The exhibit, entitled "Lady Bird - Retrospective 1945-1988," continues at Villanova from January 10 to February 9. A public reception to meet the artist will be hosted Friday, January 14, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery, which is located in the Connelly Center on the Villanova campus. Refreshments will be served. There is no charge. The exhibit is co-sponsored by the university's Department of African Studies.

Paintings such as Stompin' at the Savoy, Paintin' the Town, Zoot Suiters, LaBaker, and Jazz Masters depict the Harlem scenes Lady Bird witnessed and some of the luminaries she rubbed elbows with, among them Josephine Baker, Marian Anderson, Eartha Kitt, Miles Davis, and Billy Eckstein.

The civil rights movement, in which she participated, and American slavery are among other subjects of her paintings. While she applies the term "social consciousness" to the content of her work, she refuses to label her style.

"I want my paintings to tell a story. I paint what I feel and experience. I will not be pigeon-holed for any reason, commercial or otherwise," says the artist, who currently resides in Willingboro, NJ.

As a high school student in 1945, Lady Bird won a $1,000 scholarship to attend Pratt. By the end of her first year, she had three major art exhibits. One magazine of the time hailed her as "one of the most promising young artists in the field today."

Even so, she found it difficult to earn a living as an artist. For a time, she painted neckties in a Broadway window and rendered portraits at a Broadway penny arcade. Also a dress designer, she ad a boutique shop just up from Bird Land, where she watched "dressed-to-the-nines" pull up in fancy cars for a night of dancing, a scene she depicts in her painting Paintin' the Town.

With a daughter to raise, Lady Bird took a job as a nurse's aide at New York's Bellevue Hospital, much of it on the prison ward, where she remained for nearly two decades. "We had children murderers, killers from a section of Manhattan called Hell's Kitchen, and others come in. She adds:

"I didn't like that kind of work, but I had to go where I knew I could make a living. A lot of doors in the art world weren't open then to a young African-American woman, no matter how good I might have been."

Even though she stopped exhibiting for a number of years, she continued to paint. "I painted everything I saw," she recalls.

Since her retirement in 1984, Lady Bird's work has been shown extensively in the South Jersey-Philadelphia area. She has also exhibited in Milan, Italy. Earlier this year her works were shown in the Galleria in New York City and the Art Buyers Caravan in Chicago and Atlanta. She has also participated in Art Expos in Philadelphia and New York City.

Lady Bird is included in the book Black Negro Art by Cedric Dover. She has received the Art & Cultural Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and has been accorded eight awards by the Carnegie Institute of Chicago.

In addition to Pratt, Lady Bird also studied at the Art Student League and the Museum of Modern Art Annex, both in New York. She is represented by the Heritage Fine Arts Gallery in Willingboro.