August 23 – December 3, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 22, 2011, 5:00  –  7:00 p.m.

The work of Southern artists is often infused with a deep sense of place and time. Whether inspired by the small-town of the artist’s birth, the land, the waters – be it river, lake or sea – the music, the people or even the animals, that sense of place shows up in subtle, surprising or literal ways, unique to each artist. One World, Two Artists will attempt to show how the Gulf Coast was a shared source of inspiration to two native artists: John Alexander and Walter Anderson.

Born in 1945 in the coastal town of Beaumont, Texas, John Alexander grew up in a region heavily influenced by Cajun, Creole and African-American cultures. The natural environment of coastal Texas and Louisiana was an early and persistent inspiration for Alexander’s work.

Walter Anderson was born in 1903 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was a painter, potter, writer and naturalist, who spent most of his life working in or around his family’s business, Shearwater Pottery, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. A small, undisturbed barrier island, Horn Island, became his refuge and main source of inspiration. Years later, John Alexander would visit Horn Island, also chasing this shared muse.

The University of Mississippi Museum is proud to present this exhibition in collaboration with the Ogden Museum of Southern Art of two artists from different eras and places in the South—but both attuned to their surroundings, bringing forth beauty through their expressive talent.

April 12 – September 24, 2011
Opening Reception/Oxford Art Crawl: Tuesday, April 26, 2011 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

This exhibition was made possible by
the generosity of The Hattie Mae Edmonds
Fund for Southern Folk Art

Reception sponsored by Lenora’s Restaurant
309 C North Lamar ~ Oxford, MS
662-236-1144
www.lenorasdining.com
Reservations recommended.

April 12 – July 2, 2011
Artist’s Reception:
Thursday, April 14, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Valerie Jaudon was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on August 6, 1945. She studied at the Memphis Academy of Art, Memphis, in 1965, as well as at the University of the Americas in Mexico City (1966-67) and at St. Martins School of Art, London (1968-69). She has been the recipient of several grants, including a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, (1999), a Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, Alabama Chapter, (1994), and a Painting Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1992).

Jaudon has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Her work has recently been featured at the Stadel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (Valerie Jaudon: Paintings and Drawings, 1980-1999), and at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (Abstraction at Work: Drawings by Valerie Jaudon 1973-1999). She has completed various public art commission, such as Long Division, for the MTA Lexington Avenue Subway, 23rd Street, New York City (1988), Reunion, at the Police Plaza / Municipal Building, New York, NY (1989), and Free Style, at the Equitable Building, New York, (1989).

Jaudon is represented in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT, and the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA. She has been invited to numerous public panels, such at the DIA Center for the Arts, New York, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Jaudon lives and works in New York City.

The artwork of Valerie Jaudon is classified as Post-Minimalist Abstraction, meaning the work takes a very formal, pure approach. Valerie Jaudon: White represents Jaudon’s most recent body of work and is the culmination of decades of work.

Jaudon will be a visiting artist sponsored by the Vassar Bishop Lecture Series.

The exhibition is further enhanced by the publication of an 80-page exhibit catalog, which will be available at the museum store. In addition to images from paintings and drawings in the exhibition, the catalog contains an interview between the museum director and the artist, and is an important part of the exhibition.

Artist biography courtesy Von Lintel Gallery

March 22 – June 25, 2011
Opening reception Tuesday, March 31st, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Works on paper from the permanent collection curated by Dr. Esther Sparks.

January 11 – April 2, 2011
Opening Reception Thursday, February 3, 2011
5:00–7:00p.m.

Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. After the Civil War, the freed slaves of Gee’s Bend founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world.

The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African-American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present.

Is the first in a series of ongoing exhibits presenting selections from the permanent collection and includes work by Mississippi artists Marie Hull, Andrew Bucci, Bill Dunlap, John McCrady, Kate Freeman Clark, Jere Allen, Walter Anderson, and George Ohr.

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October 1 – December 11, 2010

Curated by Robert Krause, Doctoral Candidate in United States History, Graduate Assistant, The University of Mississippi Museum

This inaugural exhibit in the new Hattie Mae Edmonds Gallery examines the complex role of Southern Folk Art in relation to the artistic mainstream developed by historians, critics, and scholars.  Works in the exhibit include examples by artists James “Son” Thomas, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Jim Sudduth, Rev. Howard Finster, Sulton Rogers, M. B. Mayfield, and Luster Willis.

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Teacher and Student: Abstract Works of Marie Hull and Andrew Bucci is organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and supported with funds provided by the Museum’s statewide Traveling Exhibition Endowment, a fund made possible through significant private contributions matched by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, with additional funding provided by the Mississippi Arts Commission’s Arts Reinvestment Initiative.

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