Renowned artist Monty Wanamaker passed away suddenly at his Main Street museum Tuesday morning.
Wanamaker, who operated Southern Museum and Galleries of Photography, Culture and History with Chris Keathley, has an exhibit on display at Magness Library.

Library director Brad Walker says the display will remain up in memory of a dear friend.

“He was a wonderfully talented artist,” said Walker. “He was also part of my family. This is a great loss to McMinnville and Warren County. His artwork will be here for the next week on display.”

After attending Memphis Academy of Art and other regional colleges, Wanamaker spent a year as assistant to the director of the Parthenon Museum. He then moved to Washington, D.C. where he became a member of the staff of The Phillips Collection, this country’s premiere galley of modern art. It was during the years he spent apprenticing at this famous museum of art his aesthetic and artistic perceptions were honed and refined and his own personal aesthetic goals considerably broadened.

In 1968, after moving to New York City where he lived for seven years, he went on to study at the prestigious Art Students League where he studied printmaking and portrait painting. During this time two successful solo shows of his art were presented in New York. Art critics, in published reviews, called him a “master craftsman” and dubbed him a “mythic symbolist.”

Having written poetry as well throughout his life, he presented numerous multi-media concerts of his poetry.
A major dramatic event was staged in 1979 in New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine – presently the world’s largest Gothic Cathedral.

The artist’s work, personally developed over a 25-year span, was shown for the first time in March 1999 at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga.

Southern Museum and Galleries of Photography, Culture and History opened in November 2001.

Obituary information for Mr. Wanamaker was incomplete at press time.