Mildred Nungester Wolfe, artist

 

JACKSON — This four-panel mural was inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress in 1941. Roosevelt spoke of a future when the world is founded upon four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

In the late 1950s, Benjamin M. Stevens Sr. commissioned Jackson artist Mildred Nungester Wolfe to create a mural. Wolfe’s paintings use stylized figures in vibrant colors to illustrate each of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. After the mural hung for years in B. M. Stevens Company store in Richton, it was donated to the Mississippi Museum of Art by the Stevens family. 

About the artist

     Born in Ohio in 1912, Mildred Nungester Wolfe grew up in Decatur, Alabama, and graduated from Alabama’s Montevallo College for Women. She studied at the Art Students League in New York and at the Art Institute of Chicago, and received a master of fine arts degree from the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Mildred Nungester was married in 1944 to the late Mississippi artist Karl Wolfe, and made her home with him in Jackson.

Working through five decades, Mildred Wolfe experimented with and mastered a variety of media: oil, watercolor, pastel, ceramics, printmaking, mosaic, and stained glass.  A portraitist of note, her portrait of Eudora Welty was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

After Karl’s death in 1984, she shared a studio and gallery with her artist daughter, Elizabeth (Bebe) Wolfe, and was still actively painting several mornings a week until ill health and frailty finally prevented her from working at the age of 92.  She died peacefully in her beloved home at the age of 96 in 2009.

Her work is in the collections of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Lauren Rodgers Museum in Laurel, the Huntsville and Montgomery Museums of Art in Alabama, the Library of Congress and the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., as well as in many distinguished private collections.

In 2005 the University Press of Mississippi published a book of her work, titled “Mildred Nungester Wolfe,” edited by Elizabeth Wolfe, with an introduction by Mississippi writer Ellen Douglas.

“Four Freedoms” by Mildred Nungester Wolfe is sponsored by Sanderson Farms. Admission is free to the public.

Mississippi Museum of Art is located at 380 South Lamar St. Museum hours are Tuesday-Saturday, from noon-5 p.m. Admission is free to the public for most exhibitions. Group and student tours/rates available; military personnel and their families are admitted free Memorial Day through Labor Day through Blue Star Museums.

For more information call 601-960-1515 or visit the website www.msmuseumart.org