Anne Kesler Shields

A trailblazer for women artists in the South, Anne Kesler Shields maintained an active art career from her early twenties until her death and came to be regarded as Winston-Salem's "most accomplished, living native born visual artist." Art critic Tom Patterson said of Shields, “She’s wholly without peer as an artist for her generation in North Carolina.” Her professional work moved over the years from portraiture, expressionism, abstract landscapes, and drawing, to geometric paintings and prints, and finally to collages that juxtaposed images from current events and pop culture with classical works to create sharply observed commentaries on the timeless aspects of human nature. Anne's work is in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, Cornell University and Wake Forest University among many others.