Existing comment:
Edmund Minor Archer
Maggie, 1940
Strong and solid, the uniformed maid in Archer's Maggie crosses her arms and gazes directly at the viewer. With brow furrowed, her expression conveys a number of emotions: defiance, concern, fatigue, even vulnerability. Whatever challenges she faces in her work, the wedding band on her finger suggests that, at day's end, comforts of home and family await.
A generation earlier, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (commemorated in a portrait bust on view in an adjoining gallery) wrote, "We wear the mask," to describe the controlled, placid expressions black southerners assumed in public during the precarious Jim Crow era. Segregationist laws remained intact when social realist Edmund Archer, a white portraitist who specialized in powerful studies of black working men and women, strove to capture his sitters' personalities. The Richmond-born artist trained at the Art Students League in New York, served as one of the Whiskey Museum of American Art's founding curators, and worked for many years as a respected teacher at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. |