While the BMA collects art from all over the globe, it takes just as seriously the goal of collecting important work by the most significant artists born or active in the state of Alabama.
Well represented within the Museum’s collection are the Weavers, a multi-generational dynasty of women artists from Selma. Most famous among the Weavers is Clara Weaver Parrish (1861– 1925), who was born at Emerald Place Plantation in Dallas County, and raised in Selma. Encouraged by her parents, Clara was sent to New York to study art at the Art Students League, where she was taught by William Merritt Chase, whose Still Life with Watermelon hangs in the Museum’s Styslinger Gallery of American Art. By the 1890s, Parrish began working for Louis Comfort Tiffany as a designer of religious stained glass windows and mosaic murals at his renowned Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company. Thanks to the generosity of Paula Pointer, the Museum was recently able to acquire a preliminary study in watercolor for The Resurrection, the window Parrish designed in memory of her husband William Peck Parrish (1860– 1901) for St. Paul’s, their family church in Selma. The work—which descended in the family of Parrish’s brother-in-law—depicts Mary Magdalene at the moment she recognizes the resurrected Jesus. The watercolor retains its original matting, which matches the Gothic stone tracery used in the finished window at St. Paul’s. Parrish’s other windows in Alabama can be found at the Church of the Holy Cross in Uniontown, Christ Church in Tuscaloosa, and First Baptist Church in Selma.
The Museum also has a small, but growing collection of early 20th-century works by printmakers from or working in the American South, including etchings, drypoints, woodcuts, and linocuts. Among the notable artists rep – resented in the collection are Alabamians Frank Hartley Anderson (1891– 1947), Lucille Douglass (1878–1935), Anne Goldthwaite (1869–1944), and South Carolinians Elizabeth O’Neill Verner (1883–1979) and Alfred Heber Hutty (1877–1954).
A recent gift by Patrick Cather, a longtime collector of the art of Alabama, has greatly strengthened the BMA’s holdings of southern prints, by both adding previously unrepresented artists to the collection and by expanding our holdings for artists by whom we had no examples of their work in the print medium. New to the collection is the work of Birmingham artist M. R. Hubbert Smith (1885–1957), Mary Wallace Kirk (1889–1978) of Tuscumbia, and Walter H. Swettman (1906–1994), a Pennsylvanian who taught architectural design at Auburn in the early 1930s.
![John Kelly Fitzpatrick, Untitled [Dancers], 1938, linocut; Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art; Gift of Patrick Cather, Shoal Creek, Alabama, in memory of his beloved Lowndesboro, Alabama friend and mentor Dot Dickson, sister-in-law of the late Jimmy Kidd AFI.132.2016](https://www.artsbma.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/AFI.132.2016_01_p_w.jpg "AFI.132.2016_01_p_w | Birmingham Museum of Art")