Aurelia Sellman *
SELLMAN, Aurelia Mozell “Patti,” 98, a nationally recognized southern visionary folk artist, who signed her art work “Grandma Mozell,” died on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, after a brief illness, at her home in Richmond. A beloved wife, mother, grandmother, great- grandmother, sister, aunt and friend. She was predeceased by her husband of 73 years, Theodore “Ted” Ernest Sellman. She is survived by her son, James Sellman (Barbara) of Richmond; her sister, Beverly McElroy of Albuquerque, N.M.; grandsons, Michael Bruce Sellman (Amy Grace) of New York, N.Y. and Jeffrey Bruce Sellman of Philadelphia, Pa.; a great- granddaughter, Astrid Marie Grace Sellman of New York, N.Y.; and a host of friends and relatives. She was born and raised in the “Land of Enchantment,” 50 miles from Albuquerque, N.M., on April 21, 1918. The unspoiled beauty of the southwest, ancient and dynamic traditions of the Pueblo and Navajo cultures and her father’s experience working at Los Alamos and Roswell during the 1940s, were events that deeply influenced her life and art. Making her first large quilt at age 16, she continued to create brightly colored fabric dolls, especially animals and their clothing. With the illness and death of her husband in 2011, she was filled with a flood of energy, vigor and incessant creativity, experiencing an increased “inner drive” and a zeal for “calling into being” a magical cosmology of highly stylized, fantastical-anthropomorphric creatures, their friends, pets, families and related abstractions from outer space. In the past five years Grandma Mozell’s output has exceeded 2500 drawings and paper constructions, with her work finding homes in private collections from Florida to New York. She was featured in a review of her career in the Folk Art Society of America Messenger in 2013 and a human interest article by Bill Lohmann in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2014. Memorializing her art and thoughts, a children’s book, Short Stories for Short People By A Short Grandma and Travels With Teddy, A Love Story are planned for publication in the Autumn of 2017. While busy with creative activities and family in the past 80 years, she has served in positions of leadership in church, community and school activities in New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia and Virginia. Operating food banks, home visits to the elderly, the ill and work with underprivileged children were of special interest. She felt that all people should have the opportunity to live a dignified life and be honored without concerns for color, ethnicity, race, religion or position. She was a member of the Bon Air Christian Church and the Order of the Eastern Star. Higher education included studies at the University of Denver. Her professional career included management positions in the J.C. Penney and Sears and Roebuck Companies. Her friends and family will remember her as Grandma Mozell or “The Moomzie,” who had the ability to maintain optimism, laugh at and appreciate the paradoxes of life, take enormous pleasure in the accomplishments of her family and the birth of her great-granddaughter, live the golden rule daily and find beauty and fascination in the simple creations of man and nature. Grandma Mozell’s lasting legacy will be the love, goodwill and inspiration she left with everyone from next-door neighbors to distant travelers. In creating her visionary art, she reminds us that the creative process remains crucially robust and essential to the human condition, knowing no age, cultural or geographical boundaries or limits. Graveside services will be held 3 p.m. Friday, May 13, at Hollywood Cemetery, 412 S. Cherry St. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to Shriners Hospital for Children, c/o ACCA Shrine Center, 1712 Bellevue Ave., Richmond, Va. 23227
TD-May 11, 2016