News-Gazette, February 8, 2026
Human connection. Relationship building. Community. These things have been on my mind for quite some time and even more so in the last several weeks.
How can we encourage empathy, foster conversation, and experience collective healing in an increasingly divisive world?
I’m aware there are many answers to this, but one of the ways I find hope and possibility is in the creative practice of art-making.
As a curator, I help shape and build Krannert Art Museum’s collection in meaningful ways.
There are a number of artworks in the collection that speak to the issues mentioned above—and many that inspire reflection and conversation.
I’d like to highlight a painting by Benjamin Wigfall recently acquired by the museum.
Wigfall was recognized nationally very early in his art career and was later celebrated for the impact he had in building community through social practice. His painting Untitled is currently on view in the Art Since 1948 installation.
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Wigfall grew up in a Black working-class neighborhood that was fully segregated at that time.
His talent was recognized by a high school art teacher who encouraged Wigfall to enroll in classes, also segregated, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond.
That opportunity proved pivotal as the VMFA would not only provide him with artistic inspiration—especially abstract works—but also financial support.
Between 1949 and 1952, the VMFA awarded him a series of fellowships that allowed him to study art education at Hampton Institute (now University), where he was introduced to a network of exiled European artists, further nurturing his interest in abstraction.
From Hampton, Wigfall went on to attend the University of Iowa and then earned a Master of Fine Art degree in 1958 from Yale University, where he was one of the first African Americans to do so.
Wigfall returned to Hampton as faculty and then moved to the State University of New York (SUNY), New Paltz, where he was a respected professor of printmaking from 1963 until he retired in 1991.
Untitled is an early abstract work by Wigfall, likely painted at Iowa before he delved deeper into printmaking at Yale.
Wigfall found abstraction as a source of expression and space for self-discovery, regularly using moments from his childhood as inspiration in his works. In this painting, the floating geometric forms likely reference the architecture he often walked past on his way to school in Richmond.
Abstraction also allowed Wigfall freedom to move beyond the systems of segregation, once stating, “Abstraction, I realized in a sense, was a great hiding place. It was another place that I understood all things being equal. These things had no color, and yet I wanted to give color to it and statement to it.”
Read the full article about Benjamin Wigfall in the News-Gazette
Author: Katie Koca Polite, assistant curator and publication specialist at Krannert Art Museum
