Memory Wall of Love and Peace

Some outsider artists (untrained artists sometimes known as folk or visionary artists) create in obscurity, only to have their work discovered late in life or following their death. This however was not true of Gregory Warmack (1948-2012), who called himself Mr. Imagination. Gallerist Jeanine Taylor recalls Warmack claiming he slept under the family’s kitchen table as a child because his bedroom was so full of art. (Another ‘memory wall’ is located outside of Taylor’s Florida gallery).

Warmack sold his art at street fairs in the 1970s and had his first solo gallery exhibition in 1983, in Chicago, where he grew up and lived until 2001. He worked in a variety of forms, influenced by African and Egyptian masks and dress, and using repurposed materials. His art was exhibited during his lifetime at prominent institutions throughout the United States, as well as in Venice and Paris. Commissions include the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and various locations of the House of Blues, the chain music venue. Several pieces are part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

It is therefore unsurprising that Mr. Imagination was invited in 1999 to be a teaching artist in residence at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), in Winston-Salem. (Warmack had previously taught at Lehigh University, which resulted in the Stolfo Sculpture Garden.)

As a remembrance of his time in the central North Carolina city, Mr. Imagination transformed a 55-foot wall next to the city’s transportation center into what he called the Memory Wall of Love and Peace. He asked local residents to donate whatever they chose to be embedded in the façade; hundreds of keepsakes, artifacts, miscellany. Warmack sculpted semi-abstract concrete birds and other figures for the top of the four-foot-high wall.

The assemblage deteriorated over the next two decades due to exposure to the weather and vandalism. In 2021, with funding from the city and SECCA, the Memory Wall was restored and made more sustainable by a team of artists. With photos from 1999 as a guide, damaged and missing sculptures were repaired or recreated, and the wall was repainted where necessary. Now restored, the Memory Wall of Love and Peace enshrines not just Warmack’s time in Winston-Salem, but also what the community chose to have forever fixed in place.