Southern Tenant Farmers Museum to host Norwood Creech's 'Perspectives from the Delta'
- Ongoing: until Wednesday, February 24, 2010
- Monday: 9:00am
- Tuesday: 9:00am
- Wednesday: 9:00am
- Thursday: 9:00am
- Friday: 9:00am
- Saturday: 12:00pm
- Where: Southern Tenant Farmers Union Museum, Tyronza
- Cost: Not available
- Age limit: Not available
ASU - Jonesboro: Southern Tenant Farmers Museum to host Norwood
Creech's 'Perspectives from the Delta' Jan. 14
The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, 117 South Main Street, Tyronza, will
host a special exhibit, "Perspectives from the Delta: Paintings,
Drawings, Prints, and Photography by Norwood Creech," opening with a
reception Thursday, Jan. 14, at 5 p.m. The exhibition runs through
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010. Dr. Jeannie Whayne, professor of history at
the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville will present an introduction and
commentary on the exhibition. Both exhibition and reception are free and
open to the public.
Norwood Creech, artist, painter, printmaker, and photographer,
lives in Lepanto, a town of some 2,200, in the Mississippi Delta of
northeast Arkansas. Creech says, "For me, this rural landscape
represents a piece of the myth of the South, Southern agriculture and
its heritage, with stories of small lost communities, the history of
cotton, and the apparent effect that the evolution of technology has had
on the agricultural community, the landowners and the farmers who still
work the land."
Norwood Creech attended high school in Louisville, Ky., but her
roots run deeply on both sides of the Mississippi River, in Arkansas and
in Memphis. She received a bachelor of science degree in Studio Art at
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and attended the Santa Fe
Institute of Fine Arts master's programs in 1993 and 1995. She has also
attended the art educators' forum at Savannah College of Art and Design
in Savannah, Ga., and has participated in myriad art educators'
institutes across the nation.
Her exhibitions include the 2008-present "Artists of Arkansas,"
which currently hangs in the Little Rock offices of Lt. Gov. Bill
Halter, and she also exhibited in the 2003-05 show, which hung in the
Little Rock and Washington D.C. offices of Senator Blanche Lincoln. Her
work was selected for Ginger Beebe's 2009 Arkansas Artists Dayplanner,
produced by the Friends of the Governor's Mansion, and her work is also
currently exhibited in "Arkansas Artists," now hanging in the offices of
Senator Mark Pryor. She has exhibited at Jonesboro's Sara Howell Studio
and Gallery, Perry Nicole Gallery in Memphis, J. Gallagher Gallery in
Laguna Beach, Calif., Hall-Barnett Gallery in New Orleans, and she has
participated in the La Quinta Arts Festival in LaQuinta, Calif., and the
Sawdust Winter Fantasy Festival in Laguna Beach, Calif. She has also
served as artist in residence for the Hilton Head Arts League in Hilton
Head, S.C., and has served in various programs in Arkansas and
nationwide as a teaching artist.
Of her work, Creech says, "When I see this land I am captivated
by the endless compositions and nuances in the patterns of row crops and
ditches and the horizontalness of it all. I explore farms and levees,
looking over crops of cotton, soybeans, rice and milo, watching the tree
lines define the space, and watching how it changes through the seasons.
While I am working on location, I actively take in my surroundings,
watching the light, breathing and feeling the air, the weather, the
humidity, smelling the dirt and doing my best to imprint that sense of
place on my own sense's memory. Once I feel saturated with the
experience of being in the setting, and feel I truly internally
understand it, I take the image to the studio." This method of working,
in various media, yields the images on exhibition in "Perspectives from
the Delta."
Dr. Jeannie Whayne is professor of history at the University of
Arkansas and adjunct curator of American history at the Crystal Bridges
Museum in Bentonville. She is author, editor, or coauthor of eight
books, including A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor
in Twentieth-Century Arkansas (1996), A Whole Country in Commotion: The
Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest (2005), and the
forthcoming Forging a Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of
Southern Agriculture. She has launched research on an environmental
history of the lower Mississippi River Valley. She is a member of the
prestigious Organization of American Historians, and lectures on topics
as varied as flood control in the Mississippi River valley, African
American farm agents, homesteading in the Arkansas Delta, and Arkansas's
frontier exchange economy.
For additional information, contact Linda Hinton, assistant
director, Southern Tenant Farmers Museum at (870) 487-2909, or e-mail
stfm@ritternet.com. Visit the museum on the Web at
http://stfm.astate.edu/index.html. Contact Norwood Creech
(norwoodc@eritter.net) at (870) 475-6105.
This event was posted Dec. 27, 2009 and last updated Dec. 27, 2009
