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Artist depicts injustice's true colors Photo by Bob Pennell Political events have shaped 90-year-old Ashland artist Mary Perry Stone's works, including the abstract painting "Propaganda." Ashland woman has Medford show By BILL VARBLE ASHLAND -- In the spare bedroom Mary Perry Stone uses as a studio, an abstract oil painting titled "Propaganda" covers almost an entire wall. It's an outraged cry against war "patrioteers." Now showing What : Art exhibit featuring "60 Years of Protest" by Mary Perry Stone and "Voices Return" by Madalin blue. When : Through April 7. Where : The Rogue Gallery and Art Center, 40 S. Bartlett St., Medford. Information : Call 772-8118 or go to www.arttree.com "That means those who profit from it," says Stone, 90. A small, engaging woman with a ready smile, she shows visitors rooms and closets full of the paintings she's created in eight decades. The palette and brushes crammed onto a workbench testify to regular use. Books (V.S. Naipaul) and pamphlets ("Free Tibet") lie about. A new exhibit of Stone's work, "History on the Wall: 60 Years of Protest," runs through April 7 at the Rogue Gallery and Art Center in Medford. Two of Stone's sculptures you will not see in the exhibit are "Homeless" and "Together Mother and Child," which are almost certainly at the bottom of New York's East River. What you will see are paintings such as "Glory," which combines loose, impressionistic brushwork with stark subject matter -- outrage at the war in Vietnam. Stone's work is a window to some of the big issues of the 20th century. In a career that stretches from the Works Progress Administration to Web sites, her work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Center and the New School for Social Research. She was born Mary Perry in Rhode Island in 1909 and attended the Art Students League in New York City when just 15. A brother helped her attend the Traphagen School of Fine Arts and Design, but she graduated to find that jobs for young women were almost nonexistent in the Depression. In 1937, after a big battle with the relief bureaucracy, which wanted her to train as a cook, she won a coveted slot in the Federal Arts Project in New York City as a teacher and sculptor. More than 5,000 American artists would work for the WPA in the Depression, half in New York City, including future greats such as Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning and Mark Rothko. Pay started at $23 a week. Stone still believes it was Roosevelt confidant George Biddle who sold FDR on the idea of an artists group. Although critical of FDR for not supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, she supported him even if, "His idea of a painting was a sailboat." The mix of poverty and social unrest she saw combined with the artists and intellectuals she met helped shape a world view of sympathy for the poor and and mistrust for authority. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was her supervisor. She ate chicken dinner with the famed black preacher Father Divine. She was arrested and hauled off to jail for protesting when a relief agency wouldn't give a food voucher to a woman who fainted from hunger. The case was later dismissed. The Artists Project wound up being overseen by the U.S. Army, and friction between military men and artists grew. When the brass decided they needed warehouse space, many sculptures that hadn't been earmarked were cleaned out and lost. Two historians later told Stone many were dumped into the river. "The miliary didn't know anything about art," Stone says. When the Arts Project ended she went to work in a factory assembling torpedoes. She moved with her husband, a newspaper reporter, and their daughter, Ramie, to the San Francisco Bay area in 1953. She exhibited widely and in 1958 won a sculpture award from the Oakland Art Museum. She demonstrated for civil rights and against Vietnam. "I thought it would never end," she says of the nation's longest war. "There was no Hitler. Why did we go?" In 1992 she moved to Ashland to be near her daughter. She's painted more than 50 large murals, many of which are in storage. She's skeptical of the media to this day. "When I look at a paper, I think, maybe it's true, and maybe it isn't," she says. Although she relishes having fought the good fight, she has no stars in her eyes when it comes to the Depression. "Most people had it bad," she says. "It was a terrible time." Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA