Queena Stovall

Queena Stovall (December 20, 1887 – June 27, 1980) was an American folk artist. Sometimes called "The Grandma Moses of Virginia", she is famous for depicting everyday events in the lives of both white and black families in rural settings.

Early life

Born Emma Serena Dillard in Amherst County, Virginia, she received the nickname “Queena” from her grandmother because of the way young children would pronounce "Serena". She married Jonathan Breckenridge Stovall, a traveling salesman, in 1908 and the pair had nine children. The family lived in Lynchburg, Virginia during the fall and winter and on a farm near Elon, Virginia during the spring and summer.

Career After her brother persuaded her to take an art class at nearby Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Stovall began painting at age sixty-two. Her instructor there was Spanish artist Pierre Daura, who encouraged her to stop taking classes and develop her own unique style. The Daura Gallery at the University of Lynchburg holds the largest public collection of Stovall’s work. A major exhibition of Stovall's work, featuring 44 of her 49 paintings and titled Inside Looking Out, The Art of Queena Stovall, was mounted by curators at the Daura Gallery in 2018 and traveled to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia. Stovall was featured in the 2019 exhibit Memory Painting: Harriet French Turner and Queena Stovall at the Taubman Museum of Art. Stovall's work was featured the book The Art of Queena Stovall: Images of Country Life by Claudine Weatherford in 1986 In conjunction with the exhibit Inside Looking Out, the Art of Queena Stovall, Daura Gallery curators compiled a book with the same title.

Cultural

In 2010, Stovall was posthumously honored as one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to folk art. In 2017, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources approved a historic marker in her honor, to be erected near the farm where she spent 35 years of her life, the Wigwam. It was erected in March, 2018.