What Is Legacy Made Of? Found Objects and Material Culture in the Sculptures of Valerie Maynard

Multidisciplinary artist, archivist, and culture worker MacKenzie River Foy served as Valerie J. Maynard Legacy Intern in 2023–24, in the inaugural cohort of the collaborative internship program created by the Valerie J. Maynard Foundation and the Baltimore Museum of Art. The internship honors artist Valerie J. Maynard (1937–2022; pictured above), a pioneering member of the Black Arts Movement and beloved icon of the Baltimore arts community, whose multidecade practice engaged with the complexity of Black identity and experience.

Foy’s project at the BMA involved deep study of two sculptures by Maynard in the Museum’s collection: Mourning for Maurice, c. 1970 (BMA 2020.57), and Rufus, 1961 (BMA 2020.56). To expand public knowledge about these sculptures, Foy worked in the archive of the Valerie J. Maynard Foundation to gather vital research. In this two-part BMA Story, Foy reflects on the relationship of legacy, memory, and materiality in Maynard’s practice, centering the voice and intent of the artist in the preservation of her work at the Museum.

Part 1

“Impossible things happen when you come upon Valerie Maynard’s work. To be near these prints, in their company, is to be both silenced and articulated; to become deeply rooted in earth that is soaring under your feet.”—Toni Morrison, July 1989

Valerie Jean Maynard was as devoted a collector as she was an artist. Throughout her life, she gathered objects without always having a specific use for them in mind, instead feeding an inquisitive sentimentality about their history, utility, and possible futures. As she explored diverse environments across the world, Valerie saw her collection grow. Keys, nails, wood, stone, glass, bone, and other items placed a call on her, a mandate not only to look but to see—a recognition of holistic value. Found objects aided Valerie in both spiritual and cultural ways, allowing her to locate herself while surviving the movements, places, and people that shaped her. Valerie’s collection is evidence that, as Blk Mkt Vintage’s Kiyanna Handy says, “Black material culture is how we keep one another alive.”

As one of the first Valerie J. Maynard Foundation Legacy Interns swimming in the wake of this artist, I spent much of early 2024 studying her use of materials in the Contemporary Art Department of the Baltimore Museum of Art, which stewards two of her sculptures: Mourning for Maurice, c. 1970 (BMA 2020.57), and Rufus, 1961 (BMA 2020.56). The materials making up these magisterial figures offer insight into the artist’s appreciation for nature, intuition, and memory work. Her relationship to the world was one of deep listening; she often turned to trees, rivers, and stone for lessons that she could teach others. To meet Valerie Maynard and artists like her, new methods of commemoration must emerge: non-extractive, relational models that center necessary conservation and story exchange while allowing materials to remain sovereign in the possession of their communities of origin. Maynard’s sculptures are a spiritual technology and an ecological process, a mode of keeping memory rooted in Afro-Indigenous approaches to earthly and spiritual materials. What does preservation look like for this vast, intangible, and profound legacy?

Mourning for Maurice’s sculpted head surveys the world with a gentle expression; I think he probably holds answers to questions I don’t even know how to ask. The sculpture is a totem of grief erected for the artist’s dear friend lost in a car accident during the late 1960s, lamenting the abrupt and tragic end to a beautiful life. Because little about Maurice exists in the archive, the sculpture preserves one of the only known public records of his life, translated by Maynard’s powerful hands into a spiritual tool guiding her through loss. In this way, Maurice is also a site of survival and cultural endurance.

Tawny wood is carved and anointed with a halo of iron nails, a sculptural practice mirroring nkisi n’kondi, the power figures of the Kongo people of central Africa. The artist collected these nails herself from the New York City Hudson River docks her father used to work. Maynard was careful to specify during the 2020 virtual tour of her BMA exhibition Lost and Found (March 1, 2020–January 3, 2021) that for her, these nails represent Africans brought to this country and forced to labor as slaves—their resilience, their magnitude, their ability to protect one another. Maurice himself collected the wood while living in Europe; he found the discarded material and immediately thought of the sculptor. She recovered the wood during an overseas visit and used it to commemorate Maurice after his passing.

Nkisi n’kondi doesn’t hold the same cultural significance here in the United States as it does in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; nevertheless, Maurice still prompts us to consider the spiritual uses of wood and iron as found objects. Valerie kept this sculpture with her from the time she made it, around 1970, until its accession into the BMA’s collection in 2020. The artist may have seen the work as a means of protection against harm. In her tour of Lost and Found, she recounts the memories that the nails surface for her: how her father needed protection to make it home from work safely, that her mother used to smuggle his pay out of the dock by bringing him lunch. These nails, driven into the imported wood, seem to ask African ancestors to cover the deceased Maurice as he travels back to join them, just as they might have for Valerie’s father coming home. Preserving this work requires deeper understanding of the life it celebrates and further research into its use as a spiritual tool. Who were the spiritual specialists Maynard consulted while crafting this piece and where, among the rich tapestry of Afro-Atlantic religious traditions, do they call home? And perhaps most urgent: Who was Maurice before his mourning?

Part 2

In 2020, the BMA accessioned Maurice and Rufus, and I had the honor of identifying the latter sculpture’s type of stone. I located on one of Maynard’s slides, which was loose within a banker’s box of unprocessed Valerie J. Maynard Foundation papers, the material ID: steatite, a soft mineral made mostly of talc, commonly known as soapstone. In an interview with John Lewis for Baltimore Magazine in 2022, Maynard tells the story of finding the Rufus stone at a water hole near Saxtons River in Vermont, where she taught art one summer. During a leisurely swim, Maynard recalled, she noticed a striking stone beneath the surface. Enamored—though never having carved stone—she took it to her studio. Trance-like, the artist coaxed Rufus from the stone, leaving much of the material in the shape that the water had chosen.

Maynard confirmed that Rufus was not modeled after a particular person. The sculpture is named after working-class men in the 1920s and 1930s who completed hard, industrial labor. Despite his exhaustion, Rufus looks up, into the future. Rufus, Maynard’s first sculpture, embodies the political will gestating the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s; its members’ radicalism was shaped by a fervent hope to see life beyond struggle.

Maynard’s choice to use stone for this figure seems to commemorate the valor of Black freedom fighters—a reimagining of the material often employed in traditional American monuments that include the faces and dreams of Black and Indigenous peoples as defining features. The relative malleability of the soapstone underscores the flexibility of what would seem to be unchanging matter – a reminder about not just stone, but history, memory, and power.

The materials that Black women use to navigate connections with their environment, writes Carlyn Ferrari, can depict fraught contradictions between beauty and pain. These relational exchanges between Black people, the land, and the environment also can be “generative space, a space that allows them to theorize and articulate their lived experiences” (Black Ecologies, 38). Working with soapstone and water in the making of Rufus, Valerie theorizes in 1961 what Toni Morrison (1931–2019) would famously say nearly 30 years later: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was” (The Site of Memory, 99). Maynard’s treatment of the soapstone chisels the Black radical imagination into a form of remembrance, the flow carving a path back toward where we came from.

Further research to identify the artists’ other early philosophical contributions to Black feminist environmental consciousness may require an interdisciplinary, Black ecological approach. Historian JT Roane defines Black ecology as a framework for exploring historical and contemporary relationships between Black people and nature, fueling “insurgent, liberatory practices.” Rufus was not the last time Maynard collaborated with water or other forces of nature, nor was it the last monument she constructed. Her sculptures open a portal into a dimension of understanding where survival and humanity are sustained through the artist’s expressive responses to the perennial call of the natural world.

These sculptures are but two out of many that ask and answer existential questions about the nature and stakes of being alive today. Standing out within Maynard’s oeuvre, Maurice and Rufus constitute a transcendent mandate to work in concert with our environment, to listen to the rivers and the trees, and to allow our bodies, minds, and voices to be shaped by this listening.