Floyd Memorial Library’s new art exhibition — Stow Wengenroth + The Flacks: The Greenport Group — which opened on April 24, is an eclectic grouping of work by Stow Wengenroth, his wife Edith Flack Ackley, and her sister Marjorie Flack, all former Greenport residents who were well-known for their respective art. Most of the pieces in the show are on loan from the private collection of Cutchogue resident Joanna Lane.
Left: Stow Wengenroth, New Moon, n.d. Oil on board. Collection of Joanna Lane. Right: Stow Wengenroth, Mount Desert Island, Maine, n.d. Oil on board. Collection of Joanna Lane. (Photo Credit: Stephanie Villani)
American painter Andrew Wyeth called Wengenroth “America’s greatest living artist working in black and white.” Known for his exceptional lithographs, the Brooklyn-born artist’s works are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. In the Floyd exhibition, there are also a number of Wengenroth’s watercolors, oils and intricate drawings, many of them of scenes of Greenport, where he and Edith lived for more than 20 years from the early 1950s until the early 1970s.
Handmade dolls and books by Edith Flack Ackley on display at the Floyd Memorial Library. (Photo Credit: Stephanie Villani)
Greenport-born Edith Flack Ackley was Wengenroth’s wife, a writer and an artist on her own merit — a well-known doll and marionette-maker whose work was displayed in the windows of Elizabeth Arden’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City. She made a living running her own doll shop and wrote how-to books aimed at women, like Dolls to Make for Fun and Profit, published in 1951. Ackley’s original dolls and books are on display at the library, but since her original marionettes are so rare, the installation instead features two cloth marionettes made by contemporary puppet-maker Carmen Campos, Ed.D.
A selection of children’s books by Marjorie Flack, with one inscribed “to the children who come to the Greenport Public Library” from Flack. (Photo Credit: Stephanie Villani)
Storybook author and illustrator Marjorie Flack, Edith’s sister, is represented at the show by several picture books, the best known of which are The Story about Ping (published in 1933 and popularized on the Captain Kangaroo television show) and her series of books about her Scottish terrier Angus — Angus and the Ducks (1930), Angus and the Cat (1931), and Angus Lost (1932). One of the books at the exhibition is inscribed with a dedication by Marjorie “to the children who come to the Greenport Public Library — and who enjoy the books they find there, as I did when I was a little girl.”
Almost as interesting as the exhibit itself is the story of how it came to be. Joanna Lane had purchased the Flack Building, also known as the Timson House Hotel and Flack Building at 437-443 Main Street in Greenport, in the early 2000s.
Lane, who has a film and television production background, began researching the building’s history and says that “by 2006 I had already documented eleven pages of detailed history of the building, the Timson family, the Flacks and the artists whose lives converged there.”
In August 2004, Lane purchased the Stow Wengenroth Estate Collection from Paul Wingett of Galerie Pelar in Greenport. “Along with the 49 works — oils, watercolors, and drawings — the collection came with remarkable estate papers: annotated newspaper cuttings, a few bird prints, an envelope from the Smithsonian Institution addressed to Stow at 717 Main Street, Greenport (now in the reading room display case at the exhibition), and a letter from Ronald and Joan Stuckey, who wrote the two definitive books on Wengenroth’s lithographs — considered the seminal authority on this artist.”
With the support of Glynis Berry and Jessica Lee, whom Lane met in a writing workshop at the North Fork Arts Center in Greenport, she set up the first version of the exhibit at her home with work from all three artists, along with some reproduction dolls and estate papers. Sally Grant, the library’s art exhibits curator, came to see it, and the plans for the exhibit took shape.
Floyd Memorial Library contributed three Wengenroth lithographic prints and items donated by the Flack sisters and Telka Ackerly, Edith’s daughter. “We agreed from the outset that she [Grant] would research and write the bios for Marjorie and Edith and she ended up writing Stow’s as well,” says Lane.
“I drove the overall narrative, the building history, and the exhibition concept — including the title, Stow Wengenroth + The Flacks, which Sally liked, and she added the subtitle “The Greenport Group,” which I liked. We worked very closely together on the layout, the wall signs, the exhibition introduction, press releases, and flyers over several weeks,” Lane recalls. Lane is now considering a book proposal with the same title as the exhibition.
Stone and Light: Stow Wengenroth, a short documentary by Heather Atwood, is also part of the exhibit; it features some rare film of Wengenroth at work in his Rockport, Mass. studio and discussing the intricacies of working with a limestone lithography stone. Lane hopes to screen the documentary, along with two other related films, at the North Fork Arts Center.
Available at the exhibit and perhaps of interest to younger viewers is a pattern taken from Ackley’s book How to Make Marionettes and a paper excerpt from the book itself with puppet-making instructions. Carmen Campos, a part-time Cutchogue resident and a longtime Spanish teacher, taught herself how to make puppets and uses them as a teaching tool in the classroom.
Curator Grant asked Campos to make two marionettes in the style of Edith Flack Ackley. “What most impressed me was that her book (especially at that time) must have inspired so many children to try their hand at making marionettes. She expressed in her book a passion for seeing marionette shows in schools and communities. That is exactly what I would like to see!” Campos says. Campos’ own website shows teachers how puppets can be used in the classroom and how communities might encourage children to make puppets on their own.
Left: Marionettes made by Carmen Campos expressly for the exhibition. (Photo Credit: Stephanie Villani) Right: Sally Grant, Floyd Memorial Library’s art exhibits curator, and Carmen Campos. (Photo Courtesy of the Floyd Memorial Library)
The two large marionettes displayed in the show are named Abril and Julio; “I wanted to reflect a more modern take but still keep the ‘old-fashioned’ appeal,” says Campos. Her first time making cloth marionettes, Campos says it took about two weeks to make the large, heavy puppets. “Stringing marionettes can be an art in itself,” she says.
Campos will be teaching a workshop for teachers in June in Manhattan, and a children’s workshop at Front Street Station in Greenport on July 15 and at the Peconic Community School camp on July 22.
During their time in Greenport, Wengenroth and Ackley lived at 717 Main Street. They both died in the 1970s and are buried in a shared plot in Greenport’s Sterling Cemetery.
Their legacy lives on through their extraordinary artwork. Head on over to the Floyd Memorial Library for a peek at this unique show, which will be on display until June 14, 2026.
