Untitled (for Beulah and her Baby)

Stacy Lynn Waddell is a mixed media artist. She is best known for her monochromatic gold leaf paintings. First she uses gesso to create an image on stretched linen. Then she covers the image with extremely thin sheets of gold (known as gold leaf). The gold leaf reflects light, making it difficult to see the design when viewing it head on. The viewer has to look at the work from different angles in order to see the full image. 

Waddell’s use of reflective gold leaf creates a unique viewing experience. She compares the experience to the difficulty of seeing historically erased Black identities and stories. Her use of gold is also symbolic. Gold is associated with value, trade, and wealth. It has also been used in religious art throughout history, to honor and praise the subject. 

What these gold-leaf works do is they disrupt the observational process. These works require you to look deeper. They ask you to spend more time. What’s embedded in the work isn’t on the surface—it is but it isn’t—and so light and atmospheric conditions play into what you’re going to see.

Stacy Lynn Waddell

Untitled (for Beulah and her Baby) was inspired by another painting in the NCMA collection. Beulah’s Baby was painted in 1948 by a white artist named Primrose McPherson Paschal. Waddell based her painting on a photograph of the African American woman and girl who modeled for Paschal. Waddell chose to reinterpret Paschal’s photograph as a modern “Madonna and Child” image (an image of Mary with the baby Jesus). The identities of the woman and the girl in Paschal’s photograph were unknown until 2023. The woman was identified as Evelyn Mae Leaverson Davis, the sister of a woman who worked in Paschal’s household. The young girl was the daughter of a woman named Beulah, who was dating Evelyn’s brother.