Missionary, artist delivers message through work

For Ruby Williams, the road to success was the highway fronting her family farm.

State Road 60 brought traffic to her produce stand, but it was her hand-painted signs that grabbed the attention that catapulted her into the limelight as a nationally acclaimed folk artist.

This month, the Plant City native added another honor to a long list of accolades, when the Plant City Black Heritage Celebration gave Williams its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Williams grew up during the Depression on her grandfather's 37-acre farm in Bealsville, a rural community founded in the 1860s by five freed slaves, including Williams' great-grandmother, Mary Reddick.

Ruby's Produce Stand and Art Gallery sits on her portion of the land handed down by her grandfather and, after her mother's death, parceled out to Williams and her six siblings. She grows black-eyed peas, strawberries, onions, turnips and other crops.

Brightly colored paintings share the roadside stand with turnips, collard greens and other offerings. Next to a hand-painted sign that reads "Ruby is in the field, call me, please" are her latest creations, some priced at $750 or more.

She opened her fruit-and-vegetable stand, at 2001 State Road 60, 25 years ago in the hamlet of Bealsville, just north of Plant City. In 1991 the produce stand was pressed into service as a walk-in gallery after a passer-by — himself a folk artist — challenged Williams to expand her talent of painting strawberries on bright, quirky roadside signs.

Within a few years, Williams had hung her folk art paintings in galleries and schools in Florida and Georgia. In 2005, the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., displayed 10 of her pieces.

"My work was the most talked about work in the entire show," she said recently.

Williams' work graced the cover of the exhibit brochure. Even more impressive, her "Piano Playing Cow" painting was emblazoned on a large banner above the museum entry.

"We were just so happy to have achieved this type of goal," she said.

It was hard to conceal her joy, but she was warned by a museum guard: "You can't dance here."

That same year, Williams' painting "I'm A Sophisticated Person" was part of the Florida Folk Art exhibit at the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee. The state's Division of Historical Resources bestowed its annual Florida Folk Heritage Award.

Four years later, she received the Folk Art Society of America's Award of Distinction.

Like most folk artists, Williams has no formal training and uses materials she has at hand.

"Sometimes I might paint on something else, but most of the time it's plywood," she said. "Somebody might ask me to do something on tin, but I don't like to, it takes more paint."

Each painting on unfinished plywood comes with a narrow piece of wire anchored by two screws — ready-to-hang artwork.

Williams, who's in her 80s but is adamant about not revealing her age, fits another general definition of a folk artist: inspired by strong personal feelings, often spiritual.

"Let Me Live" is a personal favorite she framed and keeps in her home, a tribute to her son, Roosevelt, who died 14 years ago. Other works illustrate Bible verses: The Rev. Ruby Williams is not only an artist, farmer and produce dealer, but a missionary.

"In the Plant City area, what I'm doing now is to carry produce to different people, visit the sick and minister the word of God to them," she said. "Find a need and fill it. Find a hurt and heal it. If they need food, vegetables, whatever they want, or if they want to be prayed for."

Williams moved to New Jersey in the 1950s, where she lived for three decades, working many jobs, including as a missionary in the schools for the Community Baptist Church of Love in Paterson.

"I'm a minister and a missionary," she said. "I just say I'm a clergy in the word of God, and I'm a missionary in society."

One of her most popular paintings depicts a bright green alligator and the hand-painted message: "Tired being the good guy." It's popular with lawyers, she said. The message? "You do and you give, and people just don't appreciate it."

Another with the message "Get your own straw" means do for yourself.

"I've got some that say 'think.' It's very important to think before you do anything," she said. "Think before you say something that's going to hurt somebody.

"This is what I've been doing for years and years," she said. "I don't do it to get recognized. I do it because I think it's part of our society to do it.

She also donates her artwork to charity auctions.

"Whatever we can do to help promote another enterprise," she said. "Every day I do a good deed. Every day. Sometimes I got to think what I'm gonna do."

Williams' community service is part of why the Black Heritage Celebration decided to honor her, said Sharon Moody, the group's chair.

Williams said everyone needs a vision, a dream to follow, even if it starts small.

"I just wanted to put the stand beside the highway because there was nothing out here," she said, looking back on the produce business launched 25 years ago.

"I just kept working. My vision was to have a produce stand and do art, and I've conquered that."