Photos by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Branch's sculpting tools: "The hands in the clay, the hands in the earth, the hand on the shovel, that's what comes with me," she says.

Betty Branch's sculpture has always been self-supporting. These days, some of her commissions are valued at $100,000 or higher.

Betty Branch works on a clay figure in her Warehouse Row studio in downtown Roanoke. She plans to use the clay form as a casting for a terra cotta sculpture.

Through the first four decades of her life, Betty Branch created art, but she didn't think of herself as an artist.

"I had eight babies," she said. "That's a lot of distraction going on there."

Yet in her mid-40s, as a student at what's now Hollins University, she discovered sculpture.

"I thought I wanted to be a counselor," she said, but then, "I realized that I was taking every art course that was available. My thought was that when I was 90, I would be a lot happier making art than anything else."

The school where the Roanoke sculptor discovered her passion will host the first retrospective exhibit of her art, featuring works in marble, porcelain, clay and bronze, as well as drawings and a video of a performance piece in which figures made of burlap and straw were set on fire.

"Through a Crow's Eye: A Retrospective" opens Thursday at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University. The exhibit is not just Branch's first retrospective but an exhibit on a magnitude that hasn't been attempted at the Wilson Museum before.

"This is the largest thing we've ever done at our museum," said Executive Director Amy Moorefield, who curated the exhibit. The retrospective will not only fill all the museum's galleries, but several sculptures will be on display outdoors, and an entire hillside has been specially trimmed to create a temporary new artwork designed by Branch called "Double Spiral."

Moorefield also assembled an elaborate catalog with essays about Branch's career to accompany the exhibit. "She has everything that a curator of a museum would hope to showcase."

A Branch piece owned by nationally renowned photographer Sally Mann, "Maternica Rustica," is part of the exhibit.

Mann, also a Hollins graduate, considers Branch a mentor.

"I miss it every day it is at Hollins," Mann said about the sculpture, "but I am pleased that the viewers can see this sublime example of Betty's art and talent."

A walk downtown

Branch's art can be imposing and stately or explosively expressive. Just take a brief stroll through downtown Roanoke.

In front of the Virginia Museum of Transportation looms the work likely most familiar to Roanoke Valley residents, "Fallen Firefighter." The massive bronze casting of a firefighter down on one knee with bowed head shows him in a pose of mourning, dressed in his fireman's coat, his hat by his feet. The sculpture was commissioned by the city of Roanoke for $83,500 to honor its firefighters killed in the line of duty.

Just a few blocks away, at the Taubman Museum of Art, behind the plate glass off Salem Avenue, a faceless woman carved of pink Portuguese marble arches her back in exuberant, sensuous motion as her hair spills beneath her and her gown flows behind her. Called simply "Dancer," the statue is more typical of what Branch makes when she follows her own muse -- figures, often abstract in some way, that explore the female form and symbolic aspects of womanhood.

Once she made the decision that she wanted to pursue her art full time, "the work that has interested me the most has always been female related," she said.

And in between these two Branch pieces is her studio and workshop on Norfolk Avenue's Warehouse Row. In addition to her own art, it holds artwork done by four of her now-grown children. They have held yearly exhibits of their work, called "Five Branches."

"We are a family of artists, teachers and entrepreneurs," she said.

Making things

In person, Branch is charmingly genteel. The 74-year-old is soft-spoken and considers her words carefully. She grew up in West Virginia, where her father, Claude McAlister, worked in road construction. She was an only child, and a creative one, confident that anything she wanted to make, she could make. When she played, most of the time it involved making things.

Using tarpaulins, she'd build imaginary multiple-room houses in the woods. She'd recruit a friend to play Tarzan and Jane. "I always made the other girl be Tarzan," she said.

And all the time, she drew. She took art classes in school. She entered an oil painting competition in fourth grade and got as far as the statewide finals.

Still, she had no ambition to be an artist.

"Our milieu did not include art, and that sort of thing was not something that I aspired to," she said.

Art started as crafts

Her family moved to Roanoke when she was in junior high school. At Jefferson High School, she did not take art classes.

She went to college in Tennessee for a year, and there tried taking art, but at age 19 left to marry Billy Branch.

They moved to Maryland, where her husband, who was drafted during the Korean War and became a conscientious objector, wound up working as an engineer in the U.S. Bureau of Standards. She would paint on refrigerator carton panels to make things for the walls, she said.

When he was discharged, they moved to Georgia, where her first two children were born. Then, in 1958, they moved to Roanoke and stayed. While he bought out her father's construction business and built his own successful company, now called The Branch Group Inc. and headquartered on Rutherford Avenue, she raised their children, who eventually totaled eight.

She still did creative things in what little time she had, but "it just didn't feel like art. It felt like furnishing a house. It felt like making a table. It felt like putting something on the wall."

She made curtains and drapes. She took painting and other art courses through the years, still thinking about a career. "For many years, I painted late at night, after all the kids were in bed."

She recalled piling her children in the car to drive to craft shows to sell her wares and sometimes, even to help make them.

Katey Branch, 49, is the fourth Branch child. She's a massage therapist and musician who lives in Maine, and recalled using pomegranate seeds to make paper at one craft show.

Her mother gave her her first guitar, she said, and the two would play together outside their bedrooms in the evenings.

'Hands in the clay'

Betty Branch eventually had a couple of one-woman shows as a painter. "I was giving some paintings away. I began to sell some of them."

In the mid-1970s, when she was in her early 40s and her youngest child was in kindergarten, Branch returned to school. She went to Hollins College as a psychology major, imagining she wanted to pursue that career. By then she had established a reputation as a painter -- but still didn't consider herself an artist.

But about two-thirds of the way through the program, she realized she was taking every art course she could. During a pottery class, her first introduction to clay, "The pots sprouted arms and legs and heads."

At school and on her own she created what she called "womb pots," amorphous shaped vessels with faces. Then a Hollins class gave her the opportunity to create a life-sized figure sculpture, and she realized she found something she wanted to do for the rest of her life.

"The human figure was all I wanted to focus on."

She could just as easily have been set on fire creatively by writing, she said. "If I were a writer, I would be writing these things, and I would be saying the exact same thing that I'm saying in sculpture."

Yet her instincts are more sensory. "The hands in the clay, the hands in the earth, the hand on the shovel, that's what comes with me."

Setting her own fires

Katey Branch said that when her mother made those decisions, she challenged her fundamentalist Christian upbringing and the traditional roles it assigned to women by exploring "alternate ways of walking in the world, as an artist, as an empowered woman. She stood up for herself."

Balancing her marriage, her quest "to find her own truth" and raising her children while encouraging them to follow their own paths were big challenges for her mother, Katey Branch said.

Betty Branch said sculpture brought out in her "the need to prove oneself as an autonomous being."

From the beginning, she wanted her pursuit of sculpture to support itself, and it has and still does, she said. In 1982 the prices on her sculptures ranged from $50 to $2,500. And her sculptures sold.

Mann met her during this period. "I remember going to photograph her work back in the early '80s," she wrote in an e-mail. "She had a dusty garret studio, very romantic in a Left Bank kind of way, and there this mother of eight children came to work in peace and quiet.

"I was just blown away by her energy, her talent, her beauty and her work. I wanted to be just like her ... but with five less children."

By 1985, she had 30 exhibits and commissions in places including galleries in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii. The New York Times published a photograph of one of her "Dragon's Teeth" sculptures in 1986, and her bronze nude female figure "Isabel" was selected to be part of the Sculpture Walk at ArtExpo '86 in New York.

In that same year she orchestrated a performance art piece, "Ritual Fire," the video of which will be played as part of the Wilson Museum retrospective.

She had made a series of large humanoid figures out of burlap and straw called "Mothers." Symbolic representations of womanhood, they ranged in height from 5 to 10 feet. They weren't keeping well in her studio -- at one point she moved them and moths flew out -- so she began thinking about a way to give them a proper send-off.

She began thinking about "suttee," an ancient ritual in Indian culture, now outlawed, in which a widow was expected to throw herself on the pyre of her husband. That gave her an idea for what to do with the sculptures -- to make a statement against such practices.

"Any fires that I'm in, I'm going to set myself," Branch said.

She anchored nine of the figures on a raft and floated them on a lagoon in a rock quarry, and set them on fire. As about 30 people watched, the flames consumed the figures. A bagpiper and drummer volunteered to play as the figures began to fall.

That event became the source of a number of Branch's later bronze sculptures, such as the abstract and fluid "Fire Dancer" series. "I saw figures in the flames that were not the figures I was burning."

Finding her joy

The Wilson Museum exhibit spotlights another pivotal moment in Branch's career.

In a poem, Branch describes a 1984 incident in which a noisy crow that repeatedly disturbed her peace so upset her that she shot it -- but its death haunted her, and led to the crow becoming a recurring motif in her art.

The bird at first appeared in her work as a symbol of penitence, but it came to mean other things. Moorefield sees the crow as a symbol of aging, and also a figure that stands in for Branch herself.

"It is a symbol of expiations, regeneration and rebirth," Branch said. "Without my consciously coming to that conclusion, that's what it became for me."

She said there is a clear demarcation in her mind between works that originated from a feeling or an experience of her own and commission work. She learned quickly and early not to accept commissions for pieces that did not interest her as an artist.

When a commission engages the artist's imagination, "it's like falling in love with someone," she said, and "when that happens, then good could only come of it." Such was the case with the firefighter memorial.

Katey Branch credits her mother with "shaking the rules," not breaking them, to help make way for younger generations of women artists -- "loosening the soil for those of us who are coming after her."

Betty Branch's take on her body of work is more modest.

"I think that if there is a legacy," she said, "it's the obvious joy I've found in making art."