FLORENCE-The Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts is pleased to present, This House Was Full of People: The Art of Mary Wallace Kirk which will be on display Jan. 7- Feb. 29, 2024. A reception will be held at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 7th. Mary Wallace Kirk (1889-1978) was a poet, author, and educator, as well as an artist. She was born and lived in Tuscumbia, Ala., for nearly all her life. Her finely detailed renderings of the rural surroundings of her home captured fragments of time and preserved them in etchings, prints, watercolors, and sketches. This exhibition is comprised of art and memorabilia on loan from private collectors throughout the community and the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library.
Kirk trained at the Art Students League in New York, where she studied etching with Harry Sternberg. She produced local landscapes as they appeared in the early 20th century. Most of the exhibited work dates to the 1930s and 1940s. Kirk mainly created etchings of cabins of people she knew. She wrote, “Cabins, especially log cabins, are rapidly disappearing from the Southern landscape. Before these relics of an older day completely pass from the scene it seems fitting to make a pictorial record of them, and to try to capture some of the lowly charm that surrounded them.”
By the 1950s, after producing 80 etchings over the course of her career, Kirk focused on her duties as a trustee of her alma mater Agnes Scott College, in Decatur Georgia, and on two memoirs illustrated with reproductions of her prints. Her publications include “Cabins and Characters”, “Locust Hill” and “The Sum of Living; a Collection of Poems”.
The Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts is free and open to the public Monday – Friday from 9-4 and on Sundays from 1-4. The art center is located at 217 E. Tuscaloosa St. Florence, AL and can be reached by calling (256) 760-6379.
Media Release/Jenny Dawn Stucki, Art Director/Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts
