Diane E. Ward

Diane Elizabeth Ward of Alexandria, VA died April 3, 2024, at Alexandria Hospital following a brief illness. Several days before her death, she was diagnosed with advanced multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. Diane was born on July 3, 1945, in Baltimore, MD. Her parents referred to her as their “firecracker baby”, convincing her for many years that the celebratory Independence Day fireworks display seen in their neighborhood was done especially for her birthday.

The city of Baltimore was formative in Diane’s early life. During a visit on her 70th birthday, she noted that the Hollins-Payson branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, blocks from her house, was a refuge for her during her childhood. Diane excelled academically and attended the gifted program at Baltimore's Western High School, supplementing her secondary education with art history classes at the Walters Art Gallery and weekend classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She was the one student selected annually from her high school to be awarded a full scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art, but she left after her first year to financially support her mother after her divorce. She worked as a clerk at the NEC Charge Plan, one of the country’s first credit card companies; as the hostess at the historic One Charles Center office building during its first years of operation; as assistant to the fashion director at Stewart’s Department Store, where she also modeled in their 1967 catalog; and as an executive assistant for the Baltimore modern architecture firm of Robert R. Fryer. She often spoke nostalgically about having both worked and lived in modern buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe (One Charles Center and Highfield House, respectively.) She later worked for five years as Coordinator of Graduate Admissions at Johns Hopkins University, where she met Keith Ward, whom she married in 1971. 

Diane continued her art career in the 1970s while taking courses at Prince George’s Community College, winning first prize in painting in the annual student show, and winning a top award at a juried bicentennial competition for D.C. area artists, requiring the use of only red, white, and blue pigments; her painting was of a Baltimore arabber (horse-drawn street vendor.) She also explored scientific illustration, contributing drawings of protein structures to publications in Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

After the couple moved to Kenosha, WI, Diane completed her bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where her teachers included Moishe Smith, graduating cum laude and as her year’s Outstanding Graduate in the Fine Arts division in 1979. She then earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1981, where she specialized in painting and exhibited her work frequently. Diane’s paintings and sculptures, which reflect her talent for trompe l’oeil technique and fascination with the beauty of everyday objects and materials, adorn the Ward household. She was especially transfixed by corrugated cardboard and other packing materials, capturing these forms on canvas and ceramic. Upon winning a top prize at the 1979 Racine Area Art Show, Diane said of her paintings of cardboard, “I am interested in making evidence of a human presence like tears, markings… There are references to a third dimension in the pattern.” In the 1990s her art turned to textiles, and she took up her mother’s craft of quilting. In a 1992 interview in conjunction with her work being exhibited by Quilters Unlimited, she thanked her mother, Charlotte, for having recently introduced her to a “second creative life” in her art career. She said that her favorite work at the time was a large wall hanging inspired by a family vacation, “Safe Harbor”, which combined the figure of a giant squid, rich dark triangles of ocean colors, and the Massachusetts Bay and Cape Cod shoreline, gleaned from a Landsat satellite photograph. Regarding quilting as an art medium, she said “I want a balance between accessible and serious. I try to reach a clarity of organization while controlling the relationships between colors within a tonality. I like order and peace, but I try to crank in some tension for interest. I especially enjoy working with a main fabric and finding a cast of supporting fabrics…manipulation of color and value is my favorite activity… I like to do each phase [of working with fabric] slowly and stubbornly ignore many timesaving tips such as cutting more than one layer of fabric at a time. I ‘get to know’ the fabric the more I manipulate it and I never regret the time spent this way.” Her work was featured in shows by the American Quilter’s Society, the National Quilting Association, the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House, Belle Grove Plantation, and G Street Fabrics.

Diane was passionate about volunteering. She served for over two decades as a volunteer in the Fairfax County Public Schools, most notably at Mark Twain Middle School, where she lent her keen organizing and administrative skills to assisting the band program’s operations for over fifteen years. She belonged to several quilting guilds in Northern Virginia, including the Hayfield Country Quilters and the Springfield chapter of Quilters Unlimited, where she devoted countless hours to coordinating events as an officer and compiling newsletters. Long after her involvement with quilt clubs, during the COVID pandemic, Diane continued to give to others; in recent years she took up book-folding and turned small books into hedgehogs to gift to friends and family. She also recently met a local family through Facebook who needed their young son’s clothes altered to accommodate a chemotherapy regimen; she threw herself into the project, retrofitting all his small shirts with zippers across the chest. Diane always loved creating and mending clothes for herself and others, and always had the perfectly colored and patterned piece of fabric at the ready.

Diane enjoyed a wide range of crafts and hobbies, including plant propagation. She delighted in hand-feeding young mother squirrels (and young squirrel mothers-to-be) who tapped on the sliding glass door to her deck, begging for handouts, whenever they saw her inside. She liked crossword puzzles and competed at Wordle and Connections with friends and relatives. She also loved binging the latest television series and had a soft spot for British and Scandinavian crime procedurals. Diane loved listening to music, and often amazed her friends by knowing by heart the lyrics to jazz ballads and torch songs from the 1940s and 1950s. Diane used email and texts to keep in daily contact with her closest friends, who enjoyed her unique, wry sense of humor. She was fond of taking walks with Luke and Keith and visiting friends in her neighborhood.

The activity Diane loved outside the home the most was visiting art museums. She loved them! When relatives visited, she loved taking them to art museums, and relished visiting them with her son at destinations across the country.

Diane is survived by her husband of 52 years, Keith, of Alexandria, VA; her son Luke, of Cambridge, MA; her stepdaughter Jenni Klein, of San Antonio, TX; and her stepgrandson Jasper Klein, of Portland, OR.

Diane’s steadfast love and support for Keith and Luke has meant so much to them, and they will forever miss having her in their lives. Memories of Diane will serve as a blessing for her family and her many friends who so enjoyed her company. Arrangements for a memorial service will be announced at a later date.