La Wilson, 93, Dies; Made Art in Elaborate Assemblages

La Wilson, an enigmatic assemblage artist who took ordinary objects — from dice, plastic forks and alphabet blocks to bullet casings, fake guns and jewelry — and arranged them in boxes, giving them enthralling new life, died March 30 in Hudson, Ohio, a suburb of Akron. She was 93.

Her daughter, Jenny Wilson, said the cause was most likely complications of two recent strokes.

La Wilson did not plan her elaborate constructions, which hinted at surrealism and modernism. She did not explain their meaning (if they had any — she left that up to the observer). And she did not say why she chose particular items and arranged them as she did in boxes and other containers.

“It’s just trial and error,” she said in a short biographical film made in 2011 for the Cleveland Arts Prize, which she won in 1993. She added, “I don’t have anything in my head that I want them to say, but it’s entirely what happens when they get together that makes the story, so the story is brand new to me.”

Many of Wilson’s works are in the permanent collections of several museums — including the Akron Art Museum — and have been the subject of numerous exhibitions.

“The beauty in her work,” said Liz Carney, assistant curator of the Akron museum, which exhibited Wilson’s work several times, “is that by assembling those objects into new compositions, they become very compelling and visually delightful. They become something extraordinary.”

Inside the home garage that was long ago converted into her studio, Wilson worked in a uniform that included knickers, long socks and a vest. The shelves in the room were filled with the ephemera that she had purchased at five-and-dime stores, antique shops and flea markets or was given by friends and neighbors. She used her daughter’s toys, including a tiny doll.

“I simply collect things that appeal to me, without any judgment,” Wilson said in the film.

The effect of walking into her studio, John Davis, her dealer, said in a telephone interview, “was like walking into one of her boxes.”

The slim rectangular box that she used in “Domino Theory” (2008), for example, contains matchsticks in one compartment, dominoes wrapped in rosaries in a second one, rulers and printers’ letters in a third, wooden pieces in a fourth, and thimbles in a fifth.

“Etude” (2010) is less of a hodgepodge of tchotchkes — the piano hammers she placed at odd angles within a small box look unrecognizable as parts of a musical instrument.

In a New York Times review of a show in 1999 at Davis’ gallery in Hudson, New York, in Columbia County, Edward Gomez wrote that Wilson had remade ordinary items into “objects of power, danger, wonder or warning, all with a mysterious aura and an offbeat, lopsided charm.”

In “Crossways,” one of the assemblages at the Hudson show, Wilson used drumsticks, electric train tracks and rusted cookie cutters to create what Gomez called “a near-Gothic evocation of the sacred within the mundane.”

She was born Mary Alice Purcell on May 26, 1924, in Corning, New York, where she grew up. Her father, Justin, was a lawyer and car dealer; her mother, the former Alice McAvoy, was a homemaker.

When Mary was a baby, her brother, Tom, who was a year or so older, mispronounced her name as “La,” and it stuck. She later dropped out of Smith College to marry David Wilson and moved with him to Akron, where he attended law school. They later moved to Hudson.

A homemaker with three children, La Wilson began tilting toward art in her 30s, when she took a painting class at the Akron Art Institute (now the Akron Art Museum). She added three-dimensional objects to her canvases and then began to sculpt.

Her first exhibition of assemblages was in 1959 at the Akron museum, which held a retrospective in 2014 when she turned 90. One piece in the latter show was “Homage to Jackson Pollock,” her crowded 1980 tribute to that abstract expressionist painter using rosaries and other beads, a toy airplane, erasers, a watch, a pocketknife, tinsel, charms and plastic letters.

Besides her daughter, Wilson is survived by her sons David and Robert; her brother Tom; her sister, Ellen Carver; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Her marriage to Wilson ended in divorce.

La Wilson — who stopped working several years ago when spinal stenosis limited her mobility — approached her success with amazement, surprised that people found her work significant enough to praise and buy it.

“It’s a remarkable thing that somebody would pay money for a piece of work,” she told the Sunday magazine of The Akron Beacon Journal in 1999. “For somebody of my generation ... Women didn’t work. You bake the cakes and the pies but nobody pays you. You’re used to the praise — ‘That’s the best cake I ever had,’ or ‘the best roast beef’ — but nobody pays you.”

Her works currently sell for about $5,000 each, Davis said.