Seventy years ago, Nina Belle Ward was a big deal in Kalamazoo. Ward was one of the founders of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts back in 1924, and she served as the museum’s first and only teacher for nearly two decades. But once Ward passed away in 1944, her works were spread out across the country. Now, with the help of one of Ward’s relatives, the KIA has reconstructed her legacy in a brand new exhibit, called "Rediscovering Nina Belle Ward."
The journey to rediscovering Nina Belle Ward didn’t start at the KIA. It began in Bhutan, deep in the Himalayan Mountains. Ward’s great-nephew, Dana Ward, was there with his wife, who was was studying on a scholarship. He was trying to find out anything at all about his family, including his great-aunt, Nina.
He remembered her paintings adorning the walls of his grandparents’ home decades ago.
"It’s not kind of yard sale art, this is museum quality stuff!" Ward says. "I wanted to find out how was she formed? How did she enter our family? How did we produce an artist of this quality?"
Nobody seemed to know. So Ward resorted to searching through digital museum archives to maybe find a painting or two.
"Out popped Nina Belle Ward! In three different museums," Ward explains. "When we got back to the United States, I started tracking the paintings down."
The search took Ward to the KIA, which has Nina’s most famous painting, a striking portrait called “Portrait of a Lady in Black." When he finally reached the museum two years ago, he had learned a bit more about his great-aunt – that she studied at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. And she was good. Two of her paintings even ended up in the prestigious Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
But, he says, she didn’t want the fame or even the money that came with it. She wanted to teach. So she ran away from the limelight to Kalamazoo, where she became a part of a progressive movement of Midwestern women who were trying to change their communities with arts education.
"And this was one of these hundreds, thousands of women quietly working. Not getting thanks, acclaim," says KIA curator Karla Niehus. "Just quietly doing a business of making their communities better places. And we have the results of that in the KIA. The KIA, like several other museums in the Midwest, were born out of these artist groups, these artist associations in the Midwest."
Ward was an absolute institution at both Kalamazoo’s Central High School and the KIA when it was still starting out in the 1920s. Every Saturday morning she'd teach children at the museum. Every summer, she’d take students to the East Coast to paint in villages like Provincetown, Mass., and Rockport, Maine. Ward even created local art shows that still exist today.
"The exhibition that’s upstairs, the West Michigan Area show, has been going on for decades," says Niehus. "While I can’t draw a continuous line and while it’s a slightly different process, she did do that exhibition of Kalamazoo artists in 1930. In a way, I almost think of that as the beginning of this huge long tradition of the West Michigan Area show of local artists."
Ward passed away in 1944, and to many she’s largely been forgotten. But after Dana Ward discovered so much about her, he wanted to give her a legacy -- an exhibit at the KIA. So he embarked on a journey across the country, calling siblings and long-lost cousins to find her scattered paintings.
Ward wound up at a cousins’ house in Houston. It was there that he found the mother lode –the paintings he remembers from his grandparents’ walls.
"And when I stopped in to visit and we started looking at the paintings, he would pull one out and I’d say, 'That one hung by the ping pong table! That one hung by the phonograph!'" Ward says. "And by the time he was done, I had re-created my grandparent’s home in my mind much sharper than at home. These are memories much sharper than in a century. So that was the cathartic moment was with the paintings, then we managed to organize and get them all up here and here we are! We have an exhibit."
Ward is still amazed that after all these years of searching, it’s come together at the KIA.
"This is the one that touches me the most," Ward says, walking me over to a giant portrait. "It’s my grandmother. It’s the one that I remember. It hung over the sofa of the room and dominated the room. Whenever I thought of my grandparents’ and my grandmother, I think of this, the great portrait of my grandmother in her wedding dress."
Ward continues: "I tell you, when we first walked in, Karla wasn’t here, and so I ran down to take a look at the exhibit. And I told the docent down here that I’d have to leave or I’d have to break down crying. I’m just overjoyed. The emotion was overpowering."
You can see the exhibit at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, now through August 23rd.
