Draft:Jerome Rankin Wallace

Jerome Wallace (born June 1, 1931 in Portsmouth, Ohio) is an American artist known for his contemporary batik techniques. He has been credited as an artist who revived the ancient art of batik and developed it to contemporary ends. His work in batik primarily took place in Anahola, Kauai, Hawaii.

Education and early career
Wallace attended Carnegie Institute of Technology and Texas Christian University, but did not earn an MFA degree until 1994 when he was 63 years old from the University of Hawaii. He worked as a dancer in New York and Hollywood, CA before an injury forced him to other interests. In Hollywood, Wallace formed Artistic Laborers, a business providing services to artisans, and emerged as an expert in colors and dyes, textiles and clothing. He moved to Kauai in 1962, Wallace settled in a seaside shack and started exploring batik making.

He provided colorful batik fabric to designer Dallas Sprigg of Star of Siam for women’s fashion in 1966 and in 1972, he designed fabrics for Tahiti Imports fashion firm.

He became recognized artistically as a young master by an executive of the Norwegian Arts and Craft Museum who visited an art gallery in Hawaii and then organized various exhibitions in Scandinavia in 1968.

Career
Prior to his work in Kauai, Jerome Wallace spent months in Bali, Indonesia, learning the original batik techniques from the natives. He came to Kauai in the early 1960's and besides making art, he practiced meditation and yoga, in a cottage near Anahola where clean waters flowed from a mossy stream-fed chute of Waipahee Slide, a remnant of a slippery lava tube. He used hand-woven silk and applied colors and dyes in resist technique derived from the plants, earth and sea creatures found on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. He created yellow dye from the cotton blossom, Gossypium tomentosum, commonly known as maʻo, huluhulu or Hawaiian cotton, the Kukui nut (Aleurites moluccanus) at different -stages provided red and rust and when mixed with soot and oil, brown and black. Orange was derived from the core of the avocado seed; yellow orange from certain barks, Noni bark (Morinda citrifolia) and kukui bark produce the yellow-oranges and greens from lichens such as Xanthoparmelia mougeotii, and mosses all collected and processed by the artist, Jerome Wallace in preparation for his batik pieces. He obtained the purple color from a sea snail, Janthina janthina that comes in as a host with Portuguese man o' war in the same manner as the Romans extracted dye called Tyrian Purple. He also made purple from a combination of birch bark, elder, cochineal, cudbear- a dye extracted from orchil lichens and orchid. To prepare the fabric Jerome Wallace soaked it for a month or longer in heated coconut milk to make the material receptive to colors. He waxed the material with local beeswax, and then made accordion folds that radiate from the center of the fabric. Many of the batiks were of grand scale, one created for the Kauai Museum measured 40 feet by15 feet in length.

Lee Nordness, an art dealer who founded the Nordness Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York and who organized the international traveling exhibitions of American art and crafts for Johnson Wax, said in 1968 that Wallace was "one of the greatest batik men in the world". In 1970, James W. Foster, director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, said that Wallace "raised the ancient batik medium to a new level of technical and aesthetic achievement".

Personal life
March 1986, Soho Too Gallery in Honolulu, Hawaii held an exhibit for Jerome Wallace and Gwen Lux, an American sculptor known for her abstraction and frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. Jerome Wallace and Gwen Lux were married by the time of her death in August 1986.

Major exhibitions

 * 1967 Kauai Museum, Lihue, Kauai, Batik artist Jerome Wallace and Irving Jenkin
 * 1967 Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design Kunstindustrimuseet Norway
 * 1968 Stravenger, Kunstiforeningen, Norway
 * 1969 Objects, USA, "Objects: U.S.A.," which toured the United States and Europe from 1969 to 1973
 * 1970 The Taft Museum, Cincinnati, OH
 * 1970 The Wichita Art Museum, Wichita KS
 * 1971 Fort Lauderdale Museum of Arts, Ft. Lauderdale Florida
 * 1971-72 La Societe des Amis de la Bibliotheque Forney and Les Services Culturels Americains presented at the Hotel de Sens, the National museum Crafts of France
 * 1972 Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts
 * 1974 Moss, Norway Gallery F 15
 * 1974 Ibsen House, Skien Norway
 * 1975  Stavanger Kunstforeningen, Norway.
 * 1981 The Edward-Dean Museum’ North Gallery, Riverside County Art and Culture Center, Cherry Valley, CA "Under Saturn’s Influence” a retrospective of batiks by artist Jerome Wallace