Gladys-Marie Fry
| Gladys-Marie Fry | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 6, 1931 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | November 7, 2015 (aged 84) Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Historian, folklorist |
Gladys-Marie Fry (April 6, 1931 – November 7, 2015) was Professor Emerita of Folklore and English at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, and a leading authority on African American textiles. Fry earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Howard University and her Ph.D. from Indiana University. She is the author of Stitched From the Soul: Slave Quilting in the Ante-Bellum South and Night Riders in Black Folk History. A contributor or author to 8 museum catalogs, Fry is also the author of a number of articles and book chapters. Fry has also served as the curator for 11 museum exhibitions (including the Smithsonian in Washington DC) and consultant to exhibits and television programs around the nation.
Fry’s father, Louis, was an eminent architect. He had earned a degree in architecture from Kansas State University and then worked with architect Albert Irving Cassell at Howard University, Washington, DC., marrying Obelia Swearingen in 1927.
They had a son, Louis Jr. in 1928 (also an architect, who died in 2006). Gladys-Marie Fry was born April 6, 1931, in the Freedmen's Hospital on the Howard University campus, where her father was Chairman of the Architectural Department.
She spent many years researching enslaved African culture with a special emphasis on the material artifacts of enslaved African women, while earning degrees in history and folklore at Howard University and a PhD at Indiana University.
Fry was a Bunting Institute Fellow from 1988-1989 at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, and retired Professor Emerita from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000.
Fry was a frequent lecturer at educational institutions in the United States and abroad. She curated a dozen exhibitions that have been hosted at major institutions. Among them are the Eva and Morris Feld Gallery of the Museum of American Folk Art at Lincoln Square in New York City, the Renwick Gallery and the Anacostia Museum of Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, Alabama, Afro-American Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, and the Art Gallery at the University of Maryland.
Fry is famous for the following two seminal folklore works:
She died on November 7, 2015 at the age of 84 from a heart attack.
In 1976, Fry published landmark research about American quilt maker Harriet Powers’ life in Missing Pieces: Georgia Folk Art 1770-1976, an exhibit catalog. This was the first full-scale investigation about the life and Bible-themed quilts of Powers (an African American slave, folk artist and quilt maker from rural Georgia, whose surviving works are on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.)
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