Myra Albert Wiggins

Myra Albert Wiggins (1869–1956) was an American painter and pictorial photographer who became a member of the important early 20th century Photo-Secession movement.

Life

Early years (1869–89) Wiggins, née Myra Jane Albert, was born on December 15, 1869, in Salem, Oregon. She was the second of four children born to John Henry Albert and Mary Elizabeth Holman. Her father worked his way from being a bookkeeper in a local linseed oil company to becoming president of the Capital National Bank in Salem.

She showed natural artistic talent at an early age, and she would spend hours drawing and painting both in her home and in the fields around Salem. Her parents encouraged her talent both because she was very good and because a cultural background in the arts was expected for upper class women of the time. When she was 17, she won the first of many awards for painting at the Oregon State Fair, and between 1886 and 1907 she won a total of 94 more state fair awards for her art.

About 1888 she met her future husband, Frederick Arthur Wiggins, who was the owner of a local store that was one of the first to offer a variety of products under one roof. Among the products he offered were bicycles, which at that time were first becoming a craze among younger people, and Myra recalled that she first met Fred while riding around town on her bicycle. Their families were very active in outdoor activities, and several times a year they would see each other at outings in the area.

Wiggins said that her introduction to photography was her brother's doing since he wanted to take a photograph of his sweetheart and, not having a camera, thought their father would be more likely to buy one if both of them said they would use it. In 1889, they acquired a large glass-plate camera and tripod, and soon she was using it far more than her brother. Some of her first pictures were taken on one of her family's many trips to the Oregon Coast.

Within two years she won a new camera as first prize in the amateur division of a competition held by West Shore magazine, and many of the photographs she submitted for the contest were exhibited at the Portland North Pacific Industrial Exposition in 1890.

Becoming an artist (1890–99)

Like many progressive women of the late 19th century, Myra was sent to New York City for her higher education. She studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1891 to 1894, where she took classes from William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman. Chase in particular influenced her thinking about art, and when she brought her photographs for him to view he would sometimes write comments on the back of them. She immortalized Chase in a famous 1891 photograph of the artist teaching at the league, surrounded by his female students.

While she was studying in New York, she would return to Salem during the summers, and in the summer of 1892, she announced her engagement to Fred Wiggins. When she returned to New York that fall, she became one of the first female members of the New York Camera Club. She used the club's darkroom facilities, and it was here that she met Joseph Keiley, an influential photographer, writer, and close friend of Alfred Stieglitz.

She and her fiancé were married on November 24, 1894, in Salem, and their daughter Mildred, their only child, was born in 1896.

Master of photography (1900–29) In 1900, Wiggins was given first of two one-woman exhibitions of her photography at the Chicago Art Institute. She had already met and corresponded with the most important photographer of the time, Alfred Stieglitz, and in 1903 he admitted her as a member in the newly formed Photo-Secession.

In the fall of 1903, one of Wiggins photographs was included in the Hamburg Jubilee Exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, and in the London Salon organized by the famous Linked Ring. A review of the latter exhibition in the British magazine Photography contains these words of praise: "All things considered, we consider Mrs. Wiggins' picture called Polishing Brass one of the finest in the whole room. It certainly is the most pictorial, and is exactly like a print by Chodowiecke , both in subject and feeling. A woman is seated at a table with metal utensils of quaint and interesting form. The whole thing is quiet, healthy, and exceedingly well-designed – an example for hundreds." Through her lecturing and classes, she became a vital force in most of the region's arts activities. In 1932 she moved permanently to the Loveless Building in Seattle .

She continued to paint for many years and was recognized for her artistry through retrospective exhibits at the Seattle Art Museum (1953) and the de Young Museum in San Francisco (1954). She also had one-person shows of her paintings in Vancouver, Chicago, New Orleans, Louisiana, and New York. By the time she turned 86 in 1955, she had completed 114 paintings.

On January 13, 1956, Wiggins died of a stroke. She was actively painting up until the time of her death. Her husband died in an accident four months later.

Her work is in the permanent collections several important museums, including the Portland Art Museum, the Getty Museum and the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

Exhibitions From February 14 – April 26, 2015 the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University exhibited Myra Albert Wiggins: A Photographer's Life. The exhibition was accompanied by two lectures by curators Carole Glauber (A Life in Pictures: Myra Albert Wiggins) and Roger Hull (Art References, Art Echoes in the Photography of Myra Albert Wiggins).

From February 27 – May 3, 2026, the Musée d'Orsay exhibited Myra Albert Wiggins and her time. The exhibit celebrated the donation of ten of her prints to the Musée and was shown “in dialogue with works by contemporary male and female artists, representatives of the international pictorialism promoted by Stieglitz.”