Ada Jessamine Shumate (born on March 31, 1902 as Ada Jessamine White in Horsepasture, Virginia – died on December 16, 1990 in Greenville, North Carolina) was an American artist, historian and cartographer, winner of the "Award of Distinction" in 1955 from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Work Jessamine Shumate worked within a number of different styles and media during her career. "Her work covers a broad range of media including silk screen-printing, pastel, transparent and opaque water color, oil, collage, batik and serigraph. Some of her techniques involve oil and the use of a blowtorch. She uses her serigraphs and silk screens as part of her collage work. Mrs. Shumate also makes photographic prints of her original work." She did traditional portraits; still life; traditional bucolic and rural scenes of Virginia and landscapes. She also completed a number of abstract art works, using cubism, orientalism and found object art. However, during her time, she lived in artistic isolation. In southwestern Virginia, there were few other professional artists, and fewer people to discuss and exchange artistic ideas with. Those artists in the southwestern Virginia area during the 1940s and 1950s, were frequently very conservative in their tastes. They often concentrated only on traditional southern art paintings, such as family portraits, landscapes, or simply decorating utensils. Few other people in the region had the scope and range of Jessamine Shumate's efforts, and she received much local criticism and disapproval for some of her modern art projects and accomplishments. She was also a founder of what is now called the Piedmont Arts Association in Martinsville, Virginia. A still controversial series of art works was done showing the Broad Street Christian Church in Martinsville, Virginia of which she was a member. Margaret Hadden said: "Her church, Broad Street Christian Church, in Martinsville, was very important to her and she taught the kindergarten class in Sunday school for many years." In this series of experiments, she did one oil painting of the outside of the church in the cubist style (See: Cubism), showing an abstract view of the church from different sides simultaneously. In another two pastels, she shows the light of the stained glass windows filling the inside of the sanctuary and coming forth out from the church, and illuminating the area around the church, passing through the brick walls. Another two works were done in watercolor painting of the Philpott Dam in