655 Pennsylvania Avenue SE

Riddle #24: Three Paintings by Shirley Immerwieder
March 24–May 2, 2024

The three paintings on view here are the work of Shirley Immerwieder, a self-described looney bird and fantasist who lived alone in a hideous beige house on D St SW. In 2022, she tripped down a flight of stairs and hit her head on a wall corner, dying immediately. The coroner determined that her acute epicondylitis and flipper-like feet contributed to fall.

While she painted every day, she never considered herself a painter, and never showed anyone her work, mostly because she regarded herself as being naively happy but moreover talentless.

Many, many years ago, while vacuuming, without a vacuum in hand, all the windows in her rural, rented house imploded for no apparent reason, setting it on fire. She was rescued by a passerby, Darious Robinsnest, a commercial artist and bird watcher who had just founded a burgeoning paint-by-number company. After releasing Darious’s pet wombats, the two fell in love. He encouraged her to experiment with his kits and by 1965, she made the then-radical decision to restrict all her future painting to a single kit—a moody image of a coastal inlet. It is estimated that in total she made 7,000 painting of this particular image.

Despite the limitations Immerwieder imposed on her artistic process, her output varied considerably. She often omitted scenic features, altered contours, used the wrong colors, left sections blank, and in some cases added elements that were not reflected in the underlying designs. On one of the canvases exhibited here, she set fire to the lighthouse keeper’s house—using a pictorial device (the inclusion of some unrelated activity happening in the distance) she admired in 17th-century Dutch painting. In another, she transformed the lighthouse into what could be interpreted as a larger-then-life god-like figure with a small crucified Christ on his shoulders.

Immerwieder might likely be upset that these paintings are being shown in a public setting. In her will, she stipulated that no one physically touch her work. Out of respect to her desires, great lengths were taken to install these painting with a robotic claw.