User:Wmcconnell

Marjorie J. McConnell (March 10, 1917 - March 11, 2019). Born Marjorie Franklin Johnson to Benjamin Hughes Johnson and Ethel Chandler Franklin Johnson of Kirkwood, Missouri, she was an American artist and author.

The grand-daughter of Irish immigrants and one of four children (her sisters were Mary Elizabeth, Josephine, and Florence), she received her diploma from Webster Groves High School in Webster Groves, Missouri, her undergraduate degree from Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, and her Master of Arts from Teachers’ College of Columbia University in New York City. She also attended the New Bauhaus founded by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, Illinois. For a time, she was a free-spirited member of the Circle Pines Cooperative Camp, and she worked at the Monroe Community Center, both in Michigan. She was called by a Quaker organization to serve the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, who had been interned unjustly in Arkansas during World War II. She went east to pursue her graduate degree and eventually met her future husband on the steps of the Teachers’ College main building. Prior to her marriage she participated in an academic study trip to Guatemala together with other art teachers, and this experience would hold a significant place in her memory all her life. She first taught art in a high school in Ossining, New York before taking the position that would be the center of her professional life at Plainfield High School in Plainfield, New Jersey, where she taught from the 1950s through 1980s with a brief hiatus when she moved to Kingston, Rhode Island, where her son was born.

Both during her time as a teacher and continuing beyond her retirement she dedicated her artistic talents to work in painting, textiles, ceramics, and wood-carving. She had several solo shows and participated in numerous group shows in New Jersey and Ohio, and she was actually quite honored when some of her work was stolen from the Cincinnati Nature Center. The sister of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Josephine Johnson, Marjorie herself was also talented with words, and she wrote poems and prose that often accompanied her artwork. Together with her family she traveled to many parts of northern and Mediterranean Europe. In her retirement, McConnell lived in Florida and continued to create artwork and to support environmental and social causes right up to the age of 102. On her 100th birthday, she was honored with a speech delivered by her congresswoman on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.