Leslie Payne: Old Airplane Builder

One of my favorite artists in the Anacostia Community Museum collection is Leslie J. Payne. Born in 1907 in rural Northumberland County, Virginia, Payne was a fisherman and a crabber. Payne only received a fourth grade education, and remained impoverished for all of his life. He had few opportunities for travel, to satisfy his curiosity about the world, to put his enormous creative energies to work, or to indulge his larger than life personality. But in 1918, he attended an air show when he was only eleven years old that was to change his life. As a direct result of that event, Payne began a lifelong obsession with airplanes and airfields.

Leslie Payne poses with one of his airplanes. Image courtesy of Johnathan Green.



In the 1940s Payne began to construct airplanes, most of them relatively small in scale. Beginning in the 1960s, however, Payne began to construct what he called imitation planes. These were large scale planes, constructed so that Payne and a passenger could sit in the cabin and enjoy the view. On Sunday afternoons, Payne would invite selected young ladies to join him on flights in his planes and they would put-put around the surrounding fields. The young women wore their good Sunday clothes—one recalled wearing white gloves and pearls—and Payne wore a flight suit, aviator cap, and goggles, and outfitted each passenger with helmet and goggles . He maintained a travel log book in which the young women kept notes on each flight’s imaginary itinerary, and also had his passengers take Polaroid photos. On those occasions, for those few hours, Leslie Payne became a pilot, with all the powerful and romantic notions that that suggested in the 1960s. On the back of his flight suit was emblazoned a huge emblem that revealed his self-made identity: Old Airplane Builder. Homemade.

Using metal, canvas, automobile parts, kitchen tools, and other materials that he scrounged, he built imitation planes and then transformed his small farm into an airfield, complete with AIR TOWER, machine shop, and runways. He had no truck, or transportation for the larger pieces of scrap metal, so he carried the stuff back to his farm.

After Leslie Payne retired to a nursing home in the late 1970s, and after his death in 1980, his airfield was abandoned. The planes, tower, and machine shop remained until 1987, when Jonathan Green, then director of the California Museum of Photography traveled to Lillian, Virginia, and with the permission of the family, brought back a plane, the air tower, and some of the machine shop. Green’s team spent years restoring the artifacts. In 1994, Green assisted the Anacostia Museum in acquiring the collection, and it remains an important part of the museum’s holdings today.

Leslie Payne motto.  Image courtesy of Johnathan Green.

Let me end with Leslie Payne’s motto that was burned over the doorway of his machine shop: Safty first, Tak No Chance!

This post originally appeared on the Anacostia Community Documentation Initiative  blog.
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If you enjoyed this entry, you might also like Inside the Artist's Studio: Leslie Payne .


Portia James
Senior Curator
Anacostia Community Museum

La Sirene (The Mermaid) Chair

Mermaids have appeared in the legends and folklore of various cultures around the world and throughout time: especially among seafaring peoples.  The Egyptians and Greeks, Chinese, Western Europeans, and West Africans all have tales of this half–woman, half–fish mythical creature.  Protective yet dangerous, mermaids are depicted as beauties with long flowing hair capable of creating great storms to wreck ships or warning sailors of forthcoming disaster.

Historically, these mysterious creatures “have been subjects of art and literature.” In Haitian culture, mermaids are known as La Sirene and are also subjects in the work of artists and craftsmen.


The mermaid chair pictured above was carved by contemporary Haitian-American furniture-maker, Mecene Jacques.  It was included in the traveling exhibition America’s Smithsonian:  Celebrating 150 Years in 1996 and in Buried Treasures: Art of African American Museums at the DuSable Museum of African American History in 2013.  The chair is part of the Anacostia Community Museum permanent collection and was first exhibited in Black Mosaic: Community, Race, and Ethnicity among Black Immigrants in Washington, DC.

Mecene Jacques working in his studio (top) and the unfinished mermaid chair (bottom).  Anacostia Communit Museum Archives, Black Mosaic exhibition records,Smithsonian Institution. Photographs by Harold Dorwin.

Mecene Jacques immigrated to the United States during the economic and political turmoil that embroiled Haiti in the 1990s.  Like many other Haitian immigrants, Jacques brought to this country not only his craft and skills, but also a creative vision fueled by the folklore and vibrant cultural traditions of Haiti.

Jennifer Morris
Archivist
Anacostia Community Museum Archives