Lot 1004
Maud Gatewood (NC, 1934-2004), Rain Over Red Clay
Lot Details & Additional Photographs
Board 14 x 16 in.; Frame dimensions 14 3/4 x 16 1/2 in.
From the Private Collection of the Late Ola Maie Foushee, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Ola Maie Foushee (1905–1999) was a North Carolina artist, writer, and arts advocate born in the mill village of Avalon in Rockingham County. Showing artistic talent from an early age, she studied art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Greensboro and later taught privately while exhibiting her largely abstract paintings throughout the Southeast. She was a charter member of the Associated Artists of North Carolina and active in several regional arts organizations, while also becoming known for her lectures and her long-running newspaper column, “Art in North Carolina,” published during the 1950s and 1960s.
In addition to her work as a painter, Foushee was an influential author and historian of North Carolina art. Her book Art in North Carolina: Episodes and Developments (1970) was long considered a foundational text on the subject. She also published works on regional history and biography, including studies of Avalon and North Carolina arts patron Katherine Pendleton Arrington. Foushee spent much of her adult life in Chapel Hill and Durham, where she remained active in the arts community until her death in 1999.
Maud Gatewood, one of North Carolina’s most celebrated and sought-after artists, was born and raised in the rural town of Yanceyville, the daughter of the Caswell County sheriff. She began formal art training at the age of ten at Averett College in Danville, Virginia, and earned her B.F.A. from North Carolina Woman’s College (now UNC-Greensboro) in 1954, studying under Gregory Ivy. A year later, she completed her M.A. in Painting at Ohio State University, and in 1963, she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Grant to study with expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka in Austria.
Gatewood returned to North Carolina in 1964 to become the founding head of the Art Department at UNC-Charlotte, where she taught until 1973. She later joined the faculty at Averett College, teaching there from 1975 until her retirement in 1997. Throughout her distinguished career, Gatewood was not only a dedicated educator whose influence extended well beyond the South, but also an artist whose disciplined technique and strong sense of place earned her lasting recognition as a defining figure in 20th-century Southern art.
Light surface grime.
