All photos in this article are my own.
The American Visionary Art Museum, located right off Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, is midway through its two-year exhibition The Strength to Be Joyful: Messages from Mary Proctor. Exuberant, colorful, and eclectic, the paintings on display, many of them collaged with buttons, cloth, and found objects, are filled with stories from Proctor’s life, lessons taught to her by her grandmother, and prayers and scripture. Her work celebrates faith, love, friendship, creativity, and self-worth.
Mary Louise Proctor (née Cooksey) was born June 11, 1960, in Lloyd, Florida, a small town in Jefferson County, about twenty miles east of Tallahassee. Her mother Paulina gave birth to her at a young age, and she was raised by her maternal grandparents, Frank and Hattie Cooksey. She had an especially close bond with her grandmother, who formed her in the Christian faith and whom she describes as tender, wise, and forgiving.
One particular episode she recalls from her childhood is accidentally breaking a stack of her grandmother’s Blue Willow plates while reaching for a teacake. “I thought she would whip me,” Proctor recounted in paint in 1997. “Instead she held my hands and said, ‘I forgive you cause just yesterday God forgave me.’ And she said one must forgive to be forgiven.” The door painting Story of Grandma’s Old Blue Willow Plates portrays Proctor’s grandma reaching out to her as a child to remove her shame and console her, assuring her of her unconditional love. The clothing of the two figures is rendered in shards of the broken chinoiserie dishware, veined with gold paint, kintsugi-like—a metaphor for repair. Centered at the top of the door, round and gleaming like a sun or a halo, is an intact plate. Below it two angels—one Black, one white—resembling the plate’s turtledoves, swoop in and support the title Proctor has given this sacred memory.
Memories of her grandma, and her grandma’s wisdom sayings, feature in much of Proctor’s work. One painting enumerates eleven “things my old grandmoma told me yesterday [that] holds me today,” such as “Tell you bussiness to God” and “Every body that smile in your face ain’t your friend.” One proverb her grandma would regularly recite is “You can take a mule to the water but you can’t make the sucker drink,” teaching her that we can offer help to other people but ultimately can’t control their choices.
Proctor dropped out of school in ninth grade and, after escaping an abusive relationship, married Tyrone Proctor in 1980. She worked as a nurse’s aide until a nerve injury made the job unfeasible, at which point she pivoted to collecting and selling miscellaneous objects for a living.
In January 1994, tragedy struck when Proctor’s grandmother, aunt, and uncle died in a house fire. Proctor was traumatized by seeing the charred bodies removed from the wreckage, and she sunk into a depression. She wrestled with God and even considered suicide.
“The most beautiful personality you ever seen was my grandma. She loved everybody,” Proctor tells. “And I was like, what happened to my grandmother? I mean, why, Lord, why did you allow her to go? That’s my best friend. I was wondering why such a woman had to go like that. Why did it happen?”
While she didn’t receive an answer to that question, she did receive a new direction for her life. In February 1995, while praying and fasting, God spoke to her, telling her to “paint the door.” Not quite sure what he meant, she grabbed three detached doors that she had in her yard and painted the likenesses of her family members on them. This was the beginning of her healing process and her career as a folk artist.
Proctor was already used to salvaging things, from dumpsters and roadsides, that others deemed trash, and making good purchases at flea markets. Now instead of cleaning them up to sell or resell in their current forms, she found uses for them in her art making, and started saving other discarded items as well. Buttons, beads, shells, nails, coins, mirrors, sticks, Spanish moss, coffee cans, toys, shoes, pails, patches of cloth—any of these are worthy art materials for her, along with her go-to house paint. With them, she embellishes doors of all sizes and other types of discarded wood, which she’ll often cut into shapes that suit her.
For her, the reclamation of cast-off things reflects God’s redeeming work in our own lives—how he rescues, restores, mends. This work of mending was also modeled by her grandma, who, rather than throwing out old clothes with missing buttons or tears, would lovingly fix them up. “When I was a child,” Proctor reminisces, “my grandma would keep all her old button[s] in a jar. She would keep em there to mend our cloth. When one fell of[f] she would mend on another. Now we all need to be mended like Gram mend them old button[s]. Mend us all, Lord. Mend us all.” Two doors tell this story, showing Gram handing a young Proctor a mended garment or a jar of buttons, the two figures themselves constituted of buttons. In the wispy blue background, angels shower yellow flower petals over the scene, a rain of mercy.
Black women are Proctor’s most frequently depicted subject, whether herself, specific relatives, or more generic women. Her most iconic image type, which exists in many variations, is of a Black woman looking and reaching up, signifying trust in God. For these, she often cuts her substrate into a narrow vertical orientation, emphasizing the seeking of things above, a stretching toward the heavens. Her husband calls her paintings in this format “slims.” Two such slims counsel women to walk by faith, per 2 Corinthians 5:7, and to practice self-love.
Another, much larger slim, approximately life-size, insists on the salubrious impact of art making. “Creation heals the body, mind, and soul,” it reads. “Every day I look up and pray and say, ‘Lord, what can I create today to show a little sunshine, a little hope, a little mercy, a little joy, a little grace.’ In these dark times as these, let this little light shine”—the latter phrase a reference to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (see Matt. 5:14–16). Lit by the Spirit, by whose power she shares the gospel, Proctor prays that her art will benefit not only herself but all those who encounter it.
When she makes art, she says, she feels free, like a butterfly.
It’s a feeling that’s well captured in It’s a Woman’s World, an unironically titled painting that revels in the abundant life Jesus came to give both sexes (John 10:10), all us descendants of Adam and Eve. The painting shows four Black women in beaded jumpers leaping impossibly wide in the air, their arms outstretched, hearts floating.
In the article “From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom,”Ada C. M. Thomas identifies the womanist (Black feminist) theology expressed in Proctor’s art, which “celebrates Black women as bold, audacious, and determined to embrace their lived experiences”; her figures “embody a prideful yet humbled aesthetic. They are self-possessed and possessed by an intimate, activist faith. The women’s eyes are frequently cast upwards in hopefulness and anticipation.”
Indeed, Proctor considers it part of her mission “to get a message out to broken womens [sic], a message to help and glorify them,” she says. “I’m going to get a message out so men can search their hearts, learn to respect us and treat us the right way.”
She believes everyone is a child of God, and she wants her art to connect people to the hope, peace, joy, and love that’s accessible through him. She calls herself a missionary, often using that title in signatures of her name. “The Lord spoke, and he said, ‘You are on a mission to get a great message out into the houses and hearts,’” she testifies.
(Related post: “The Biblical Imagination of Folk Sculptor Annie Hooper”)
In Look and See the Angel Is You, by using a mirror as the face of the holy figure, Proctor preaches the imago Dei (image of God) in every person, encouraging viewers to recognize their inherent dignity and worth, imbued in them by their Creator.
In Every Child Was Born to Rise Up and Be Creative, she echoes the cultural mandate God gave to humans in the garden of Eden: to develop and rearrange the raw materials of creation for the flourishing of all. While not everyone is called to be an artist, we are all called to create.
We ought also to cultivate our own selves. Proctor often uses the metaphor—popular in the Middle Ages—of the soul as a garden in which we grow “flowers” of virtue. For example, a series of wood cutouts portrays women holding pails, with signs like “Let love live in my garden” and “Let grace live in my garden.” Another declares and beseeches, “I refuse to let hate live in my garden. Love, help me grow.”
Besides vows and petitions, Proctor’s art also contains testimonies. In the Black church, testifying is a sacred tradition of sharing personal stories of survival, deliverance, and praise. Encouragement is a key component. One of Proctor’s painted testimonies reads, “It may seem dark at times, yet I hold on, I know the sun will shine.” She knows God will never forsake her, though he may occasionally seem absent.
Other paintings by Proctor mark milestones in her spiritual journey, such as her baptism in Lloyd Creek in 1975 at age fifteen. One such painting references the African American spiritual “Down by the Riverside,” its refrain about relinquishing hatred and violence—“Ain’t gonna study war no more”—taken from Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3. Members of her Missionary Baptist church community gather round, dressed in white and golden robes. At the bottom center, two elders raise up Proctor’s arms as she emerges from the baptismal waters, cleansed and reborn.
Several pieces highlight Proctor’s whimsical sense of humor. It Ain’t Over Till the Fat Lady Sings God Bless America, a patriotic adaptation of a well-worn idiom, made me laugh. So did the adjacent painting, The Story of the Two Maxwell House Friends Mrs. Lilly and Mrs. Dilly, married to Willie and Billy; the women, Proctor narrates, would meet in Philly, get chilly (and so sip their coffee), and giggle about matters silly. Proctor affixed two teacups to the wood, giving the work three-dimensionality.
A sense of delight infuses Proctor’s art. She’s attuned to the beauty of the ordinary, the sacramentality of the everyday. She identifies a spirit of joy and gratitude even in animal life. “Every day I pass the cows,” she writes in one painting. “In the sunshine or rain the cows dance. If the cows can dance in green pastures why can’t we?” Speckled and smiling, her cows bear signs that say “Enjoy life,” “Be content,” “It’s going to be fine.” Cattle are among those named as being part of the cosmic choir of creation in Psalm 148, praising the Lord—Proctor goes even further and imagines them dancing.
In the hallway outside the exhibition gallery, it’s a trio of women who dance. The central painting shows Proctor’s signature upward-gazing gal, in a fringed dress, opening her hands to receive divine love, symbolized by the red hearts that angels pass down to earth in one long chain. “It’s the love of God that makes the world go round,” Proctor preaches. “Pass the love from above.”
Flanking this painting are two wire sculptures of worshipping women who wear crosses and heart-shaped bangles inscribed with “Near the Cross” (the title of a popular hymn by Fanny Crosby) and psalmic phrases such as “Shout for joy,” “Rise up,” “Lead me,” “Shine on me,” and “My heart is glad.”
Proctor acknowledges that some may look at her art and see only messy pictures or rubbish. But paraphrasing the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 1:26–31), she says God uses foolish things—like scrap wood or twisted wire decorated with cheap paint and baubles—to confound the wise.
Shortly after getting married, Proctor moved to Tallahassee with her husband Tyrone, where they raised three sons and a daughter. They now live back in Lloyd but operate a small gallery in Tallahassee proper, where they sell Proctor’s work. Follow them on Instagram @marysvisions or on Facebook.
The Strength to Be Joyful: Messages from Mary Proctor runs through August 2, 2027, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Admission to the museum is $20.
Don’t miss two more works by Mary Proctor that are on display in the third-floor café, each titled Music Heals the Body, Mind, and Soul. Made of mixed media on wood, they show a man with a guitar and a singing, dancing woman, and scattered across the backgrounds are sheet music fragments from a Christian hymnal.
If you download the Bloomberg Connects mobile app and search “AVAM,” then select “The Strength to Be Joyful,” you can access seven audio interviews with artist Mary Proctor (transcripts included), which are tied to different displays in the exhibition. The exhibition also runs a video interview on loop.
But also, here’s a 2003 news segment shot with Proctor in the “art yard” outside her house:
And a more recent interview clip, from 2022, of Proctor talking about her grandmother’s importance in her life:
Art & Theology 