Second Life

In the spring of 2011, Lafayette’s Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum geared up for a most unusual event. They printed short biographies of a locally born artist and prepared her artwork for the event by simply arranging the pieces by size and style. The paintings were not hung with care. Instead, they were displayed in piles—and people were encouraged to sift through the stacks of paintings and take what they wanted. The event was the art museum equivalent of a garage sale.

The museum kept the pieces it considered to be most significant. They also donated select pieces to other Louisiana museums as well as museums in Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, but the bulk of what constituted a lifetime of work was priced to go—at $2 a square foot.

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The prolific artist was named Cora Kelley Ward. She was born in 1920 in Eunice, the daughter of Rev. Edward Kelley, a Southern Baptist preacher, and his missionary wife, Mary LaVergne Kelley. After Ward’s father died of tuberculosis when she was a toddler, her mother eventually married the man who preached her father’s funeral—another Southern Baptist preacher. “Our mother was a very dynamic person. To understand us, you’d have to understand her,” Ward’s 82-year-old brother, Maurice Badon, of Hammond, said. The general consensus is that Mrs. Kelley was a force of nature—an evangelical hurricane.

With the help of a benefactor arranged by her charismatic mother, Ward was able to attend nursing school at the Southern Baptist Hospital following high school. She passed her boards in 1939, and two years later, married Dr. Simon Ward. The couple lived in New Orleans where Cora studied painting at the Newcomb Art School at Tulane. The marriage ended in 1948, which is when Ward began to seriously pursue painting. In 1949 and 1950, she went to Black Mountain College where she studied under Josef Albers and was challenged in the small classes of noted art critic, Clement Greenberg—a defining moment in her career and shaped her art and life for years to come, according to her brother, Maurice. 

After earning bachelor’s and a master of arts degrees and moving to New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1955, she began painting as much as she could and worked as a nurse when necessary to pay for her paints, canvases and travel. She never forgot home, though, returning almost every summer and often for Christmas too. Maurice remembered, “The thing about Cora is she was very beautiful, very thoughtful, she loved her family very much.”

And so it was that this daughter of Acadiana moved to and built a life for herself near, if not at, the center of the contemporary art movement in Manhattan. Through the better parts of four decades, Ward built close relationships with many of the greats of the contemporary art world: the poet Robert Frost was a friend. Abstract expressionist and National Medal of Arts-winner Helen Frankenthaler was a friend. Clement Greenberg, credited with being the single most influential art critic of the twentieth century, was also a dear and close friend. She took pictures of artists at work in their studios and went to one art opening after another taking photographs. (In fact, many of her photographs are still in use by the artists or their estates, including Frankenthaler’s current website.) She ran in the circles that could have opened all the right doors for an aspiring artist. In her Greenwich Village apartment, Ward created more than a thousand paintings. But no matter who her friends were or how hard she tried, her artwork just didn’t catch on.

On paper, Ward had it all: passion, training, context, access to the giants of the American contemporary art movement. She was in the right place at the right time, and she was prolific. So why don’t we know Cora Kelley Ward’s name? There are many possible explanations, none of which matter to this now deceased artist. But unlike Ward herself, her body of work has many possible lives not yet lived. Some trajectories are more likely than others, but the one precipitated by the Hilliard’s $2-per-square foot fire-sale does illustrate the different ways that society ascribes value to art. The sale also demonstrates how, sometimes, the space between being at the forefront of an art movement and being a footnote can be very small indeed.

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Lee Gray, former curator of the Hilliard who helped catalog more than a thousand pieces of Ward’s work, wonders if Ward’s reserved nature prohibited her from the self-promotion required of some artists to get their work shown. “I honestly think she was so shy that she couldn’t have gotten out there. Either people just didn’t click with her work or she couldn’t part with it,” said Gray. “That’s the thing about the art world—getting into the right museums and galleries is a lot about marketing.”

Bob Ekelund, professor and eminent scholar emeritus in economics at Auburn University and former director of the Jule Collins Museum of Art at Auburn, cited gender as a possible reason for the failure of Ward’s work to attract attention. “A lot of times such things do happen—especially to women artists. Women artists have been given short shrift through the years,” Ekelund said. “With few exceptions into the early twentieth century, art was basically a man’s work.”

Then, there was the quality of most of Ward’s work, which was largely derivative. During the cataloguing process, Gray was able to examine four decades of Cora’s work, observing how Ward played with the ideas of many others, including Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Louis Morris, Mark Rothko, and Frankenthaler. Exposed as she was to these luminaries of Abstract Expressionism, Ward absorbed the ascendance of the color field movement. (The color-field movement emerged in mid-century New York City and was championed by Greenberg; its proponents made color the subject of their paintings rather than a tool, an abstract style that is recognized by the use of large blocks of solid color.) Ward’s work runs the gamut of color-field exploration—from controlled but lively watercolors; to what some call “the pebble series,” giant canvases scattered with hundreds of colorful polka dots; to the “egg series,” colossal canvases of electric-bright ovals; to the more subdued lines of tones, created using the stain-painting technique her friend Frankenthaler is credited with inventing.

It is the latter style that Ward developed in 1983 during a two-week artist residency, called the Triangle Arts Workshop in Pine Plains, New York, that finally earned some critical acclaim. In the Triangle’s 1983 yearbook, Ward said, “My two weeks at Triangle were devoted to painting. I explored the approach to my work that I came with and found ways of changing. I saw old habits of painting give way to new experiences.” Most of the work considered her finest is marked with a triangle on the back of the canvas.

Unfortunately, Ward reached her stride very late in her career, just a few years before her death in 1989. Within a year of her death, Clement Greenberg organized a New York memorial exhibition of her paintings and a retrospective of her photographs that documented the New York City art world from the 1950s through the 1980s. Greenberg wrote in the catalog that accompanied the exhibit: “Cora was a dear friend and selfless. But I can confidently say that doesn’t sway me. It’s only with these paintings of the ‘80s that I am able to hail her art without reservation. That makes me glad—regretfully, because she’s not here to read what I write.”

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Ward died of what was believed to have been ovarian cancer at the age of 69. According to her brother Houston Badon, her sisters, Jessica and Vivian, and one of her brothers, Calvin, traveled to New York to clean out Ward’s apartment shortly after her death. “She had so much work there,” Badon said. “It wasn’t something that you could take and put in your house.”

The siblings brought their sister’s work home to Louisiana and put more than a thousand paintings in a storage unit in New Orleans, where they lay for fifteen years until Hurricane Katrina caused concern among her family. “Katrina really worried me. The electricity was off. I got the paintings and stored them at my house,” Maurice Badon said. “We first tried to sell them. We couldn’t. Nobody was interested in Abstract Expressionism. First, I thought, ‘Why not donate them to libraries where people could enjoy them?’ I first went to Southeastern. They were interested. They had a one-person show and were impressed. I started contacting other libraries and museums.” But he could find few takers.

The family donated a few more of Ward’s paintings to libraries and museums but finally decided to donate the rest to the Hilliard in Lafayette. Mark Tullos, who was the director of the Hilliard at the time (now director of the Louisiana State Museum System), said that he and his team approached the room full of art almost like an archeological dig. “We paid close attention to adjacencies. We documented everything and brought the paintings back to the museum where we worked on the project for more than a year, cataloging and sorting,” Tullos said. Tullos and Gray agree that Ward kept almost everything she ever painted—and many of her paintings just weren’t ready for primetime.

Gray considered Ward’s best work easy to pick out. “The maybes were tougher,” Gray said. “She did so many that were similar. The best thing about the experience was seeing an artist’s process—same shapes and colors. Some of the work didn’t work. Not everything is a stroke of genius. You can see where she’s exploring those ideas. She was exploring color theory.”

“An artist might do twenty paintings before an idea or concept is resolved,” Tullos explained. “We tried to offer those that were fully resolved, in our opinion, to museums around the country. We tried to make sure those remained in public collections. We tried diligently to find homes for the more extraordinary pieces, but there were more than 1,500 objects.” Eventually, art museums in Mobile, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and one in southeast Texas took some of the paintings, after which the Lafayette-based team could find no one else. “The problem was that no one knew about her. If you have an artist of low provenance, and so many of the canvases were unstretched …” Tullos said, as his voice trailed off.

“She is the rule, rather than the exception,” Gray said. “Hers is the story of most artists. They’re passionate and follow their dreams. They hope, at some point, that someone will notice. Just when Cora Kelley Ward found her voice, her life was taken—and that’s the real tragedy.”

“She is the rule, rather than the exception,” Gray said. “Hers is the story of most artists. They’re passionate and follow their dreams. They hope, at some point, that someone will notice. Just when Cora Kelley Ward found her voice, her life was taken—and that’s the real tragedy.”

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But the life of a work of art lives beyond its maker, and there are forces at work that can give art a second life—despite whatever challenges the living artist may have faced, whether with originality, gender, or marketability. Art is a commodity, after all, subject to changing tastes, changing narratives, and changing market pressures.

Because the bulk of Ward’s pieces remained in storage until Hurricane Katrina forced them out in 2005, and because, prior to her death, few pieces of her work were sold, Ward’s artwork was scarce, at least in the marketplace. But scarcity doesn’t guarantee value. Ward’s work was like a low-volume stock on the stock market: regardless of how great a company’s products are, if no one knows about them and the volume remains low, the value doesn’t rise. So when Ward’s work was offered to museums, after spending fifteen years locked away in a storage unit, its “low provenance” did not trigger the attention of curators.

Eventually, though, museums did take some pieces and the Hilliard did host an exhibition, thus creating demand for an almost unknown artist’s work while simultaneously establishing her identity. When the Hilliard finally decided to sell the work at rock-bottom prices, it created both a market for the pieces and established a new economy, and potentially a new value, for Ward’s work.

The Hilliard ended up keeping a dozen or so of each medium of Ward’s work—paintings, drawings, and ceramic pieces. “But at that point we had a curious opportunity—the dumpster or find homes for all of these paintings,” Tullos said. He decided it was time to get creative to solve the problem of what to do with the six hundred to eight hundred pieces of original artwork that were left: a two-dollar-a-square-foot fire-sale.

The plan was unorthodox and certainly raised some eyebrows within the art community; but because Ward’s work in the marketplace was so scarce, and the demand so low, the remaining pieces were of little value.

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In a tidy ranch-style home in Lafayette’s Bendel Gardens neighborhood, two young children and their parents live their lives surrounded by, if not overwhelmed by bright, gargantuan canvases. With its mid-century styling and furniture, the décor suggests a mash-up of Jackson Pollock and Ward Cleaver. More than sixteen of Ward’s paintings decorate the walls of the home. “Now they’re just a part of our lives,” Lisa Cross said, who simply refers to the artist whose work graces the walls as “Cora.”

Shortly before the Hilliard hosted its Ward art sale, Cross stopped by the museum and bought a single book. It was a book about Clement Greenberg. “I didn’t know who he was. In fact, all the painters in that collection, I hadn’t heard of before,” she said. “At some point, I decided that if I don’t like something—I don’t understand it. That spurred me on. I started asking [myself] a lot of questions, ‘What are they doing? Why is the art like this?’”

When Cross’ husband, a university professor, told her about the Saturday morning sale, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

“When I got there, I realized the artwork was ridiculously inexpensive. Color was everywhere,” she said. “I still was unsure about the artwork, but the whole thing was just so much fun. I feel kind of guilty when I talk about it. I realize it was someone’s life’s work being put on fire-sale, but for me, that day was like Christmas. It was the most Christmas-like event I’ve had as an adult.”

Occasionally, Cross recalls her first impression of Ward’s work: “I had a real reaction to it. I didn’t understand it, and that’s the kind of stuff I want around me anyway—stuff that challenges me.” In the years since she’s filled her home with Ward’s work, though, Cross has come to understand just how much she doesn’t know. “She fascinates me. I realize that I know nothing about her, and it’s very easy to idealize people, but it seems to me that she didn’t need affirmation from others,” Cross said. “My connection to her mainly is admiration for someone who didn’t allow her circumstances—her birth, her lack of money—to limit her in life.”

Cross is one of a growing number of so-called “Cora-collectors.” This past fall, one of Ward’s watercolors sold at a Neil Auction Company auction for $950. Neal Auction Painting Specialist Rachel Weathers explained that valuing that single watercolor took some serious research. “We knew she was a significant Louisiana artist, but she is also not well represented in the collections I see here in New Orleans,” Weathers said.

The painting that was sold through Neal Auction Company in November of 2014. “Ring,” 1961, watercolor on paper, 19 1/2 in. x 14 1/2 in. Photo courtesy of Neal Auction.

The painting Neal Auction sold came out of an art collection in California, rather than from the Hilliard Museum’s sale. Neal Auction’s researchers could find no true comparable piece; so they set the value of Ward’s watercolor by assigning a value similar to the work of other Louisiana artists of Ward’s time.

“When artists begin to appear at auction, interest is generated in their work. If a dealer acquires a group of paintings, her name is spread by advertising and gifts to museums,” economist Ekelund said. “That’s the way it happens—by hype and advertising. That she appeared in the auction in New Orleans is a signal that interest in her work could be increasing.”

Ward’s existing pieces in museums combined with having one of her pieces go to auction in New Orleans and being included in Ask Art, the so-called “artists’ bluebook,” are further indicators of increasing value and attention. “We’re beginning to hear that there is some interest,” Tullos said. “It could be that down the road someone could say, ‘Wait a minute. How did we miss her?’”

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Though controversial and unorthodox, neither Tullos nor Ward’s brothers, Maurice and Houston, regret the course of action that led to the great fire-sale of Ward’s work. “One of our roles is to encourage collecting,” Tullos said. “That’s why we [at the Hilliard] decided to have this big sale and price [the art] so that students could afford them. We printed up biographical folders on Ward. If you bought a piece of artwork, you got the biographical info too. We wanted people to make the connection between Cora the person and her work.”

The event was barely publicized beyond the University of Louisiana-Lafayette campus. With hundreds of pieces of Ward’s work in stacks, visitors were encouraged to explore and learn a little about the artist as well. The work was priced to sell, and it went quickly. Because of the sheer scale of some of the canvases, there are unconfirmed tales that some of the buyers purportedly bought with plans to paint over Ward’s work. But clearly, some of Cora’s work made it into the marketplace and, more importantly, into the homes of people who appreciate it for what it is.

Nearly four years after the sale, Maurice Badon said he’s happy his sister is getting some attention; he simply wants people to enjoy his sister’s artwork and recognize her talent. “I didn’t have a problem that Lafayette decided to sell them,” Maurice Badon said. “If you’re wondering if I’m feeling like we should have kept them, I’m not. I wanted them to get out. I wanted people to recognize my sister’s work. She was beautifully talented and a wonderful person.”