Phyllis Stigliano Art Projects is pleased to announce, Rainbow of Uneven Colors: Mary Frances Whitfield,  a tribute exhibition of selected artworks by self-taught Alabama artist inspired by her ancestors’   heritage from Birmingham during the slavery era of American history.  Remembering her past was    essential to Whitfield and in her personal visions she channels uneven events of life in the South    from Mama Picking Up Baby Efrin, 1991, portraying a mama’s love playing with her babies surrounded    by the pine trees of Alabama to her lynching, Narrative: Why Albert?, 1999, relaying vulnerability    and unbearable sadness in outstretched arms.    

An exhibition of Whitfield’s lynching paintings Why? was held in 2019 at AEIVA-Abroms-Engel    Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL shared by Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. In 2023,    Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, AL, accepted her Lynching, 1993, for its permanent collection    at The Legacy Museum, the nation’s only memorial dedicated to enslaved black people terrorized    by lynching. Mary Whitfield’s art was recently exhibited in, Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain    America, at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.     

Whitfield has been featured in several publications including Kathy Kemp’s 1994 Revelations:    Alabama’s Visionary Folk Artists, and Raw Vision 49, 103, 105. In 1996, she was artist-in-residence    at New York’s American Folk Art Museum, and in 1997 she had a residency at The MacDowell    Colony, Peterborough, NH. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, NY, awarded her a grant in 2000.      

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