Meet the Artists

Margaret Cranson Boylan [Smoot] in Bostian Alley, 1937. Photograph by Alex Smoot

MODERN MASTER ARTISTS

Pierre Bonnard

Marc Chagall

Willem de Kooning

Maurice de Vlaminck

André Derain

Henri Fantin-Latour

Paul Gauguin

Armand Guillaumin

Wassily Kandinsky

Franz Kline

Fernand Leger

Marino Marini

Albert Marquet

Ludwig Meidner

Andell McCoy

Andell, local visual artist and actress, narrated excerpts from Betty Lou Smith’s memoir, Missing Bostian Alley.

Andell will join us on December 6 for a live performance.

Claude Monet

Achille-Émile Othon Friesz

Samuel John Peploe

Francis Picabia

Pablo Picasso

Camille Pissarro

Odilon Redon

Pierre Renoir

Gerhard Richter *

George Rickey

Georges Rouault

Paul Signac

Louis Valtat

Alexej von Jawlensky

MARIA BENNETT HOCK

Remembering Bostian Alley

While visiting Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury NC, I came across a series of  pictures of life during 1937 in a small impoverished neighborhood called Bostian Alley.  Residents of the “Alley” were photographed by Alex and Margaret Smoot, about whom very little is known.

It is so easy to reduce any group of people to stereotypes, yet the Smoots were able to capture the subjects’ personalities and some of the complexities of their lives, including the joy this community found in music, dance, and family despite their social status and poverty.

Time has not been kind to the photos, which have lost some resolution and clarity.  I determined to set about recreating, reinterpreting and reimagining the images with oil paints in an attempt to bring back their original life.

I chose thirty photos from the series for this project.  As the photos are black and white, I selected a palette appropriate for the time, then cropped and added my own vision.  These photos by Alex and Margaret Smoot tell a story of family, community and perseverance.  They obviously felt that it needed to be told, and that these people should not be forgotten.

Maria is an internationally recognized artist whose paintings have been shown across the United States and Japan. She often spends her time as a copyist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she completes in-depth studies of the work of master painters of the past. She is a member of the Coast Guard Art Program, the Portrait Society of America, Oil Painters of America, American Women Artists., and most recently, she was accepted into the prestigious Salmagundi Club, one of the oldest art clubs in the United States.

Alex Smoot

Margaret Boylan Smoot

Alex Smoot, born in Salisbury in 1911, was a radiologist who spent most of his life in Greensboro.

He became interested in photography in high school; he had a dark room at his house. He graduated from Duke University in 1932 with an A.B. in Chemistry. He was working at the Stanback Company in Salisbury (1933-39) when these photographs were taken. Margaret saw a few of the first ones he took and asked if she could come along next time and take some more of the children. Alex was around 26 years old at the time; Margaret was around 36.

Alex served in the Army from 1941-1946, where he received medical training. He began working in Greensboro soon after as a pathologist, and he and Margaret Boylan married on 4 July 1949. They were avid photographers and won many contests and whose work is widely collected throughout the region. Margaret died in 1987; Alex died in 2000. They had no children. Alex was married again in 1995, to Rose Freedman.

There is no biographical information we could find on Margaret, known as Maggie, other than she was born on 22 November 1901 and died 25 December 1987 at age 86 in Greensboro.