To celebrate Mississippi’s bicentennial year, the Mississippi Museum of Art is curating 12 exhibitions for 12 cities across the state called “Art Across Mississippi: Twelve Exhibitions, Twelve Communities.”
Mississippi State University will host the Art Across Mississippi exhibition “Narratives of the Land” Sept. 1 through Sept. 29 at the Cullis Wade Depot Art Gallery on campus. This exhibit is free and open to the public and will focus on Mississippi landscapes through the lenses of artists Eudora Welty, Walter Inglis Anderson, Ke Francis and William Dunlap.
Endless Delta sky with telephone poles standing like crosses; remnants of a pier off the Gulf Coast; bottle trees perched in front of a 1930’s sharecropper’s home: these quintessential scenes embody the landscape of Mississippi — from Hollingsworth’s and Welty’s frank representations of life during the Depression to Ke Francis’ and others’ contemporary fascination with history and memory of the land. Whether nostalgic, critical or aesthetic, capturing Mississippi’s landscape means capturing its people.
Art Across Mississippi features artwork by regionally acclaimed artists, past and present. These exhibitions will provide residents throughout the state with an opportunity to enjoy high-quality exhibitions from the Museum’s permanent collection in their own communities, to reflect on the rich heritage of Mississippi’s visual arts, and to contemplate the meaning of the bicentennial moment.
“The Museum’s collection of art is made more valuable every time Mississippians have encounters with it,” said Betsy Bradley, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art. “The celebration of our state’s bicentennial is the perfect opportunity for the Museum to share its collection with people across the state. We are honored that our partners are hosting these exhibitions in their communities. We are excited to share how, during the past two hundred years, artists have helped us to see our hometowns and each other with new eyes and increased sensitivity to the beauty around us.”
The exhibition is the latest in the Annie Laurie Swaim Hearin Memorial Exhibitions series.
Bicentennial exhibitions created by the Mississippi Museum of Art are supported by the Robert M. Hearin Support Foundation and the state of Mississippi, through the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. To learn more about the Mississippi Museum of Art’s bicentennial celebrations, visit msmuseumart.org.
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