Deceased October 15, 2023
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IN MEMORY
“James Wyly is a 21st-century painter about whom little is known. He lives in southern Mexico with his wife and dog.” That is how Jim described himself on the website where you can see his remarkable portraits and mythological scenes. But he was an artist in a larger sense—musician, writer, healer, therapist, and aficionado of Old and New World Spanish culture. His was a deep, probing, complicated mind. When, on Oct. 15, he died of leukemia that had been in check for years, the city of Oaxaca lost one of its most creative souls, and the class of 1959 one of its dazzling intellects.
Jim came to Amherst from Kansas City. More than for most of us, the College offered him an escape, not just from the provincialism he perceived around him but also from a damaging family environment. He remembered his father as an abuser, bigoted and racist. Jim had wounds to heal, and in college he kept pretty much to himself. Most of us hardly knew him. His single good friend, the brilliant Kelly Edey ’59, with whom he shared a sense of alienation, is long gone. At Amherst, Jim majored in English, but music was his passion. A gifted keyboard artist, he particularly loved the harpsichord and, after earning his doctorate at Missouri, taught musicology for years at Elmhurst and then Grinnell College.
At an early music symposium at Chicago’s Newberry Library, an attractive young librarian took the seat next to him. During their years in Chicago—Mary as associate librarian at the Newberry, Jim as a licensed Jungian psychoanalyst (oh, yes, he did that training as well!)—they spent many vacations in Oaxaca. There, after retiring, they built the handsome, earthquake-proof house where, surrounded by a widening circle of friends, they spent several happy decades. Lately, Jim connected monthly by Zoom with a group of ’59ers. We finally got to know him, and he us, with admiration and pleasure.
Werner Gundersheimer ’59