Benjamin Leroy Wigfall (1930–2017) was an American abstract-expressionist painter, printmaker, teacher, gallery owner, and collector of African art.

He was the founder of a community art space called Communications Village as a hub for residents in a Black neighborhood in Kingston, New York.

He grew up in the working-class Black neighborhood of Church Hill in Richmond, VA. His mother worked in a tobacco factory, cleaned houses, and was a beautician.

[1][2] Wigfall started drawing while a student at George Mason Elementary School, first creating cartoons and later becoming observant of his neighborhood, including a house on 30th Street that he drew in pen and ink.

[7][8][5] He met his wife Mary Carter, an art student at the school, when he and friend L. Douglas Wilder (who later became Virginia's governor) crashed a party.

[14][23][24][25][26][10][27][28] The painting was inspired by smokestacks atop industrial buildings that Wigfall saw at dusk as he often crossed the Marshall Street viaduct over Shockoe Valley.

After they left the second store, Miller & Rhoads, Wigfall was accosted by police officers, grabbed by the collar, and accused of trying to steal a handbag and wallet the day before.

Wigfall “achieves a strange effect of a different sort … in which streaks of orange and blue glow like live coals in a thick enveloping web of brown ashes,” a reviewer stated.

[5][31][15][32][33][29][17] In 1951, Langley Air Force Base in Hampton chose Wigfall's painting “Kites” to hang in a room in its library.

It consisted of five full-size panels titled “Disturbance of Temptation,” “The Decision,” “The Kiss,” “Remorse,” “Consequence and Self-Punishment.” That same year, the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences (now the Chrysler Museum of Art) held a one-man show of his works, with Wigfall described by one writer as “Tidewater’s national ‘find.’” Among his entries were drawings and plans for the mural.

In 1951, when Mary McLeod Bethune was speaker, he was big news: One article noted that the exhibition “has received added interest” because of the recent purchase of Wigfall's “Chimneys.” In 1953, his submission to the commencement show was the mural project.

[37] 1952-1959 – At Norfolk Museum in 1952, among Hampton students and staff - including Albert Kresch, Joseph W. Gilliard, Louis Rosenfeld - who submitted paintings, ceramics, creative photography and sculptures.

Wigfall submitted what were described as semi-abstracts: “Wounded Beasts,” Carnivorous Symbols,” “Boats” and “Urban.” In 1953, he had a one-man show at the museum.

In 1956, the museum hung a Wigfall abstract in a furnished room in an exhibit titled “March for Moderns,” which combined architecture, interior decorations and art in a contemporary home design.

[54] 1958 - Loaned to the Virginia Museum's “American Artists 1958” exhibition a painting titled “Without Black” by Ulfert Wilke of the Allen R. Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville.

[33][57] In 1988, Wigfall opened Watermark/Cargo Gallery in Kingston, which featured African art from his own collection, and exhibitions of works by national and international contemporary artists.

He worked alongside some notable local and national artists, including Louis Rosenfeld, Joseph Gilliard, and painters John Koos and Friedrich Gronstedt.

Called the New Place, it was described as a “media exploration and communications center” that offered music, photography, art, dance, theater and other programs for children and adults.

[4][66][65] He opened Communications Village in 1973 as a place where community people took classes, absorbed lectures from major national artists, and learned and executed printmaking.

In a 1977 exhibit at the site, Wigfall showed his works as well as those of such artists as Benny Andrews, Betty Blayton, Jayne Cortez, Melvin Edwards, Charles Gaines, Diane Hunt, Pat Jow, Mary Lou Morgan and Joe Ramos.

It was headed by his wife Mary, a retired public school art teacher who was employed in a migrant child-care program, and photographer Rose Tripoli.

He was among a group of Black protesters who confronted the Kingston police chief about what they considered the department's slow pace in finding the murderer of a 12-year-old boy.

In 1971 when Hampton presented a one-man show of his etchings, a newspaper writer noted that this “first-rate printmaker” had been teaching in New York for a long time and few people in Richmond were familiar with his works.

He was listed among the country's top African American artists, including Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Camille Billops, Robert Blackburn, Vivian Brown, Edward Clark, Eldzier Cortor, Melvin Edwards, Richard Hunt, Mohammed Omer Khalil, Norman Lewis, Richard Mayhew, Stephanie Pogue, Mavis Pusey, Vincent Smith, Sharon Sutton, Betty Blayton, John Wilson and Wendy Wilson.

Titled “Hampton’s Collections and Connections: Part One, Returning Home to Hampton,” it included Wigfall; Reuben V. Burrell, the school's photographer for 40 years; Joseph Gilliard; sculptor Persis Jennings, and painters John Biggers and Samella Lewis, both of whom studied under Gilliard.

[86] In 2003, the Virginia Museum mounted an exhibit of 33 of the 60 works in its collection by African American artists, including Wigfall.

[23] In 2018, Wired Gallery in High Falls, NY, mounted an exhibit titled "The Golden Age of New Paltz," celebrating artists from the 1960s and beyond.

Titled “Ben Wigfall: the Artist Revealed,” the show featured artifacts from his African art collection, and his prints and paintings.

[60] In 2021, he was in a group show focused on Cinque Gallery, founded in 1969 in New York by Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow and Norman Lewis as a place for Black artists to exhibit and feed off each other's talent.

The exhibits featured slides from photos shot by Wigfall and VanDyke as they wandered the city in the 1970s photographing its African American citizens.