Packed In A Trunk: The Lost Art Of Edith Lake Wilkinson

Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, playwright and director Jane Anderson tells the story of her great aunt, a gifted but forgotten artist, in the lively, passionately personal documentary "Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson."

A trained, talented and prolific painter, Edith joined the Provincetown Art Colony in 1915 (the oldest continuing artists' enclave in the country, in a fishing town at the tip of Cape Cod, where women could only sell on Sundays), and produced "an astounding body of work."

Edith was committed to an especially cruel West Virginia asylum in 1924, at age 57, diagnosed with dementia and given heavy sedation, never to be heard from again. All her possessions, art, paintings and charcoals were packed in a trunk and sent to Wheeling where they remained stored in an attic.

Forty years later, Anderson's mom found the light-drenched paintings during a visit, and took them back home.

Anderson grew up around the cutting edge, "white line art" in her house, and was inspired to become an artist herself, eventually moving to New York.

Armed with a computer tablet filled with images of Edith's output and a website, Anderson tirelessly researched Edith's artistic contributions and the reason for her commitment. She was diagnosed in a "paranoid state," with "delusional ideas," but was likely put away because she cheated on her lover Fannie (who "looked like Gertrude Stein" in Edith's sketches and died in 1931) and an unscrupulous lawyer wanted her small fortune (Edith's parents died of gas asphyxiation).

A psychic was also consulted, who told Anderson her relative "loved a party, rum punch, dancing and freedom. She was into girls, you know, and loved color. She broke Fannie's heart because Fannie was too controlling" (she co-signed Edith into the hospital).

Anderson, who feels she is living the life that Edith should have had as a gay artist (with many parallels, including the same "visual vocabulary" and a particular Joan of Arc book), is finally able to assemble a gallery show in Provincetown, Edith's favorite place to make art. Anderson is "taking up the cause to unravel the mystery of her life and return her work to Provincetown; great work full of skill and soul and a love of this place."

"She didn't have a strong person in her corner to get her out," Anderson says. "So it's time to give her story a better ending" a hundred years later.

"Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson"
DVD
$24.95
http://www.wolfevideo.com