Martha Tabor (1939-2004)

Ms. Tabor worked as a freelance photographer and visual artist for the past 24 years, mainly out of her home studio in the Petworth neighborhood in Northwest Washington. While her photographs centered on images of people at work, her recent sculptures tended to be large, abstract pieces made of sinewy corkscrew willow wood and other such natural materials as wool, horsehair and animal bone. Some of her wood sculptures, which were influenced by gospel music, appeared to be wheels and boats, which she saw as symbols of time and transition.

Ms. Tabor, who had been battling cancer since 1996, turned to sculpture as her medium in the 1990s after working primarily as a photographer and printmaker. "I come out of a documentary tradition in photography, but it just struck me I could work more poetically and evocatively" as a sculptor and printmaker, she told The Washington Post in 1994. Her sculptures are in the permanent collections of Loudoun Hospital Center, Washington Theological Union, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Va., Wesley Theological Seminary and the Urban Institute of Washington.

She also took part in exhibits at the Glenview Mansion Art Gallery in Rockville, the Montpelier Cultural Artist Center in Laurel and the Studio Gallery in Washington, where she showed a collection of silkscreen prints, "My Dog as Art." Ms. Tabor held various jobs before she began to pursue art as a profession. In the 1960s, she taught English composition and literature at Frederick Community College. She took up welding in the 1970s and joined the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. She was hired to work on the construction of the Metro system and became active as a union organizer. It was about this time that she started taking pictures of her fellow laborers and became a social activist.

She documented antiwar protests and civil rights marches as her photography gradually turned into a freelance business by the late 1970s. Among the subjects she photographed were midwifery and women in blue-collar jobs. In 1980, she received a grant from the D.C. Commission for the Arts to photograph city workers for photographic exhibits at District government offices. She received another grant from the commission in 1997 for a visual arts fellowship in sculpture.

Ms. Tabor was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Washington. She graduated from Colby College in Maine and received a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Maryland and a master's in photography from Goddard College in Vermont. She attended the Corcoran School of Art in the late 1970s and served as an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y. She was a member of the Washington Sculptors Group and Impact Visuals, a photographers' cooperative based in New York. Her marriage to Michael Tabor ended in divorce. Survivors include a brother.

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