Biography

Lucia Wiley was unique among Depression Era artists. She ended her public artistic career as a nun, and while she appears to have been largely self-taught, she became one of America's pre-eminent mural painters.

Wiley was born on the Oregon coast in the town of Tillamook, the home of her parents and grandparents. She recalled that her first mural was painted when she was in high school - for a Tillamook department store and with payment in blouses. She enrolled in a fine arts program at the University of Minnesota in 1924, but transferred to the University of Oregon in 1928, receiving a BA in fine arts in 1930. She recalled having a professor who loved the paintings of Piero della Francesca, but there were no color reproductions of this work for her to look at.

A second instructor encouraged Wiley to try painting a fresco herself. The Dean of the School of Architecture offered her space for such a work in the school's entrance hall. Assisted by her instructor and Billy Rivers, the school janitor, who knew something about plastering, she set to work in 1932. While her "Fishing on the Columbia River" was destroyed when the building was taken down, the Dean (an architect himself) was sufficiently impressed that he recommended that she be considered to decorate a new Courthouse, then in the planning stages. It took some years for this to happen, but one of Wiley's murals remains on display in that Courthouse building.

Wiley's School of Architecture mural served as partial fulfillment for a Master of Fine Arts degree, which she received from the University of Oregon in 1932. She undertook some post-graduate study at the University of Minnesota and was offered a teaching position there. But the job was canceled due to exigencies of the Depression. She remained in Minnesota for over a decade, giving fresco workshops at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1933-1935 and working as a fresco artist for the Federal Art Project from 1938-1940.

During this period she participated in a two-person show in St. Paul (1934) painted a mural for the Miller Vocational High School (1934), showed her work at Bennington College as part of the exhibit "Mural Painting in America," and exhibited at the Walker Galleries in Minneapolis and the Corcoran in Washington, DC.

She continued to paint murals: the Minneapolis Armory (1938); the Long Prairie, MN Post Office (1939); the Moorhead, MN High School (1940); and the Shelbyville, IL Post Office (1941). Her watercolors were shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1940; she was part of the National Mural Painters Society Exhibition the same year at the Whitney Museum in New York; and she participated in two Artists for Victory shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1943).

In 1941 she loaned mural cartoons to the Guatemala National Fair, gaining her an international reputation. From 1942-1945 Wiley was back in Tillamook, giving art classes in her studio. She completed a mural for the Tillamook Post Office in 1943, the commission having been given to her in consequence of strong local support. Her mural for Ashland, WI (1947), "Northern Nativity" was never installed because of the local Postmaster's objections and was apparently lost while in storage in Washington, DC.

From 1947-1955 Wiley taught drawing and painting at the Museum of the Art School in Portland while exhibiting in Portland and Seattle. In 1950 she completed a mural for the County Courthouse in Tillamook - the one first proposed by the Dean at the University of Oregon. She painted one more mural in 1953 - for St. John's Episcopal Church in Milwaukie, OR. But in 1955 she visited St. Hilda's House in Brooklyn and was accepted as a nun, ending her formal public career in art.

She continued to paint and served as a supervising art teacher at St. Hilda's and principal of the lower school at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's. In 1985 she received a Medal of Honor from the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was listed as one of the eight best mural painters in America, and was honored in Tillamook with a Lucia Wiley Day in 1987. She died in New York in 1998.

Critical Analysis

Wiley said she had never seen the frescoes of other artists before she completed her own. This is astonishing, given how difficult fresco technique can be. If one looks, for example, at the frescoes in the William Jefferson Clinton Building in Washington (Headquarters of the EPA), it is easy to see the difference between the work of a master such as Alberto Crimi, with the work of artists less skilled in the technique. In the hands of a less skilled artist, the seams from each day's work are clearly visible, and the plaster is often applied in very thick layers. In the hands of a master, the seams would be invisible, and there would be no need for multiple layers of plaster. Wiley's work has all the hallmarks of a master fresco artist. Her compositions are engaging, and her color choices are excellent. Had she worked for years to train with a master, her work would not have been any better. But, in fact, she apparently developed her technique on her own, and this is truly remarkable.

Murals

• Shelbyville, Illinois - Post Office: Shelby County Fair - 1900
• International Falls, Minnesota - Post Office: Early Logging at Koochiching Falls
• Long Prairie, Minnesota - Post Office: Gathering Wild Rice
• Minneapolis, Minnesota - Minneapolis Armory: History of the Minnesota National Guard
• Tillamook, Oregon - City Hall: Captain Gray Entering Tillamook Bay
• Tillamook, Oregon - Tillamook County Courthouse: Building of the Morning Star

References

1. History (City of Tillamook).
2. A Life in Art and Spirituality (A Life in Art and Spirituality).
3. Lucia May Wiley (askART).
4. Lucia Wiley (Wikipedia).
5. Lucia Wiley (Weisman Art Museum).
6. Lucia Wiley (Portland Art Museum).
7. Carla Albright, Lucia Wiley (1906-1998), Oregon Encyclopedia https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org ().