Priscilla Moon Fleming Vayda

Priscilla Moon Fleming Vayda, artist, author, and journalist, died peacefully on July 21, 2023, in a suburb of Los Angeles. She was 90. Priscilla grew up in Lafitte, Louisiana, attended Newman High School, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1955 Chapel Hill, where she met her husband Jerome Joseph "Jerry" Vayda, captain of the 1956 UNC basketball team. They married and moved briefly to Denver, CO where Jerry played professional basketball for the Denver Truckers. Soon after they moved to the Fleming family plantation in Lafitte LA with their young family, and then to New Orleans where he worked as a stockbroker. Priscilla was a reporter (1998-2009) for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans as a sports and feature writer, as was her mother Madeline Frost Fleming and grandfather, author, and reporter Meigs O. Frost. Madeline Fleming's history of Bayou Barataria and the bayou town of Jean Lafitte, where Priscilla was born, was made into the National Public Television film "The Baratarians." After the death of her husband in 1978, Priscilla moved briefly to Hilton Head SC, returned to New Orleans, then moved to Los Angeles to a former shepherd's hillside house on Mount Washington, to be near her children, Catherine Vayda MacVaugh and William Jerome Vayda. There she painted full time and wrote art columns for various papers of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, covering art show openings at galleries, the Getty, Norton Simon and other museums, and on artists including acclaimed sculptor Christopher Slatoff, Rene Magritte, Romi Bagh, Sally Storch and American conceptual artist Ed Ruscha. Priscilla returned to New Orleans prior to her final move to Southern California. Priscilla's strong, semi-abstract paintings of landscapes and people have been shown, among other places, in New Orleans at the Keller Library and Art Center, group exhibits at the VERVE Art Collective, the Women's Caucus for Art in Louisiana, the Jazz and Heritage Gallery, most notably she was accepted and displayed in the Americans Show in Paris, France, in the 1970s. A major retrospective show of her work was in the "Three Fleming Sisters of Lafitte" at the Reynolds Ryan Art Gallery, which included work of younger sisters Valerie Fleming Turgeon, a fabric artist, and Avis Fleming Hodge, a printmaker, painter, and teacher at the Art League School in Alexandria VA. Priscilla wrote two unpublished regional cookbooks, "Barataria Cooks" (in conjunction with her sisters, Valerie and Avis), "The Barataria Family Kitchens", and three novels. Priscilla and other Fleming family members recently sold/donated 3,500 acres of their historic Lafitte plantation to the National Park Service to become part of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve south of New Orleans. In honor of her two daughters, Elizabeth and Madeline, Priscilla and her mother were founding members of the nonprofit New Orleans Cystic Fibrosis chapter. A funeral for Priscilla is being planned for Saturday, Nov 4, at 10 a.m. in St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church in Lafitte, where she and Jerry were married, followed by a reception in the church hall and burial in historic Fleming-Berthoud Cemetery overlooking Bayou Barataria. She is survived by daughter Catherine Vayda MacVaugh (Horace IV) of Pasadena CA; son William Jerome Vayda (Barbara) of Yorba Linda CA; sister-in-law Patricia Fleming, of Lafitte LA; sister Avis Fleming Hodge (Paul), of Alexandria VA; nine grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by daughters Madeline Anne Vayda and Elizabeth Fleming Vayda, her husband, Jerome Joseph Vayda, her brother Meigs Frost Fleming and sister Valerie Fleming Turgeon. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Louisiana Chapter, 4630 S Carrollton Avenue, New Orleans LA 70119. For more information contact Paul and Avis Hodge (703-477-0060; a.p.hodge2@gmail.com)