Reynolda House Museum of American Art has acquired Stephen Towns’ “Flora and Lillie”

Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem has acquired a work by painter and fiber artist Stephen Towns. It comes from his recent exhibit, “Declaration & Resistance,” a collection of paintings and story quilts that explored the roles enslaved and free African American laborers played in building the region’s economy. 

The painting, “Flora and Lillie” was inspired during Towns’ Winston-Salem residency last year. Scouring the Reynolda Archives, he came across a black-and-white photograph from the 1900s of laborers Flora Pledger and Lillie Hamlin — residents of Reynolda’s Five Row village for laborers. Their homes, situated out of sight of the bungalow, had no electricity, or indoor water. In the photo, the two women stand arm-in-arm wearing loose-fitting garments staring confidently at the camera against a backdrop of scattered, waist-high shrubs, matted grass, and a distant outhouse.

In Towns’ large acrylic, oil, and metal leaf painting, the artist adorns his two subjects — gold scarf, hair decorated with magnolia blossom and set off with a halo — and he transforms the landscape.

"I want the area that they are in to depict the dignity of who they are. And so, I chose to surround them in azaleas. I’m from South Carolina. My memory of the South is of azalea trees. So, I wanted to depict them with these beautiful, lush azalea bushes. And the state butterfly is in the image."

The acquisition of “Flora and Lillie” was made possible by the Wells Fargo Foundation. Towns’ work will now reside on the second-floor balcony of the historic Reynolda house.