It’s a season of change for two revered South Coast artists

As the leaves rid themselves of green and turn red and crisp, and the coolness of the morning makes itself known, and darkness arrives earlier each day, no season is more emblematic of change than the fall. 

This particular autumn brings with it a palpable bittersweet sense of loss and impermanence to the South Coast visual arts community as two unique and significant local artists transition. One will depart soon. The other is already gone.

Born in Trinidad, Alison Wells has lived in New Bedford for 21 years and, with the able assistance of her husband Jai Grau, she has operated her namesake fine art gallery at 106 William St., recently celebrating the 11th anniversary of the small business that has become an institution in the city. 

Wells will be closing the gallery to the public on Nov. 1 and by mid-December, she and Grau will move to Trinidad. The reasons are myriad and understandable: to be closer to family, to live in a warmer climate, to be free of political uncertainty, and to kickstart a new phase in their lives.

Wells tells a story of a high school teacher in Trinidad who asked her, when she was 16, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When she answered “an artist,” the cynical teacher’s face dropped, and she said “You’re going to starve!” Her classmates laughed.

She considered architecture and visual design as alternative possibilities. She ended up getting a bachelor of fine arts in Jamaica, and returned home, where she worked in advertising, graphics and at a bank. But she met a woman who asked her to join an organization called Women in Art. She did and she started painting seriously. She began selling work in local art galleries and teaching art fundamentals in a high school.

And then Wells decided to pursue a master’s in fine arts and moved to New Bedford to study at UMass Dartmouth, spending much of the time in the Star Store building. After graduation, she stayed because of “the (city’s) art renaissance.” She lived downtown. She made friends. She had a studio downtown. In 2010, she met Grau. New Bedford became her home.

When she opened the gallery, she sold paintings and intricate collages, as well as prints, postcards and greeting cards. And she taught art classes within the space.

I once asked her if, as a gallery owner, artist, teacher and Black immigrant woman, if she saw herself as an inspiration to others. 

Her answer was an unequivocal yes, saying “Definitely … I do. At first, I didn’t think so. I am an artist. But as a teacher, I started seeing from their eyes. The students, especially the students of color … they’re so excited. They’re asking ‘how did you do that?’… it feels good to know you are impacting and inspiring young people.”

Beyond her own gallery (where on any given second-Thursday-of-the-month AHA! night, one might be greeted by someone playing a piano or banging away on steel drums at the entrance), she has exhibited in many other local venues and well beyond, from the walls of the Pour Farm Tavern to having two works of art in the permanent collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, as well as the New Bedford Art Museum and the University Art Gallery (when it was in the Star Store building.)

One of her paintings from the Whaling Museum collection, “The Other Side of the Harbor,” is presently on loan to the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.

To the best of my recollection, my first interaction with Wells’ artwork was likely at the Colo Colo Gallery, when it was in the original space on Centre Street. The one-person show was called “Collage 02740” and she exhibited luscious and vibrant urban portraits of New Bedford City Hall, the First Baptist Church, fishing boats in the harbor, and a particularly elegant take on the Star Store, when it housed UMD’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

At the time, I wrote that her exhibition was “strong but a bit too safe. Her downtown New Bedford is beautiful, highlighting bethels and cupolas and statues and scenic vistas, but there is none of the underbelly most residents know. There are no abandoned storefronts, no smokers outside the National Club, no idling buses billowing exhaust.”

She told me later that she took that to heart. And in a good way. More recent works include Black Lives Matter protesters on Union Street and what appears to be an almost post-apocalyptic vision of Acushnet Avenue in the North End, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Wells is a successful entrepreneur, a terrific and inventive painter and collagist, and an inspiration to young and upcoming artists. Her departure will leave a hard-to-fill void in the New Bedford art scene. Although she will be sorely missed by many, I wish her nothing but happiness and success in Trinidad. 

And I’ll miss drinking IPAs and talking trash with my good buddy Jai down at the tavern.

It’s hard to say goodbye to Alison and Jai. But it is not nearly as hard as it is to say goodbye to Wanda Medina who, after a long illness, died on Oct. 9, at the age of 69.

I met Wanda when I was a first-year student at the Swain School of Design and she was in her last year. “Met” might be too strong a word. Even though Swain had a very small student body, there was not much interaction or socializing between stunning and seemingly worldly senior girls and awkward, diffident freshman boys. She was just someone who I passed in the halls or on the green at the corner of Hawthorn and County Streets.

Wanda was born in New Bedford on Aug. 13, 1956. She was an only child, raised in Fairhaven on Sconticut Neck. She attended Bishop Stang and later began her formal art education at Mount Ida Junior College in Newton. Her mother, Alice Silva Medina, had attended Swain in the 1940s and Wanda eventually transferred to her mother’s alma mater.

She majored in printmaking at Swain, where her mentors included printmaker John Osborne, painter David Loeffler Smith and poet Leo Kelley, the latter who was a notable inspiration as her art is imbued with a poetic sensibility, embracing patterns, a visual cadence and rhythm, and more than a little bit of melancholy.

Wanda later attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and was awarded an MFA. Later, she moved onto painting with water-based paints, in response to an annoying twitch that she suspected was connected to chemicals that are common to many materials used in printmaking disciplines.

She later bopped around the country, living in Boston, Oakland and Seattle, among other places, picking up other skills including faux painting, ceramic tilework and furniture design. 

Along the way, she regularly sold sandwiches to Ric Ocasek and his fellow Cars, sat on Timothy Leary’s lap, passed toilet paper to Joni Mitchell in an adjoining stall, and declined an invitation from Prince to go to a concert after-party in Detroit because she had too much work to do at her studio, a decision she later regretted.

She eventually came back to the South Coast and had a first date with a guy she met on an online dating service. His name was Jeffrey Richardson and the date was at Freestone’s. It worked out. They were together for 20 years, married for the last 15. They lived in southern Vermont in the same era that my wife and I were living in northern Vermont.

Somehow, all back in New Bedford, Wanda and I ran into each other in Gallery X. We chatted briefly. I bumped into her at Merrill’s Wharf and met Jeffrey. We started hanging out. My wife Elizabeth and I became very close friends with them. Many great meals, good times, shared music and jokes. 

And all along, Wanda was still making exceptional art. Not many years ago, she was in an exhibition of artists who were alumni of the local arm of the National Park Service’s Artist-In-Residence or Community Artist-In-Residence programs that was held at the New Bedford Art Museum.

While in her residency, Wanda researched women who were involved with the whaling industry and became aware of the indigenous Māori women of New Zealand who watched the sea as they farmed. When they sighted the flukes of a sperm whale or a humpback, they would ignite a fire to signal the men to get down to the shore to take the great beast. 

Her “Flukes in the Harbor, Fire in the Field” was made with acrylic paint, tree bark and paper on canvas and the semi-abstract image gave due justice to the fire, the field and the flukes. The work was later displayed at the ambassador’s residence in the U.S. Embassy in Praia, the capital of Cabo Verde, in order to promote “cultural diplomacy through visual art.”

At present, Wanda has a number of works in an exhibition of Cape Verdean artists in the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Ymelda Rivera Laxton, the assistant curator of Contemporary Art and Community Projects, offered her thoughts on one of Wanda’s collaged artworks.

“The New Bedford Whaling Museum was delighted to share Wanda C. Medina’s work in ‘Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art’ this past year. Medina’s ability to transform disparate patterns, colors, and simple materials into beautiful and reflective landscape and textured images was masterfully subtle.

“It is something special to create a work that can be visually abstract in nature yet still evoke feelings of intimacy and personal connection.

“This connection seems most evident in her 2016 work ‘Ancestral Flow.’ The collage combines colorful flowing shapes and patterns, layered on top of one another, that create movement and a literal layered story. A story that is built upon her interest in visually exploring her family history and ancestral heritage.”

Wanda’s work reverberates down to something deep within the soul.

A few months ago, Wanda and Jeffrey moved to Arizona, perhaps hoping that the warmth would be easier on her. She had been athletic — a runner, a boxer, a devotee of yoga — and she was fading before our eyes. Even putting on a jacket became difficult. She was slipping away.

A few weeks ago, we spoke. They were on speaker phone and wanted to do FaceTime and they wanted to show us the guestroom. But Elizabeth had already gone to sleep. I suggested we speak on the weekend. But within two days, I received a message that Wanda was receiving in-house hospice care and being made comfortable. And then she was gone.

In that previous call, Wanda sounded almost cheerful. 

She was the only woman that I ever called “Sistah.” And she never called me by my given name. She just called me “Brotha.” And that meant everything to me.

I love you, Sistah. And I miss you.

There must be cosmic serendipity at play. 

Alison closes the gallery to the public on the same day as there will be a Celebration of Life for Wanda at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It is, indeed, a season of transition.

Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org

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