Benjamin Leroy Wigfall
Benjamin Leroy Wigfall was an American abstract-expressionist painter, printmaker, teacher, gallery owner, and collector of African art. He was the founder of a community art space called Communications Village as a hub for residents in a Black neighborhood in Kingston, New York. At the age of 20, he was the youngest artist ever to have a painting purchased by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Early life and education
Benjamin Leroy Wigfall was born on November 17, 1930, to James Andrews Wigfall and Willie Cozenia Johnson Wigfall. He grew up in the working-class Black neighborhood of Church Hill in Richmond, VA. His mother worked in a tobacco factory, cleaned houses, and was a beautician. His father was a firefighter for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Benjamin was the youngest of three children.Wigfall started drawing while a student at George Mason Elementary School, first creating cartoons and later becoming observant of his neighborhood, including a house on 30th Street that he drew in pen and ink. When he was a teenager, his father found a nude drawing he had made. Wigfall was worried that his father would be upset, but he was happy to see the talent in his son.
At Armstrong High School over several years, Wigfall persuaded the principal to hire an art teacher, who did not arrive until the spring of his senior year. Teacher Stafford W. Evans took him to the Virginia Museum, and then signed him up for classes. Wigfall's interest was portraiture until he saw Lyonel Feininger’s abstract painting “Moonwake.” Riding a bus one day, he noticed on the window some reflections of windows from a building. He then understood Feininger's painting and discovered abstraction. By the time he was 30, he completely gave up figurative art.
An assistant state art supervisor whom he met at the museum encouraged him to apply for a museum fellowship. He submitted an application along with the drawing of the house in Church Hill, titled “The House on 30th Street.” In 1949, he received the first of three fellowships. When he arrived to pick up the fellowship, museum workers thought he was part of the service staff and sent him to another entrance.
Wigfall received fellowships in 1949–50, 1951–52 and 1952–53, the third routed through the museum from an anonymous donor. He enrolled at Hampton Institute and was president of the Art Club for two years. He was surrounded by a faculty of established artists. His instructors included abstract artist Albert Kresch and Leo Katz, chair of the art department who was a noted artist and president of the Virginia Art Alliance; ceramicist Joseph W. Gilliard and sculptor Louis Rosenfeld.
He studied art education and graduated in 1953. He met his wife Mary Carter, an art student at the school, when he and friend L. Douglas Wilder crashed a party. He and Carter got married in 1955 and had two children.
Wigfall received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to attend the University of Iowa after graduation. In 1954, he was awarded fellowships to Yale University - and found a mentor in abstract artist/teacher Gabor Peterchi – and the Yale-Norfolk Summer School in Norfolk, CT. With another fellowship in hand in 1958, he returned to Yale and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1959.
Art career
Wigfall was an abstract artist whose forte was printmaking. He was a regional artist whose heyday was in the 1950s, when he won awards, fellowships, news coverage and accolades.Considered a “gifted young artist,” he had a long history with the Virginia Museum. When he was a sophomore at Hampton in 1951, the museum bought his abstract oil painting “Chimneys” during its biennial exhibition “Virginia Artists 1951.” At age 20, Wigfall was the youngest of the five artists whose works were chosen. The painting, purchased for $90, was part of the museum's national traveling show.
The painting was inspired by smokestacks atop industrial buildings that Wigfall saw at dusk as he often crossed the Marshall Street viaduct over Shockoe Valley. Usually, the stacks were busily billowing smoke but at that time of day, they were quiet and serene, he told an interviewer in 2003. “Things are abstract but at the same time quite real,” he explained once, noting that there was “nobility in something very common.”
Being a talented young artist did not shield Wigfall from the racial discrimination of the time. In 1957 while teaching at Hampton, he and student Paul Dusenburg went shopping at two department stores in Richmond, according to an article in the college newspaper Hampton Spirit. After they left the second store, Miller & Rhoads, Wigfall was accosted by police officers, grabbed by the collar, and accused of trying to steal a handbag and wallet the day before. He denied the accusation. He was arrested on a vagrancy charge and taken to jail. Insisting on going to trial, Wigfall enlisted local civil rights attorney Oliver W. Hill. At trial, the charge was shoplifting and not vagrancy, and it was dropped. When the incident occurred, “Chimneys” was on display in the Miller & Rhoads store window.
A year later, the Virginia Museum purchased his tempera painting “Corrosion and Blue” during “American Painting 1958,” its quadrennial exhibition of the best talents in contemporary American art. Wigfall mixed mud in the paint to give it non-color, he told an interviewer in 2003. Wigfall “achieves a strange effect of a different sort … in which streaks of orange and blue glow like live coals in a thick enveloping web of brown ashes,” a reviewer stated.
In 1951, Langley Air Force Base in Hampton chose Wigfall's painting “Kites” to hang in a room in its library. It was the first painting picked by Langley in a program to provide space for works by local artists and authors. The work was on loan from Hampton.
In 1953, Wigfall created sketches for a mural depicting Christ and Judas. It consisted of five full-size panels titled “Disturbance of Temptation,” “The Decision,” “The Kiss,” “Remorse,” “Consequence and Self-Punishment.” That same year, the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences held a one-man show of his works, with Wigfall described by one writer as “Tidewater’s national ‘find.’” Among his entries were drawings and plans for the mural.
During the 1950s, Wigfall participated in several other exhibitions, including faculty art shows, and activities. Among them:
1951 & 1953 - Annual art exhibitions at Hampton’s commencements. In 1951, when Mary McLeod Bethune was speaker, he was big news: One article noted that the exhibition “has received added interest” because of the recent purchase of Wigfall's “Chimneys.” In 1953, his submission to the commencement show was the mural project.
1951 – Only Virginia artist represented in the Contemporary American Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
1951 – “Chimneys” mounted in an exhibit at the Virginia Museum. Works by three of Hampton's faculty were also shown: Joseph W. Gilliard, Louis Rosenfeld and painter Helen Kendall.
1952-1959 – At Norfolk Museum in 1952, among Hampton students and staff - including Albert Kresch, Joseph W. Gilliard, Louis Rosenfeld - who submitted paintings, ceramics, creative photography and sculptures. Wigfall submitted what were described as semi-abstracts: “Wounded Beasts,” Carnivorous Symbols,” “Boats” and “Urban.” In 1953, he had a one-man show at the museum. In 1954, three of his works – “Mourners,” “Crucifixion” and “The Beast” – were shown. In 1955, “Mourners” was one of 30 pieces chosen for the Tidewater Artists Open Annual. In 1956, the museum hung a Wigfall abstract in a furnished room in an exhibit titled “March for Moderns,” which combined architecture, interior decorations and art in a contemporary home design. In 1959, he was among art faculty at Virginia colleges who splattered paint on canvases in a show titled "Fresh Paint Exhibit."
1952 – One of 20 students picked by Hampton Student Council to represent the college in the 1952-1953 edition of Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. He was included in a newspaper photo of the students, standing in the second row.
1953 – Recipient of a Purchase Prize at Hampton - an award given for purchase of his artwork by the college.
1955 - One of 85 artists selected for the Brooklyn Museum National Print Annual. His woodcut appeared on the cover of the annual.
1955 - Named one of the 35 best painters in America by directors of 10 of the country's leading museums. The announcement appeared in the February issue of “Art in America” magazine under the title “New Talent in America.” Works by the artists were exhibited at Jackson Gallery in New York and were part of the American Federation of Artists traveling exhibit in 1956. Wigfall described his work as abstract expressionism.
1956 – Included in a group show of Hampton faculty members, including painters Peter Kahn and John Koos, at the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College.
1956 - Included in the book "American Painting Today: A Cross-Section of Our Contemporary Art," edited by Nathaniel Pousette-Dart. Wigfall's painting "Chimneys" was reproduced in the book.
1958 - Among 50 artists from the South Atlantic states in a show at Gibbs Art Gallery in Charleston, SC. His entry was an oil painting.
1958 – Chosen to participate in the first Provincetown, MA, arts festival titled “American Art of Our Time,” with 33 works by artists from Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.
1958 - Loaned to the Virginia Museum's “American Artists 1958” exhibition a painting titled “Without Black” by Ulfert Wilke of the Allen R. Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.
1958 - Commissioned to design the 10th annual Christmas card for the Virginia Museum. The design is part of the museum's permanent collection. It was included in a display titled “Designs for Christmas” in the museum lobby in 1964.
Wigfall's works could be found sporadically in exhibits during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1963, he was among four faculty members, including painter Lorraine Bolton, in a show at Hampton. In 1976, he was shown at Gallery One in Poughkeepsie, NY, owned by a fellow instructor at SUNY New Paltz, NY.
In 1988, Wigfall opened Watermark/Cargo Gallery in Kingston, which featured African art from his own collection, and exhibitions of works by national and international contemporary artists. He held solo and group exhibits in the 1990s and into the 2000s, and sold African art. The gallery reopened in 2006 after having closed three years earlier. It was in operation for about 20 years.