Geneva Mercer: life and works

Geneva Mercer (January 27, 1889 – March 2, 1984) was an American artiste from Alabama. Best known as a sculptor, she was as a consequence an clever painter in her unconventional years. Although most of her early play-act with Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti was done under his name, her best known individual works include Joyous Boy, Pied Piper, the Flimp Fountain, and several Julia Tutwiler sculptures located at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, University of Alabama, and University of Montevallo. She was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in 1989.

Geneva Mercer was born in the little community of Jefferson in Marengo County on January 27, 1889. Her parents were Thomas Barton Mercer and Emma Elizabeth Berry. She attended the local village school, where she modeled her first sculpture, a crude red clay bust, at the age of nine. Her intellectual recognized that she had a natural capacity and obtained modeling wax and a book upon sculpting for her. She completed tall school in 1904 and went upon to attend the State Normal School at Livingston, now known as the University of West Alabama. While there, her talents curious the school’s president, Julia Tutwiler. Tutwiler secured an art researcher from Chicago to teach at the scholarly and give counsel in modeling to Mercer.

Tutwiler far ahead took some of Mercer’s sculptures to Birmingham to display at the Commercial Club of Birmingham. Giuseppe Moretti, who had been commissioned by the Commercial Club in 1904 to create the monumental Vulcan statue for the city’s display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, saw Mercer’s performance and credited her talent. He asked her if she would intern at his studio. She served as his apprentice from 1907 to 1909 and would remain as his accomplice until his death in 1935.

In 1909 Mercer left Alabama next Moretti and his wife, Dorothea Long Moretti, and relocated to New York City. Over the bordering thirteen years, in auxiliary to New York, the trio lived in Pittsburgh, Florence, and Havana. One of Moretti and Mercer’s greatest accomplishments during this become old was the finishing of Moretti’s ninety-seven sculptures for the Gran Teatro de la Habana. They returned to Alabama from 1923 to 1925, where Moretti built a house and studio near his Talladega County marble quarries.

Due to the failure of the quarries and a variety of new circumstances, they after that returned to Moretti’s indigenous Italy. Once there, the Morettis and Mercer occupied a large villa and studio in Sanremo. There Moretti and Mercer completed three of his last major American commissions together, Atlanta’s Governor Brown Memorial, Nashville’s Battle of Nashville Monument, and Dayton’s John Henry Patterson Memorial. Moretti was diagnosed in the express of cancer just about 1930 and died in 1935. Mercer continued to comport yourself his studio for some era after his death, producing many of her own works there.

Mercer difficult returned to the United States and eventually established in Demopolis, Alabama, near her birthplace. She died there on March 2, 1984, and was buried in the Jefferson Cemetery.