Edith Lunt Small is finally having a retrospective exhibit in Rochester, her hometown. Sixty or so pieces of art culled from a 50-year career fill the Dyer Arts Center at NTID. Paintings and sculpture have come in from major collectors such as Charles Rand Penney in Buffalo and Maurice Ochsman in Washington D.C., but works commissioned for corporations are harder to shake free. Strong Hospital has loaned its pieces, but a huge (3'x5') painting of Midtown Plaza, packed with detail and showing a crowd of Rochester's famous and near-famous of 1987, is locked up somewhere within the dying commercial center. Let's hope it can be retrieved before the mall is demolished. The painting is a veritable time capsule of Rochester history.

Those are the kind of paintings Small makes. They are frenetically detailed, intensely colorful, and nearly always comical. They get categorized into the "Grandma Moses school" of primitive painting by people who are quick to attach labels because the scenes she chooses to depict are usually ordinary happenings and the action is laid out flat with hardly a degree of perspective. But her paintings do not reach the cuteness quotient of modern folk art. They part company with nearly all other contemporary primitive paintings (an oxymoron if ever there was one) through an indefinable tweak of humor and startling relevancy.

Edie Small graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1952, quickly married, and spent a dozen years establishing a family before she made the decision to establish an art career. She first joined local paint clubs and showed with Atelier 696, one of Rochester's hippest art ensembles of the 1960's and 70's. She entered the annual "Finger Lakes" shows at Memorial Art Gallery during the years when it stamped artists as the "best of the best."

And she won awards - six from "Finger Lakes" competitions within 15 years. She was a finalist in the 1973 Ladies' Home Journal Primitive Artist Competition, and during the 1980's her work was published in national magazines that included Country Living, Southern Homes, North Country Landscape Artists, and the Williams College Review.

I visited Edie Small on a bitterly cold January day. Four years ago, she and her husband sold the family compound in Mendon, a historic homestead with a freestanding art studio, and moved into a more modest single-floor patio home closer to the city. "We're all getting older, "she says. "Drugs keep me going!" Then she breaks into the rollicking laugh that so defines her. She walks me through rooms, pointing to paintings and wood sculpture to be carted away for the show. The work is linked by a lifetime of common themes - social responsibility, a Latin-inspired color palette, and family, family, family.

"My influences? I loved comic books as a kid," Small says. "Comic illustrators were a huge influence. I still love them. I've tried drawing comic strips but I think you need to be a writer first. So now I collect graphic novels."

Judging from what I saw throughout the house, she also collects primitive antique furniture and American and Mexican wood carving, but it's hard to distinguish which of the carved wooden masks originated south of the border, and which were created in her own studio. Small's acrylic paintings were always done on wood and she began adding extra dimension to the flat panels by layering painted wood cutouts to the surfaces in the early 80's. She decided she needed more sophisticated woodworking skills and spent a year (1987-88) as a student at the Wendell Castle School of Woodworking in Scottsville. The year resulted in new skills and a deepened friendship with Wendell Castle.

"I admire artwork that doesn't fit into a convenient historical niche," says Castle. "Edie is able to speak in the clear, uncluttered language of the folk artist, yet this work has a personal vision which allows her to comment on her own history in ways that cut right to the heart of the matter."

A collection of animated chairs followed Small's stint at the Castle school - too craft-oriented for serious art critics - and her paintings sprouted hinged doors that revealed painted animals or rooms inside.

Small always accepted commission work, turning personal narratives - hers and those of patrons - into exquisitely detailed 3-D landscapes. During the past dozen years, these commissions have nearly taken over her creative time. Building and painting each commission, using photographs of people and buildings taken on site as models, requires from three to six months to complete. Judging by the waiting list, the demand could consume her time for years to come, when it is the paintings that spring from her imagination that result in the strongest work.

Ultimately, Small's legacy may rest on the 1982 painting "The Entry of Christ Into Manhattan." It is magnificent, a painting that any artist would be proud to point to as his or her masterwork. But I suspect there are contenders still to come.

Just, please, do not call her a "Grandma Moses painter." 

Edith Lunt Small Retrospective RIT ‘52

Through February 29

Dyer Arts Center, NTID, RIT campus

Monday-Thursday 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Friday 9 a.m.-7:30 p.m., Saturday 1-3:30 p.m.

485-6855