Philly artist commissioned for Wells Fargo’s corporate offices in NYC’s Hudson Yards

NEW YORK — Philly mixed-media artist Pauline Houston-McCall beamed as she peeled back the sheet of plastic covering her oil painting, Sala-Adoni. The large work, hanging in a conference room at Wells Fargo’s new corporate offices in New York’s skyline-altering Hudson Yards complex, is part of a 19-piece collection — 11 sculptures and eight paintings — that the artist was commissioned to create for the location.

Once the covering was removed, she reached into her bag for a permanent marker and gingerly signed her name in the bottom right-hand corner.

For Houston-McCall, 54, the Hudson Yards commission, officially unveiled on Tuesday, Aug. 6, is a highlight of a long artistic career. Her work has been exhibited in and around Philadelphia since the early ’90s at venues that include the Painted Bride, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Ellen Powell Tiberino Museum, and Rutgers-Camden’s Stedman Gallery.

But she’d never before received a commission of this magnitude. "It feels like a dream that I wasn’t allowed to dream,” she said. “I feel angelic.”

Her largest piece, Hudson Blue, hangs on a wall in a different Wells Fargo conference room, overlooking the Hudson River from 63 floors up.

Houston-McCall said it isn’t lost on her that most of the people who will be at the conference table there aren’t likely to be people of color. New York has a 3-1 ratio of white-to-black workers in all occupations, according to reporting by USA Today, but it’s nearly 6-1 in business and finance.

Growing up in Germantown, Houston-McCall cherished the time she spent wandering the Philadelphia Museum of Art, hand in hand with with her father, developing an affinity for fine art.

She was one of 24 children in a blended family, and said she would often have to fight for attention. When her father would take her older siblings to classes at the Art Museum, she protested, in her 6-year-old voice, “I’m the artist!”

Paying things forward at the museum that first inspired her, Houston-McCall later taught art classes there for seven years. She has also taught for Raising Art, a traveling music and art education program that visits public and charter schools in Philadelphia. She trained at both the Community College of Philadelphia and Moore College of Art.

Houston-McCall was 7 when her mother died in childbirth, and that absence has “greatly informed my art practice," she said.

She never learned to swim. When her father took the family to Wissahickon Valley Park, her siblings played in the creek while she sat under a tree with a sketchpad, doodling images of her surroundings.

Linda Foggie, the vice president of project management for Wells Fargo, said she was introduced to Houston-McCall’s work years before they met. Foggie, a Philly resident, had spotted the artist’s work in a local collector’s home and inquired about it.

Later, when seeking artists to fill the Hudson Yards space, she reached out.

“I went and took a look at some of her work, and I told her she was very talented,” Foggie said. “The work I saw was not actually the kind of work that I was interested in for my project. But it looked like she had the potential to do what I was interested in.”

Houston-McCall says most of her work is “representational, figurative, or something that’s easily recognizable," but Foggie wanted something more abstract, drawing from colors found in nature.

She was invited to New York to meet the design team to discuss details of her commission. Returning to Philadelphia, she tried to get to work right away — but hit a creative slump.

“I tried to create something and it just wasn’t right,” Houston-McCall said. “From about October to May was a gestation time for me. I was giving birth to all of these pieces.”

For the past 11 years, Houston-McCall has been in an artistic phase that she calls “journey by fire,” where, she said, she attempts to connect elements of the black experience in her work, particularly the sense of peril she feels as a minority under scrutiny. Her work employs natural elements like clay and wood. Sculptures of women, mostly mothers, have become a signature.

“I have come to tell the stories of our African and African American ancestors,” she said. “No matter how sorrowful ... I’ve come to tell the story in the most beautiful way possible.”

She knew that she would have to venture out of her comfort zone to produce abstract works.

Richard Watson, resident artist of Philadelphia’s African American Museum, has mentored Houston-McCall for 25 years and said he knew she was up to the task of producing work for the Wells Fargo commission since her work has never been a “singular essay on black culture, per se.” Rather, he said, she has always attempted to “simplify the connection between people and life.”

As she was searching for inspiration for the Hudson Yards commission, she returned to the Wissahickon.

The colors of water and earthy textures show up multiple times throughout the collection. And one actual memento of the Wissahickon landscape — a piece of fallen oak now treated and mounted — has pride of place at Hudson Yards as the sculpture Yemaya, one of the larger sculptures in the Wells Fargo collection.

“I was walking through the park and I saw this beautiful piece of curved wood that had fallen," Houston-McCall said. She dragged it to her truck, she says, and "and threw it in.”