Anne Kesler Shields
During her 60-year career, Shields moved from abstract landscapes and geometric paintings and prints to portraits and collages, many of her images engaging in social and political commentary. Her paintings from the 1960s reflect her interest in the optical effects of color popular with the Op Art movement of that period. Red and Blue is typical of this style in the way that it manipulates the viewer’s perception of color and shape. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Shields observed how trends in painting changed from abstract expressionism to minimalism to realism. While her work from the mid-60s, which includes Red and Blue, was inspired by abstract geometries and optical and color theories, her later work became more influenced by the media and popular culture.
Shields is an important figure in the history of arts in Winston-Salem; she was a life-long advocate for the arts and her efforts led to the establishment of important arts initiatives and cultural institutions in Winston-Salem. Long affiliated with Wake Forest University, Shields participated in the formation of the Student Union Art Collection (now known as the Mark H. Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art) and early buying trips to New York. Additionally, she helped to create the Winston-Salem Gallery of Fine Arts (now known as SECCA). Shields studied at Hollins College, then at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, and she received her MFA from UNC Greensboro.
A retrospective of her work was displayed at SECCA, Salem College, and Wake Forest University at Hanes Gallery in 2012. Anne Kesler Shield’s legacy is her art and advocacy for contemporary arts in Winston-Salem. As a Winston-Salem local myself, I am especially awed by her artwork and how she transformed our local arts scene.
Lilly Reed (’23) Sociology and Art History Major
After setting out to learn more about Red and Blue, I was delighted to find documentation of the moment Anne Kesler Shields’ work entered WFU’s collection almost six decades ago. Scouring my favorite historical source base, local newspapers, I learned that in October 1964, Shields entered the painting in a juried show at the Winston-Salem Gallery of Fine Arts. And it won! As reported in the Twin-City Sentinel at the time, Red and Blue received the Wake Forest College Union’s “purchase prize,” which had been established to support the inclusion of local artists’ work in the institution’s newly created contemporary art collection (today known as the Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art).
But something in the news item also surprised and intrigued me. As she commented on Shields’ winning work, the Sentinel’s long-time arts reporter Beverly Wolter wrote, “Quite frankly, I cannot comment at any length upon this assemblage of brilliant blue dots on a brilliant red surface for the simple reason I could not look at it long enough to do so.” The comment seemed less than generous, even snide (though I should note, Wolter also praised “the surety of [Shields’] technique and control” and added that it would be a “fine addition to the union’s growing collection).
With some added context, however, I’ve come to believe that Shields was just as likely gratified that Wolter called attention to Red and Blue in the terms she did—i.e., by reporting on the immediate optical experience of the observer. In 1963, Shields’ encounter with Josef Albers’ instant art-world classic, Interaction of Color, had provoked a stark shift in Shields’ artistic evolution, away from the naturalistic style in which she’d mostly trained toward what an observer in the 1980s characterized as her “eye-boggling” work of the 1960s. Works like Red and Blue marked the artist’s alignment with the era’s “Op art” movement, something she explained in a 1965 Winston-Salem Journal interview as “experimenting with the responses of human sight to different juxtapositions of colors, lines, squares, circles, and other shapes.” Interestingly, Shields guarded against the suggestion of faddishness—her turn to dots and circles in paintings like Red and Blue, she said, emerged organically from the near-symmetrical compositions of trees and the repetitive motif of leaves that occupied her not long before. Still, this gives us reason to surmise that Wolter herself understood what Shields was up to. With that one comment, perhaps Wolter was both anticipating the likely reaction to Red and Blue (especially among the Camel City’s more provincial mid-century audience) while also underscoring the fact that optical experience was, indeed, the artist’s intended query.
On a different note: looking at Red and Blue today, I’m inclined to see it as an abstract visualization of the artist’s long and varied career, with each dot representing a different contributing element. When she painted Red and Blue in 1964, Anne Kesler Shields was already an established working artist and local arts leader in her home city of Winston-Salem. With undergraduate and MFA degrees in art, additional training at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and, most notably, study with the influential abstractionist Hans Hofman at his school in Provincetown, MA, Shields had helped found the city’s Associated Artists group (which lives on today) and the aforementioned Winston-Salem Gallery of Fine Arts (a predecessor of today’s SECCA); and since 1962 she had grouped with several other prominent women artists as the “Five Winston-Salem Printmakers,” a savvy entrepreneurial move that successfully elevated their profiles, increased business, and reflected the particular kind of hustle required of women trying to find places in the art world of her era. Yet all of this belongs to the first decade of a career that would carry forward for nearly a half-century after completing Red and Blue. For anyone interested in learning more about Shields, I recommend Tom Patterson’s authoritative curatorial essay in Anne Kesler Shields: A 50-Year Retrospective (SECCA, 2012).
Dr. Mike Wakeford
Associate Professor, Division of Liberal Arts, UNCSA Executive Director, MUSE Winston-Salem
Mark H. Reece Collection of Student-Acquired Contemporary Art, CU1964.4.1