Those familiar with her work perhaps take it for granted—her work is exhibited, and her name is included—but the pictures she made beg for the same rigor of visual analysis with which she painted them.

The Hard Edge & The Soft Line builds upon similar projects undertaken by the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum’s peer institutions across North Carolina: the Weatherspoon Art Museum’s foundational Maud Gatewood Re-Visions (1994) and Remembering Maud Gatewood (2015), and the Cameron Art Museum’s From Memory: Maud Gatewood (2005). In the years following her death, a consensus has solidified around the painter’s essential placement in the state’s art historical canon. This exhibition and catalog work to expand that narrative into the larger orbits of Southern modernism and the evolution of representational painting alongside abstraction in America across the 20th Century. My fellow contributors to this publication have deftly taken up that mantle.

In her text and recorded presentation, Martha R. Severens situates Gatewood in a historical framework that continues to coalesce Southern modernism as an ethos that emerged parallel to its better-known evolution in the nation’s more urban environs. She recasts the work of modernist artists in the Southeast as connecting social and aesthetic advancement, aiming to transform people's perceptions of their world. Similarly, Will South locates Gatewood’s impulse towards figurative art and storytelling alongside her vigilance towards the wider art world, particularly developments in hard-edged abstraction and pop art.

I’ve chosen to take a slightly different path. The exhibition this text accompanies is organized into four themes, with one persistent throughline running through each of them. “The Artist & Her Origins” makes the obvious but crucial argument that much of Gatewood’s work is rooted in place, particularly her home in Yanceyville, NC, both in its production and in spirit. “Land & Landscape” ruminates on the artist’s most common subject and her myriad strategies for disrupting the genre through persistent use of abstraction and attention to the specificity of Southern land and its changing character across her lifetime. “On Postmodernism” toys with Gatewood’s acerbic wit and insightful observations of cultural shifts from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. “Reflecting the Body & the Self” considers Maud’s recurrent interest in figurative painting and the reverberations of her queerness in depictions of the human body. These are overlapping categories. Most of the paintings included in this exhibition’s checklist (and Maud’s oeuvre more broadly) could occupy multiple categories, and their division was sometimes strategic and sometimes arbitrary. What unifies them is the technical throughline: a visual analysis of Maud’s strategies for putting paint to canvas and her relentless capacity for experimentation. The artist’s rich legacy cannot be wholly articulated in thematic analyses—the real hero of Gatewood’s body of work lies in the images themselves.

The Artist & Her Origins

Maud Florance Gatewood was born on January 8, 1934, in Yanceyville, Caswell County, North Carolina, in the historic Graves-Florance-Gatewood house. She was the only child of Sheriff and tobacco farmer John Yancey “Yance” Gatewood and Mary Lea Florance Gatewood. Growing up in a tightly knit family and community, Gatewood's pastoral childhood had a lasting impact on her adult experience and perception of the world as an artist. Riding shotgun with her father on duty, busting moonshine operations with her toy gun, she gained a unique understanding of human nature, recalling, “I had a more than average knowledge of the many foibles of human existence.” The tension between these two polarities—pastoral optimism and human pessimism—reverberates across her oeuvre.

Gatewood found freedom on the pony her father gave her, exploring farms and forests and fostering a lifelong appreciation for nature—a recurring theme in her paintings. While her mother aimed to raise her as a Southern belle, Gatewood's individuality and curiosity prevailed. Her experience of segregation and racial prejudice in the Jim Crow South informed many of her iconic works, often focusing on marginalized figures and places. As a queer woman, her peripheral status contrasted with her extensive community involvement, culminating in her election as the first female member of the Caswell County Board of Commissioners in 1976 and then chairman in 1979, where she advocated for economic development and land use.

In 1945, at age 10, Gatewood began art classes at Averett College in Danville, Virginia, under Carson Davenport. Her emerging interest in art led her to graduate high school early and enroll at the North Carolina Women's College (now UNC Greensboro) at 16. She attended the Burnsville School of Fine Arts during the summer and was exposed to avant-garde performances at Black Mountain College, encountering figures like Merce Cunningham and John Cage.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Gatewood developed her identity as an artist, influenced by contemporary art and her instructors. Her early works were expressive and abstract, but by her mid-20s, she began integrating legible subjects, creating a unique style that straddled abstraction and representation. The 1960s marked her first full decade as a professional artist and educator, a period during which she refined her paintings and established a distinctive pictorial style that persisted throughout her career. While she began to travel extensively and took teaching positions elsewhere in the state and the Southeast, Yanceyville remained her home, where she maintained a painting studio throughout much of her professional life.

Abstract Expressionism had firmly gripped contemporary American painting by the time Gatewood entered a collegiate fine art program in the mid-1950s. Like her peers, she immersed herself in its frenetic painterly abstraction, emphasizing movement and texture. By the decade's end, Gatewood began to experiment with recognizable subjects, pursuing representation through expressionist brushstrokes and dense forms. Three Sisters (1957-1958), begun just two years after she received her MFA from Ohio State University, reflects her early explorations as she honed this emerging visual identity. Tightly framing three figures—her aunts Helen and Maud, and her mother Mary Lea, most likely in her mother’s home in Yanceyville—Gatewood drafted this from memory rather than plan drawings, emphasizing emotion over meticulous planning.

Three Sisters marks the beginning of Gatewood’s career, while About Dissolution (1996) bookends it with a return to her origins as a subject. The historic Graves-Florance-Gatewood house, significant throughout Gatewood's life, serves as the focal point. Originally titled "Thunder Snow," Gatewood began drafting the composition in the summer of 1996 following a freak winter storm. Rendered at a monumental scale, the artist captures intricate details despite a restricted palette, using thick white stripes for clapboard siding, sprayed paint to depict frosted surfaces, and an ivory haze that envelops the entire canvas. Snow, a recurring element in Gatewood's works, showcases her enjoyment of its dynamic play of light and color, softening the harsh boundaries of her forms.

Land & Landscape

Gatewood's canvases resonate with a distinct essence of North Carolina and the American Southeast throughout the transformative 20th century, depicted through a delicate balance of abstraction and vivid detail. Her compositions are rhythmic, often oscillating between pattern and dissonance within the same image. Fields and rainfall become graphic exercises, repeating striated lines that suggest a timeless state rather than movement. Barn doors, towering mountains, and willow branches dominate the picture plane, with the artist's subjects placed unselfconsciously in the foreground. As a visual composer, Gatewood pulls viewers swiftly into her scenes, leaving little doubt about the focal point.

Maud Gatewood's artistic evolution showcases her mastery of pattern, rhythm, and texture to convey spatial depth and movement within her compositions. During the peak of her career in the 1970s and 1980s, her forms were precise, and their placement meticulously considered. Gatewood was not a plein air painter; instead, she collected vignettes and moments. Rather than capturing an intriguing scene with a photograph, she pursued her compositions through repetitive sketching, meticulously recreating the essence of an image that had captured her attention. She collected angles and unconventional perspectives—a crooked tree, a barn's corner, a cow's broad back, a truncated umbrella, a figure turned away from the viewer—all elements awaiting integration into her seamless compositions.

Gatewood referred to many of her paintings from this period as archetypal explorations of figurative and landscape painting. It's no surprise, then, that she assembled her images from fragments, treating forms like tools for her artistry. Painter's tape created sharp, defined edges on her canvases, while an isolated branch in the foreground of a painting offered a unique perspective to view the landscape beyond.

Gatewood often implied texture and space through pattern and rhythm. In Black Cornfield (1981), the artist identified the painterly effect or form that best articulated her subject, then allowed it to dominate the picture plane. The seemingly endless repetition of glowing curls—the husk leaves aglow in neon under the fading sunlight—creates expansive movement across the canvas. Gatewood is unafraid to truncate her compositions; here, the sky is rendered through a seamless gradient produced with a paint sprayer, a textured slice framed by the matte expanse of the field, cleverly disrupted and saved from monotony by the sparing inclusion of branches and leaves in the foreground. Perhaps we, the viewers, peer from the woods at the farm's edge, placed by the artist amidst her world, slightly askew.

The last decades of Gatewood's career were characterized by a loosening of her firm grip on form, allowing her approach to composition-building to become less graphic and more painterly. While her images from the 1970s and 80s are often defined by precise, straight-edged, and matte arrangements, many of her works in the 1990s embraced literal rather than implied texture to articulate movement and form. In Prevailing Wind (1991), some of the expressionist layering of paint, soft edges, and imprecise forms reminiscent of her early works reemerged. However, the artist did not abandon pattern entirely; objects and forms are articulated not only through shifts in pigment and tone but also through rhythmic scraping or incising of paint (sgraffito), revealing glimpses of her fluorescent base layer beneath the cool tones on the image's surface.

On Postmodern Life

Parallel to her documentation of landscapes in the midst of change, Maud Gatewood's images, particularly those of the 1980s, offer compelling explorations—and sometimes critiques—of postmodern life in late 20th-century America, deftly addressing themes of urbanization, isolation, and evolving social mores. Her images capture the tension between rapidly developing urban landscapes and the enduring, yet eroding, rural environments of North Carolina and the Southeast. In her paintings, encroaching modernity is often alluded to through empty agrarian landscapes.

Gatewood's landscapes, both rural and urban, frequently depict spaces devoid of human presence, evoking a profound sense of isolation. This absence of figures allows the viewer to focus on the starkness and beauty of the environment while simultaneously conveying a sense of loneliness and abandonment. Her painting Two Chairs, featured in the following section, “Reflecting the Body & the Self,” poignantly suggests the loss and solitude brought about by the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s, reflecting Gatewood's sensitivity to vital social issues and her ability to convey complex emotional narratives through seemingly spare vignettes.

Gatewood's social commentary was not always pointed; sometimes her observations of postmodern society were as much humorous as biting. In Tribal Dance–Winter Solstice (1988), she captures a timely scene. The popularity of rhythmic aerobics in the 1980s and 90s created a subculture influencing fitness, fashion, and music. The viewer confronts a gym studio filled with tightly packed, writhing bodies. Alternatively, the image evokes a pagan communal ritual, bodies celebrating movement and sweat as the season peaks. This painting also showcases a number of Gatewood's technical innovations. Beyond brushes, she uses a paint sprayer to create mist on humid glass, masking tape for sharp edges defining planters and fluorescent lighting, and various metal meshes and plastic grids as stencils for textured and reflective surfaces. These techniques illustrate Gatewood's commitment to pictorial precision found throughout this exhibition.

The artist's cutouts—paintings whose surface is built up through the cutting and layering of three-dimensional material—are prominently featured throughout the exhibition. While they were developed in the 1960s and 70s, their effect on her stylistic identity came to full fruition in the 1980s. That period of her career is perhaps the most familiar to audiences and is characterized by the firmer edges and stark layering of her forms, a legacy of this earlier body of work. Beginning during her tenure at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte when she had access to the department’s wood shop, Gatewood gave into a collage impulse, layering elements to construct cohesive images from discrete forms. She described this body of work from the 1960s and 70s as "a play between the end of two-dimensional illusion and the beginning of the third dimension. They also satisfy a certain building or constructive urge which I feel from time to time." Using plywood and later masonite, Gatewood achieves literal depth that paint alone cannot replicate, evoking theatrical stages or a child's popup book. While the cutouts as a material approach did not persist throughout her career, their influence would later permeate Gatewood's mature works. The eponymous hard edges, or sharply delineated forms, and graphic elements in her paintings reflect stylistic echoes of her earlier sculptural experiments. This subtle abstraction, while a hallmark of her work in the postmodern era, also permeated her other fascinations with landscape and figurative painting.

Reflecting the Body & the Self

At the intersection of Gatewood’s observations of contemporary life and her manipulations of the human visage are pressing questions around the specifically queer body. Donated by Gatewood to the AIDS Community Residence Association in Durham, NC, her painting Two Chairs (1993) was sold at an annual art auction, with the proceeds benefiting those living with HIV/AIDS. The painting was likely created for this purpose: its subject is a lone male figure sitting on a lawn chair, looking away from the viewer and beyond an empty chair, perhaps vacant due to the loss of a loved one to the disease. Gatewood, though not often overtly political in her images, was pointed in her observations at times. Her works made in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis did not shy away from the tragedy that befell the queer community and often centered on the very real bodies affected by the epidemic.

Maud Gatewood's paintings contend with recurring questions about the body and self through various mediating concerns and conditions, including abstraction, queer experience, the interplay between subject and identity, and the process of aging. Her work adeptly navigates the complexities of representing the human form, often blending recognizable figures with abstract elements.

Gatewood’s approach to figurative painting exemplifies her technical skill and singular point of view. The interplay between the legible and abstract body in her paintings creates dynamic tension, reflecting her ongoing exploration of how the body can function both as a formal element and a vessel for emotive and cultural critique. Queer perspectives are crucial to understanding Gatewood's art. This sensibility is sometimes explicit, as in Mirror Image, where the depicted figure is her lover, and at other times more subtle, embedded in the compositional framing of landscapes or nuanced critiques of contemporary culture. As a lesbian, her position outside widely accepted societal norms allowed for alternative, sometimes subversive assessments of her environment. The resulting compositions often eschew straightforward angles, leaving room for explorations of the figure and its societal role that resist easy categorization.

The distinction between subject and identity recurs throughout Gatewood's work. Her disinterest in traditional portraiture suggests a broader inquiry into how identity is constructed and perceived. Her figures, often lacking detailed facial features, become archetypes rather than individuals, inviting viewers to project their interpretations onto the canvas.

Aging also occupies a significant place in Gatewood's images. Her later works, characterized by meticulous attention to detail and layered textures, reflect a mature artist's contemplation of time and change. More self-portraits of the artist emerge later in her career. Pushing Fifty (1983), a self-portrait of the artist on the cusp of half a century, is hung alongside the exhibition's title wall and positions Gatewood and her direct confrontation with aging as an essential question for the artist.

While Gatewood is often remembered for her unexpectedly framed landscapes, figurative painting posed an equally persistent challenge that the artist rigorously explored. Latin America (1956), an abstract expressionist composition painted during Gatewood's undergraduate years, captures a group of flamenco dancers. The figures are obscured yet hinted at through vibrant glimpses of red amidst densely applied paint and staccato brushstrokes suggesting the dancers' movements and angular limbs. While this project is primarily focused on Gatewood's essential legacy as a representational painter in postmodern American art, her origins as an artist are crucial to understanding her position in art history. Rooted in Abstract Expressionism during her education, Gatewood diverged from the movement's stylistic aims, but her work continued to be informed by these earliest lessons, using abstraction as a lens to pursue representational goals.

In Mirror Image (1982), Gatewood situates a nude female body as the formal and embodied focal point. Gatewood spoke of her disinterest in portraiture—faces are often blurred or blank, and when detailed, the figure is partially turned away and rarely looks out from the canvas. The crisply delineated contours of the woman's body and hair position her on the surface of the composition. Her framing is tripled: in the repetitive periwinkle wallpaper, the framed edge of the mirror, and the reverse image of the wallpaper. This exhibition suggests a 'queer sensibility' in Gatewood's work. Sometimes, it is reflected directly in the subject, as with this depiction of Maud's lover. Other times, it is in the sidelong framing of a landscape or the critique of contemporary culture. As a lesbian, Gatewood's status as an outsider can be understood as an additional lens through which she perceived the world, lending further nuance to her particular gift for framing the world around her through exacting compositional structure.

"The Hard Edge & The Soft Line" is a major undertaking that provides a comprehensive narrative of Maud Gatewood's career. It examines her evolution as an artist, her significant contributions to contemporary representational painting, and her outsized role in North Carolina art history and Southern visual culture. I hope too, that we have begun to reinforce the indisputable fact that Gatewood’s oeuvre requires further examination and a more nuanced understanding of its place in the broader 20th-century American canon.  This exhibition is not just a recuperative exercise but a celebration of Gatewood's rich legacy. Her paintings, with their rigorous technical experiments, coded explorations of gender and sexuality, and reverence for the built and natural landscapes, stand as a testament to her enduring impact. Through this retrospective, Gatewood's work is afforded the continued recognition it deserves, firmly situating her within the larger trajectory of pictorial development in American art.

By exploring the various themes and techniques that defined her work, this project sheds light on the complexity and depth of Gatewood's artistic vision. Her ability to blend abstraction and representation, her innovative use of perspective and composition, and her engagement with contemporary social issues all contribute to her singular and enduring legacy. As we celebrate her contributions to the art world, we also recognize the profound impact she had on the cultural landscape of North Carolina. Her paintings continue to challenge and delight, inviting us to see whatever it is we can in the images she has left us with.

Ian Gabriel Wilson is the Curator of Exhibitions & Collections at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum (BRAHM). Most recently, he served as the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he curated a number of exhibitions including Ruth Adler Schnee: Modern Designs for Living, the first major museum presentation and publication to study the life and career of the eponymous textile designer and interior architect. Gabe has previously held positions at the academic journal ARTMargins, the Roger Brown Study Collection in Chicago, and the Sullivan Galleries of SAIC where he was awarded a Graduate Curatorial Fellowship by the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice in 2015. He has also taught courses in the history of craft and the concepts and methods of visual culture at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies.