Saturday, March 16 will be Helen LaFrance Day in Mayfield, her hometown. Several community organizations have come together to celebrate the life and work of this important African American artist.
The Jackson Purchase Historical Society will meet at the Graves County Public Library Community Room for a program honoring LaFrance beginning at 10:30 am on March 16. 
The program will feature She Remembered It All: The Art of Memory Painter Helen LaFrance a new children’s book by Jayne Moore Waldrop and illustrated by Michael McBride. In addition to Waldrop and McBride speaking about the book and Helen LaFrance, Jayne will read the book and a group of children who will have read it will discuss the book. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing by the author and illustrator at the meeting. The book is published by Shadelandhouse Modern Press and is available through online booksellers as well as directly from the press: smpbooks.com. The library is at 601 North Seventeenth Street in Mayfield.
This Jackson Purchase Historical Society is open to the public at no cost and will be available via Zoom for those who are unable to attend in person. Registration is not required for the in-person meeting, but it is for Zoom.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vf-ugqTMjHNNNnbVk5XKn8FSI09a9AmG9
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Helen LaFrance was born in Graves County in 1919 and passed away at age 101 in 2020. She has been described as both an outsider artist due to her lack of formal training and existence outside the cultural mainstream and as a memory painter, best known for her capture of the disappearing lifestyle of the rural South. Sharing traits in common with memory painters Horace Pippin (1888–1946) and Grandma Moses (1860–
1961), LaFrance has been referred to as “the Black Grandma Moses.” She also painted powerful and intensely spiritual visionary interpretations of the Bible, in a style that differed radically from her memory paintings.
Art historian Kathy Moses wrote, simply described, memory painting is a visual history of reminiscences coming from a particular frame of reference. Her sense of time and place resonate with the emotions and memories of the viewer, pulling them in. With oil on canvas, LaFrance shared the traditions of family and church and the values she grew up with, and recollections of coon hunts, fishing, planting, and picking cotton and tobacco, growing flowers and using their petals for paint, the general merchandise store, barn dances, the circus, fish fries, family reunions, and church picnics where the community gathered together. A selection of these paintings was included in “Helen LaFrance: Kentucky Woman,” an exhibition that ran from August 26, 2022, through April 30, 2023, at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. However, the inaugural exhibit of these allegorical paintings, “Helen LaFrance: Biblical Visions,” took place at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2012 sponsored by the Divinity School’s Religion in the Arts & Contemporary Culture program.
Jayne Moore Waldrop has her bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Kentucky and an MFA in Creative Writing from Murray State. Her collection of short stories, Drowned Town, published in 2021, is one of twenty books selected for the 2022 Great Group Reads list by the Women’s National Book Association and was named the 2021 INDIES Fiction Book of the Year silver award winner. She has held a number of fellowships and residencies.
Michael McBride earned his undergraduate degree in art from Tennessee State University and his graduate degree in painting from Illinois State University. Currently, he is an instructor of art at Tennessee State University and has been the lead artist on many community-based mural projects in Nashville, Tennessee, including the John Lewis mural. McBride was featured in Visions of My People, sixty years of African American art in Tennessee.
