Charles Banks Wilson’s works
on Will on display
Charles Banks Wilson was 13 and living in Miami, (Okla.) when he saw Will Rogers for the first time — at the Coleman Theater.
It was also the first of many times he sketched Will and the beginning of a long relationship with Will on canvas.
At 90, he continues to paint at his home in Fayetteville, Ark., and was at the Will Rogers Museum in Claremore for the opening of “Wilson on Will, A Retrospective of the Art of Charles Banks Wilson.”
A special exhibit of Wilson’s paintings and sketches opened at the Will Rogers Memorial on November 2 and will remain until February 9, 2009. Museum hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., 365 days a year.
The 1931 pencil sketches are among the exhibits as well as a Navajo rug used as a prop for “Welcome,Folks,” the Will Rogers Memorial portrait. A collector of Native American texiles and basketry, Wilson gifted the rug to the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in 2007.
One of Wilson’s best loved “Will” paintings is the one which hangs in the entry to Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore and the first thing visitors see when they come into the museum from the west entry.
Charles Banks Wilson and a giclee print of Will Rogers standing on a grass airstrip, which hangs in the Oklahoma state Capitol. The original was completed in 1963.
Many of his works hang in the Oklahoma State Capitol including a life-size portrait of Will Rogers. He was commissioned to do a painting for Oklahoma Press Association and for the 1979 (centennial year of Will Rogers birth) Oklahoma Southwestern Bell telephone book cover. In the 1940s he did a series of Will Rogers national calendars.
In 1936, his first year at the Art Institute of Chicago, he began to realize his fascination with Native Americans. He sketched faces of individuals of more than one hundred persons from sixty-five tribes as recorded in his 1983 book “Search for the Native American Purebloods.” He donated those originals to Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa; fulfilling a promise to models he would never sell their images.
The Will Rogers Memorial exhibit will include not only the museum’s full-figure painting, which is on display continuously, but also the sketches he did as a teen-ager and other study sketches, copies of “Welcome Folks,” the 1979 Southwestern Bell Telephone Company Centennial Portrait, “Will Rogers-Showstopper,” the state Capitol work and Will Rogers in western clothes, now in a Bolivar, Mo., gallery.
On loan for the duration of the exhibit is a Wilson “Portrait of Will Rogers Done from Life,” “All I know Is What I Read in the Papers” from Oklahoma Press Association and “Will Rogers” from Wanda Jo Wainscott.
Charles Banks Wilson and Judge Robert Henry, chief justice of United States Court of Appeals, and Mrs. Henry
Charles Banks Wilson and his daughter, Carrie, arrive for opening of “Wilson on Will: A Retrospective of the art of Charles Banks Wilson” at Will Rogers Memorial. The 90-year-old artist attended a preview opening with Will Rogers Memorial Museum docents and the public opening.
Charles Banks Wilson and his daughter, Carrie, arrive for opening of “Wilson on Will: A Retrospective of the art of Charles Banks Wilson” at Will Rogers Memorial. The 90-year-old artist attended a preview opening with Will Rogers Memorial Museum docents and the public opening.
Charles Banks Wilson’s grandson, Ben, despite the fame of his grandfather, was in awe of the giant leather carving of Will in the Will Rogers Memorial permanent display.
Wilson remembeirng Will
Charles BanksWilson and Will Rogers Memorial Docent Judy Eagleton.