life in the Old South. Her drawings are simple, clean and honest. She could have focused on flowers, trees and vases, but she chose to preserve a unique history of simple events."
In preserving the past and focusing on simple events and everyday people, Dashiell was reflective of the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, an exploration of black American life originating in Harlem and contemporaneous with Dashiell's paintings in Richmond.
"There was a strong interest in the 1920s in African heritage and that distinct culture," says Vincelli. "Langston Hughes came to Richmond in the '20s to give a reading. Even if Dashiell did not hear him, she would have been exposed to the movement through magazines like Harper's, which was featuring articles on it at the time."
Exhibition events-lectures, discussions, receptions, a brown-bag Q&A-were designed to celebrate Black History Month in February and Women's History Month in March. The exhibition catalog, including two essays by Vincelli, will be the first published work on Dashiell.
"It will be a really valuable resource for the community," says Elizabeth Schlatter, deputy director of University Museums. "So far, Dashiell has been relegated to a mention or two in a few old reference books, and this will be the first in-depth look. Diana has done some important work here."
Vincelli acknowledges that the independent study undertaken for her master's led her to places she never expected to go. "It turned out to be much bigger and more complex that I had imagined. The exhibition has been a remarkable collaborative exercise, and it gives us much to think about."
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