Enchanting storyteller from Mt. Airy

90-year-old sculptor a force of nature

by STEVEN STANEK

Top left, Charlotte Stokes is literally one-of-a-kind.

Center, this is one of Stokes’ many works that adorn the grounds at Cathedral Village and which are based on real-life children. The 90-year-old artist has arranged for busloads of her Cathedral Village classmates to visit the foundry where her sculptures are bronzed.

Bottom left, this remarkable life-sized sculpture of four boys at Cathedral Village was created by Charlotte based on children she says she saw from a car window while stopped at a red light.

 

When I first phoned Charlotte Stokes, she was noticeably shy and tentative, speaking in a slight telephone voice, “I don’t know what there is to write about. I’m not that interesting.” She was doubtful that an interview was worth my time or the Local’s ink, so I prepared for ways to get her to open up, certain questions that would extract the right anecdotes that make for good reading. When I arrived at her apartment in Cathedral Village, all of that went out the window.

Charlotte, or Chim as she goes by, seemed more like a fairy-tale grandmother from Peter Pan legends or an illustrated storybook. What seemed a fragile voice on the line had more girlish buoyancy in person, a bit of animation and energy fused with each word. Although almost 90 years old, she tells wide-eyed stories of times and places I’ve never seen. I couldn’t help but see children — maybe her grandchildren — gathered around her in a semi-circle, hanging on every word with “oohs” and “aahs.” And during the brief interview, I became one of them, just sitting there, enchanted.

Chim’s story is one that reaches foreign lands and spans decades, chasing all sorts of pursuits and interests, yet it remains grounded in northwest Philadelphia, around Mt. Airy, Germantown and Roxborough. And it is all recorded in her artwork, the walls crowded with canvases or the books stacked on the floor, and the sculptures everywhere that occasionally jump out from the woodwork. Behind each piece of her art there is a romantic tale, a small chapter of a colorful past relegated to some corner of the room.

At the beginning of our talk, Chim showed me her portfolio, some photographs of her sculptures in a glossy album. A sculpture of children stood out, a bronzed group of kids sitting on a park bench, from smallest to tallest, in a crescendo of heights. The original was actually next to me on the bookshelf, but I had seen the piece before. There was a life-size version at the lobby of Cathedral Village, perched cheerfully by the front office, greeting all visitors and residents. In fact, she is the creator of many sculptures there that interact with the landscape, becoming a part of it. Even before we met, her artwork preceded her. I began to understand that her influence was greater than she had let on.

Chim’s most recent sculpture, and perhaps the most storied, is a life-size bust of Chief New Chest, a Piegan (Blackfeet) Indian whose upper torso and head she fashioned from a picture in a book. The image comes from “Portraits from North American Indian Life,” a rare collection of sepia prints from famed photographer Edward S. Curtis. She assured me they don’t stock it at Barnes and Noble, while a mysterious musty odor was emitted from each page.

On a bookmarked page was the picture of the chief. I realized the rigidity of his features and rock-hard tenor of his gaze, which must have prompted her to convert it to bronze in the first place. Working exclusively from this shot, she reconstructed the details of his face to a “t,” although she had no way of knowing the way his hair fell in the back. For help, she contacted the Smithsonian, The National Museum of the American Indian, which mailed her more photos from the period, so she could complete her sculpture with the utmost authenticity.

Since they had helped her complete it, Chim hoped it would be accepted by the Smithsonian; however, only works by Native Americans are displayed there. She was advised, though, that it would be accepted by the Montana Historical Society, and so the chief’s bust was trekked across state lines to a museum display out west.

When new Montana governors are voted in, they walk the floor of the museum to pick out artwork to decorate the new office. Brian Schweitzer, the present governor, chose the bust immediately, and it now sits across from his desk, shooting the same stoic glance across the room as he holds meetings and signs papers. Gov. Schweitzer recently sent Chim a long letter, thanking her for the sculpture and detailing his keen interest in preserving the culture of Native American tribes.

Although the inspiration for the bust was a photograph, the great majority of her art is based on experience and encounters, places she has seen and people she’s met. Her more common muse is the passerby, the street people who will never know they’ve been shaped in clay, hardened and preserved for all time. Chim works from a sharp photographic memory and remarkable mental notes about the way an arm is positioned, the way a certain smile bends or the way someone’s hair falls just so. The results are sculptures that are not completely true to their subjects, but more accurate to the ways she sees them, or remembers them, which means there is a lot of her in the outcome. The children on the park bench outside the front office, each with his/her quirky smile and aesthetic pose, she claims to have seen from a car window while stopped at a red light.

Most of her subjects come from her travels — foreign lands secured in the frame of a mental snapshot. Her paintings, for example, next to each other on the wall are like a multi-hued meeting of the United Nations. As she points to each one and describes the meaning behind it, the broad scope of her life unfurls. One picture is of a peat digger in Ireland she happened to see from a moving bus; another of a busy market she remembers from somewhere in Mexico. She has painted the fog hanging lazily over Glasgow and the vibrant lights of Chinatown in New York City. A small sculpture on the bookshelf, a woman draped over a man, was created weeks after the fact. She saw them in a cathedral in Italy.

Her most immediate impact is at Cathedral Village where she lives, as they are closest to her epicenter. Aside from the sculptures that garnish the grounds, many residents, whom she calls “the most interesting people,” have learned sculpture by watching Chim. She is a leading art student in Cathedral’s “college classes,” which she could easily instruct, but she says, “No, I couldn’t do that.”

She’s arranged for busloads of her classmates to visit the foundry where her sculptures are bronzed. As with a class trip of schoolchildren to the Franklin Institute, she gives them something new, something to learn. She recently crafted a horse for the director of Cathedral Village, Bill Owens, who sports it proudly on his desk. She has raised money to install gardens for communal use. Her daughter, a landscape architect, even designed the layout of the land outside building K. The world around her becomes an extension of her. This is especially true of Philadelphia, where she has lived since 1915.

A brief history: Charlotte and her husband Joe (Francis Joseph Stokes Jr.) have been lifelong Philadelphians. Her grandfather fought in more than 20 Civil War battles, and her father, Charles S. Calwell, was the president of the Corn Exchange National Bank and Trust Company (which later became Girard and then Mellon Bank). Charlotte and her husband lived on Westview Street in Mt. Airy for several years, both of them products of Germantown Friends School (the same location on Coulter Street).

She became a Quaker when she and Joe married, and the wedding was held in the Germantown Meeting House, where they both became regular members. Her husband wrote a book about Caribbean fish called Fishes and Sea Life, which has been mass-produced by Collins Publishing and recognized by the Academy of Natural Sciences. Charlotte did all of the illustrations using a projector, filling the pages from cover to cover with the varied Technicolor of aquatic life. They moved to Cathedral Village together.

As is the case with her involvement in Cathedral Village, Chim has become a force in Philadelphia. She has been integral to the restoration of the Victorian Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion on Tulpehocken Street in Germantown, donating large sums of money toward its restoration and upkeep, and laying a few bricks herself. There have been generous donations to the Philadelphia Zoo and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she once worked as a docent. Her husband was a longtime board member of the Franklin Institute. She is a member of Chestnut Hill Historical Society.

On a lunch break last week, I saw her sculpture in the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Building on Market Street, a collection of children dancing around a lamppost called “Let’s Play.” The piece was based on a fleeting glimpse she caught while passing by in a car. She sold a copy to the late Willard Rouse, famed real estate mogul who developed Liberty Place and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Building. After the interview, I realized there are signs of Charlotte Stokes stamped all through this city, and people walk by her artwork every day.

The last and most telling piece of Charlotte Stokes’ art is one of her books, How to Build Fairy Houses. The book is literally a children’s guide, given step by step, about how to build a proper dwelling for trolls, nymphs, elves and the sort, a literal take on a fantastical practice. Chim wrote, illustrated and hand-printed the book, which was released in 1980 when she was 65, and she has sold many to grown-ups and children alike.

The subject of the book, which features a younger Charlotte as its protagonist, is very revealing of her character. She turns to me and says, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time, it’s that every country has fairies.” I laugh a little and look at her, then down at the book, but I catch her looking back at me, completely serious, “especially in Ireland.”

And then it hits me. Charlotte Stokes is the youngest 90-year-old I’ve ever seen. The giddiness is still in her voice; she’s interested in everything (including her massive collection of rare fans); she has this ability to see beauty in unnoticed places, and she occasionally acts shy; there is still this youthful energy that enables her to make such a big splash in the world despite her age.

I started thinking of her sculptures, most of which depict children dancing, playing in fields, smiling faces, a ring-around-the-rosy on the street corner. There’s a book about fairies and another book about fish. There is innocence and purity to all of it, and the art she creates reminds us of childhood, that there is still time left to be young.

I left her apartment thinking of grass-stained jeans and summer scrapes of the knee, Popsicles and ice cream trucks. Who would’ve ever thought that by interviewing a 90-year-old in a retirement home, I’d leave feeling refreshed, invigorated or enchanted? I’d been in the presence of a force more than a person, a fountain of youth, and I have since started to see it pop up in the strangest places in Philadelphia; her name is often on the tip of my tongue. She commands a powerful post from her apartment in Cathedral Village, and though she won’t admit it, that makes her story worth telling.

saw her sculpture in the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Building on Market Street, a collection of children dancing around a lamppost called “Let’s Play.” The piece was based on a fleeting glimpse she caught while passing by in a car. She sold a copy to the late Willard Rouse, famed real estate mogul who developed Liberty Place and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Building. After the interview, I realized there are signs of Charlotte Stokes stamped all through this city, and people walk by her artwork every day.

The last and most telling piece of Charlotte Stokes’ art is one of her books, How to Build Fairy Houses. The book is literally a children’s guide, given step by step, about how to build a proper dwelling for trolls, nymphs, elves and the sort, a literal take on a fantastical practice. Chim wrote, illustrated and hand-printed the book, which was released in 1980 when she was 65, and she has sold many to grown-ups and children alike.

The subject of the book, which features a younger Charlotte as its protagonist, is very revealing of her character. She turns to me and says, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time, it’s that every country has fairies.” I laugh a little and look at her, then down at the book, but I catch her looking back at me, completely serious, “especially in Ireland.”

And then it hits me. Charlotte Stokes is the youngest 90-year-old I’ve ever seen. The giddiness is still in her voice; she’s interested in everything (including her massive collection of rare fans); she has this ability to see beauty in unnoticed places, and she occasionally acts shy; there is still this youthful energy that enables her to make such a big splash in the world despite her age.

I started thinking of her sculptures, most of which depict children dancing, playing in fields, smiling faces, a ring-around-the-rosy on the street corner. There’s a book about fairies and another book about fish. There is innocence and purity to all of it, and the art she creates reminds us of childhood, that there is still time left to be young.

I left her apartment thinking of grass-stained jeans and summer scrapes on the knee, Popsicles and ice cream trucks. Who would’ve ever thought that by interviewing a 90-year-old in a retirement home, I’d leave feeling refreshed, invigorated or enchanted? I’d been in the presence of a force more than a person, a fountain of youth, and I have since started to see it pop up in the strangest places in Philadelphia; her name is often on the tip of my tongue. She commands a powerful post from her apartment in Cathedral Village, and though she won’t admit it, that makes her story worth telling.