More than seventy years after Miriam McClung left The University of Alabama, sketches from her college days have returned to Tuscaloosa.  The Alabama native recently collaborated with Andrew Alford Creative to design bespoke fabrics for the interiors of the Graduate by Hilton’s new location slated to open at Tuscaloosa’s University of Alabama campus in 2027.

When I spoke to McClung about the Graduate project, the ninety-year-old artist shared how those early sketches come back to life on a bolt of fabric. Using archival images from the fifties as inspiration, and drawing on her experience studying abstract art during her years at the University, she created a series of black elephants that march across a cream field, printed on curtains throughout the hotel. The fabric was produced by Valley Forge Fabrics.

The Making of an Artist

The project with The Graduate brings McClung back to the town where she first began the formal study of art. During those tender years, she recalls studying abstract technique, and building friendships with fellow Alabama artists Dale Kennington and Bill Christenberry.

McClung’s slow Mountain Brook drawl speeds up when she talks about her years at the University and the lifelong friendships she forged with sorority sisters. She traveled with them out west one summer, where her canvas was critiqued in a Colorado classroom by Mark Rothko.

McClung’s informal study of art began during childhood when she picked up a paint brush in Ms. Cone’s art class at the age of eight and signed her paintings as Miriam Jackson. Her earliest work was based on things she saw in her city, and scenes with her family captured during days spent on the river.

Seeing Birmingham

Miriam McClung has painted hundreds of scenes from her hometown, and the city continues to influence her work.

She remembers the day she saw Jesus Riding Into Birmingham. That was the title of a painting depicting Christ in a scene inspired by the Studdert Kennedy poem, Indifference. McClung saw this painting at a Southeastern art show and assumed the painting referenced her city.

“Turns out, the painting referenced Birmingham, England and if you read that poem, you’ll know why it stuck with me,” she says. Over the years, her spiritual journey would inspire her own painting titled Jesus Rides Into English Village.

The Birmingham scenes are a constant through her long career, even after she married and the signature in the corner of her paintings changed to McClung.

A Year in New York

Between college and marriage, McClung would continue painting in Birmingham and New York City. She worked out of a studio in her parents’ Birmingham garage, and took an office job where she often sketched in free moments. “The thing about drawing is you are never bored,” she says, laughing.

It didn’t take a lot of convincing when sorority sisters called and suggested Miriam trade her desk job in Birmingham for an apartment in New York City. “Of course I went,” says McClung, “I had been several times with my family to see plays and museums and I already loved it.”

A member of The Art Students League, McClung continued studying abstract painting. Her time in New York would last approximately a year. But the love of her first city and the Alabama red clay was stronger than her love of big city life. She returned to Alabama where she would spend most of her life with her husband and children and paintings.

The Pull of Home

Today, she still misses Alabama.  A few years ago, McClung moved from Birmingham to live with her son, Frank, and his family in Crossville, Tennessee. That’s where she was when we spoke about the current exhibit of her work running at the Carnegie Visual Arts Center in Decatur, Alabama.

“I miss the Alabama clay, and I miss Silver Queen corn. I don’t think they have it up here,” McClung tells me. She misses Birmingham, too. “I miss going to the museum. I miss riding around down there. It’s a beautiful city. I don’t think people realize how beautiful it is. When you grow up somewhere you miss that.”

A Lifetime in Pictures

Visitors to the Carnegie can study scenes from McClung’s time in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham while they hang on display until August 22nd. The exhibit, Portrait of an Artist, Miriam McClung, features paintings from several eras of the artist’s life.

Two paintings included in the Carnegie exhibit show the artist’s firsthand observations of Tuscaloosa: one early in life when she volunteered as a student for bible study at Bryce Hospital, and another later in life as she took her late husband, Sonny, for medical treatment at the VA Hospital there.

The first painting depicts a patient at Bryce holding a bible, rendered in the abstract style of McClung’s youthful student days. The latter painting has a loose, in-the-moment sketchbook feel that is common in many of her later Alabama scenes.

The Carnegie hosted a reception on July 24th to mark the opening of the exhibit, and the artist attended along with her son Frank, his family, and several relatives.

Visitors to the exhibit will see very young Frank in several paintings, McClung’s late husband Sonny in others, and grandchildren scattered along the walls. Self-portraits marked by McClung’s evolving style and signature are also included in the exhibit and trace the artist at various stages in her career.

Seated in the main gallery of the Carnegie, with one of her oversized paintings positioned above a fireplace, Miriam McClung sat surrounded by family, all smiling for photographs at the opening. Visitors can find some of those same smiles on Miriam’s canvases at the Carnegie through August 22nd.

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