Miriam McClung

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Miriam Maddox Jackson McClung (born 1935 in Birmingham) is a notable painter.

Miriam was the youngest child born to real estate developer Philip Jackson Sr and his wife, the former Margaret "Ellen" Maddox. She grew up in Mountain Brook and attended Mountain Brook Elementary School and Shades Valley High School as part of the first graduating class of 1953. While in elementary school, she pursued artistic studies with Louise Cone at her studio in the former Margaret Allen School on Highland Avenue and also learned from visiting museums with her family. At Shades Valley she was exposed to modern painting by art teacher LaNeil Wilson.

Miriam enrolled at the University of Alabama as a fine arts major, studying under Richard Zoellner and Jack Granata, and alongside classmates such as Dale Kennington and William Christenberry. During the summers she participated in art tours of Europe and classes in Boulder, Colorado with Mark Rothko. After graduating in 1957 she moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League, where she practiced abstract art. She also found a position assisting associate curator Marshall Bowman Davidson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Miriam moved back to Birmingham in 1959 and attended business classes at Alverson-Draughon College. She was briefly employed as a stenographer for vice president Joseph Volker at the University of Alabama's Birmingham Extension Center. She turned from abstraction to more impressionist and realist art, and took private classes from Max Hellman, Billy Wilson, Lem McDaniels, Arthur Stewart, and Billy McVoy; and worked in support of the newly-established Birmingham Museum of Art.

In 1963 Miriam attended the Farnsworth School of Art founded by Jerry and Helen Farnsworth in Sarasota, Florida. Miriam married dentist Sonny McClung in the 1960s and became a stepmother to his four children. Her own son, Frank, was born in 1969. Dr McClung later attempted suicide and was left paralyzed. She took charge as full-time caregiver while pursuing her painting as a profession from home. She has exhibited her with through the Alabama Pastel Society, the Watercolor Society of Alabama, the Mountain Brook Art Festival and the Magic City Art Connection.

McClung's work was included in the "Birmingham Bienniel" organized by the Birmingham Art Association in 1985, and in a "Birmingham - Hitachi Exhibition of Contemporary Birmingham Artists" organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art which traveled to Birmingham's sister city of Hitachi, Japan in 1989.

In the 1980s, McClung was able to take additional summer art classes with Murray Wentworth and Larry Webster at the Mid-coast Maine Watercolor Workshop in Port Clyde, Maine, and at Seecelo, a 52-acre art colony founded by Frank and Francis Herring in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Burnsville, North Carolina with John Bryan and Everret Kivette. She also began teaching art classes to residents at St. Martin's in the Pines. In the late 1980s she committed to expressing her Christian faith through her artwork. She had work included in an exhibition at the Coleman Center for the Arts in York in 1992 and at the Walton Fine Art Center at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas in 2002.

Sonny died in 2001. Able to undertake more extensive travel, McClung visited biblical sites in Israel in 2003 and produced a series of impressionistic views under the theme of "Walking in His Footsteps." The series has been exhibited several times, including a solo exhibition at the Webb Hall Gallery at the University of West Alabama in 2012.

McClung has self-published two monographs through Blurb Books, The Way of the Cross in 2011 and Walking in His Footsteps in 2012. She was featured in a retrospective exhibition at Jacksonville State University's Roundhouse Gallery and another at Aldridge Gardens, both in 2019.

Miriam moved to Crossville, Tennessee to live with her son's family during the COVID pandemic in 2021.

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