The story of an art rebel who broke all rules for Southern women in order to live alone up north so that she could fulfill her dreams of dedicating her life to the creation of her art and leaving an inspiring legacy to her small Alabama hometown by establishing an art museum there.—Alexandra Branyon
In 1905 Lois Wilson is born into deep poverty in the rural south. Showing early promise, Wilson studies art in Boston and New York.Unable to afford rent in New York City, Wilson moves to Yonkers where they are bulldozing the slums around her. Every day she searches for scrap wood on which to paint.Like the folk artists she so admires, Wilson spends the rest of her life creating art from found objects. She also collects art from other artists through barter.With bad health and old age upon her, Wilson begins a correspondence with Jack Black, a Fayette newspaperman, telling him she wants the town to have her art collection. Wilson ultimately gives Fayette 2,600 pieces of art.Black spends the next 35 years of his life shepherding the Fayette Art Museum from its fragile birth in 1969 with the Wilson Collection to its solid presence as an icon of Southern pride in its arts.Lois Wilson dies poor and obscure in Yonkers, New York, in 1980 at the age of seventy-five. The beauty of her art and the vision of the woman live on.
