At a farm stand in the Florida countryside east of Tampa, Ruby C. Williams sold pumpkins and collard greens for a few bucks. In galleries in Florida and beyond, some of her vibrant and quirky paintings have drawn hundreds.
About 30 years ago, after a fellow artist saw her hand-painted farm signs and encouraged her to expand her practice, Ms. Williams’ work began to be recognized as distinctive folk art, and galleries and collectors alike. I started hanging them on the wall. She became moderately famous in Florida.
The occasional interviews she gave were as colorful as her paintings, images of animals and fruits, and people often adorned with words from her imagination. I drew below a rendering of a turtle.
“My life is about looking up and reaching out and taking someone no matter what and making someone else happy,” she once explained. increase.”
Williams died on August 8 at a relative’s home in Plant City, Fla., said Jeanine Taylor, who had some of Williams’ work at her Sanford, Fla., gallery Jeanine Taylor Folk Art. She was 94 years old.
After decades of pastoring in Paterson, New Jersey, Williams returned to his native Florida to work the land. That included a period of Southern racism and bitter divorce.
Sometimes bad experiences appeared in her pictorial phrases. “My husband broke my heart,” read one. “She’s tired of being a good person,” said a painting of a red-spotted crocodile. Another example: “I played fair and got cheated.”
She once painted two men. Beneath it was written, “My name is Hud.” Under the other was written, “My name is enough.”
“The slogan alone makes you stop and think,” Vera Ames, a longtime Patterson legislator, told the Pasek Herald News in 2000. Twenty-five of Williams’ paintings are on display at the Patterson Museum of Art. “There is pain in what she does, there is suffering in the people she represents, but there is also joy in seeing her put it on these boards and make it happen.”
Williams started out using house paints, but switched to acrylics after graduation. Plywood was the favorite surface. Some of her works reflected harsh aspects of her life, while others were whimsical. “Skip and skip on a sunny day,” read the young girl’s pictorial phrases and included religious phrases evoking her years in the ministry.
Williams was interviewed by the Passaic newspaper at the opening of the exhibition in 2000 to talk about her paintings and her own fascination.
“Everyone loves color: teachers, kids, photographers, filmmakers,” she said. “And they like me because I speak my mind.”
Ruby Curry — She said “C.”The meaning she used as her middle initial was ‘against’ — born bealsville, floridawas a community founded in 1865 by twelve freedmen, one of whom, Mary Reddick, was Williams’ great-grandmother. The farmer’s market that Williams ran was located due east of Tampa along Route 60.
Mr. Williams Always timid about her age, Ms. Taylor gave her date of birth as June 9, 1928. Her parents were Lawrence Curry and Viola Curry Green. The elementary school she attended was founded by her great-grandmother.
Williams chose the surname from a marriage that ended when her husband left her in the 1960s. She told the Tampa Tribune in 2002 that she wanted to grow up to be a plumber, fisherman, or preacher.of 1 video interviewshe said she once wanted to be a songwriter. Separately, She said she wanted to be a detective.
What finally took hold was a career as a pastor. By the 1960s, she was living in New Jersey, where she did gospel and outreach work at Paterson’s Community Baptist Church of Love. However, she returned to her hometown in the 1980s and began selling produce grown on her family’s land.
As several newspapers have told her story over the years, it was a fellow folk named Rodney Hardy who, around 1991, noticed her eye-catching billboard and set her on a path to art. was an artist.
“We drove by her stand for about a year,” he told Ledger in Lakeland, Fla., in 1997. I asked her if she had ever painted a picture of her. “
He gave her a working table and talked to her in the art circle. Bud Lee, a noted local photographer and folk art collector, took an interest in her work. She began gaining attention in area newspapers and on local television, and institutions such as Lakeland’s Polk Museum of Art held exhibitions of her.
In 2005 she “On Our Own: Selected Works by Self-Taught African-American Artists” At the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington.In the same year she Florida Folk Heritage Awardrecognizing the “excellent stewardship of Florida’s living traditions.”
Williams’ survivors include his son Elrod Curry and daughter Rosa Curry Wilson. She is the sister of Emma Jane Jackson and Mercedes Green. And many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
Art consultant and curator Catherine Gibson, who organized an exhibition of Williams’ work, said she first met Williams in 1993 when she went to an exhibition Lee had curated in a train depot in Plant City. said.
“Bud provided paintbrushes, a drawing table, buckets, etc. as if you had stepped into Ruby’s environment,” Gibson said in an email. “Bud was installing paintings everywhere, high, low, leaning, hanging, propped, nailed, stacked, and as she does.”
“I felt like Ruby was speaking to me,” she added. I had to meet this woman. Bud took me to a fruit and vegetable stand and introduced me to Ruby C. Williams. At that moment, I can say that my life moved to a new chapter.
Taylor said Hardy introduced him to Williams when he started a folk art gallery about 25 years ago. They often went to exhibitions all over the South together, Taylor in charge Williams sales figures.
“I always enjoyed driving 60 miles to pick up art from her fruit stand,” she said. I never went out without strawberries.
“As the years went by, I was constantly reminded of a Reader’s Digest column titled ‘The Most Unforgettable Person I’ve Ever Met. That’s how I sum up my friendship with Ruby C. Williams.