Works by area artists included in Delta Exhibition

Several artists from the Tri-Lakes Edition coverage area have works on display in the 57th annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. Shown at the opening reception on July 9 are, from left, Amber Haycox of Arkadelphia; Katherine Strause of Little Rock, who works at Henderson State University; Aaron Calvert of Arkadelphia; Beverly Buys of Hot Springs; DebiLynn Fendley of Arkadelphia; and Michael Preble of Hot Springs.
Several artists from the Tri-Lakes Edition coverage area have works on display in the 57th annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. Shown at the opening reception on July 9 are, from left, Amber Haycox of Arkadelphia; Katherine Strause of Little Rock, who works at Henderson State University; Aaron Calvert of Arkadelphia; Beverly Buys of Hot Springs; DebiLynn Fendley of Arkadelphia; and Michael Preble of Hot Springs.

Sixty-eight artists from an eight-state area have works in the 57th annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. Six of those artists have ties to the Tri-Lakes Edition coverage area.

Those six artists are Beverly Buys and Michael Preble, both of Hot Springs; Aaron Calvert, Amber Haycox and DebiLynn Fendley, all of Arkadelphia; and Katherine Strause, who lives in Little Rock but works at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia.

Calvert and Preble also won honorable-mention awards in the show and are featured on the cover of today’s Tri-Lakes Edition.

Following is a look at the other local artists whose works are featured in the annual juried show in Little Rock:

Beverly Buys

“I am happy to be selected for the Arkansas Arts Center’s Delta Exhibition,” said Buys, who retired in 2014 as a professor of art at Henderson State University, where she taught photography.

“It is the premier competitive exhibition in Arkansas, so it feels good to be picked,” she said.

“Undoubtedly, many deserving works aren’t selected due to the sheer volume of entries for this exhibition,” she said. “I have experienced both sides of this — it is important to remember that the only thing an artist can really do is their best work and that it is as honest and true and as finely crafted as they can make it.

“Being accepted into a show or receiving an award is sweet, but the real reward is the discovery the artist makes about herself and the way her work enlightens her own world. By sharing that work, perhaps it will spark the curiosity and imagination of the viewers and inspire them to find their own truth.”

Buys titled her entry in the exhibit Lonesome Highway.

“It is a cyanotype print from the series Delta in Blue that I have been working on the last couple years. This print depicts one of the rural highways running through southeast Arkansas,” Buys said.

“For me, it captures the endless miles of flat farmland where you never see a person at work, even though the evidence is everywhere that work is being done, mostly by machines now in the days of modern agriculture. Dotted along the dirt roads and highways are old white shotgun-style churches, yards of large farm implements and an occasional house. These are reminders that even if you don’t see them, there are communities of people living and working here,” she said.

“Artistically, this has been a good summer for me,” said Buys, a native of Hot Springs. “I just found out that the Delta Cultural Center [in Helena-West Helena] is buying one of my photographs for its permanent collection.

“I got into two other shows besides the Delta. One was at the Batesville Arts Council, and two pieces were chosen for the South Arkansas Arts Center ([in El Dorado], both juried competitions.”

Buys’ work was also selected earlier this year for inclusion in the online registry of the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Buys received a Bachelor of Science in Education degree in art education from Henderson State University in 1977, a Master of Arts degree in photography from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1994 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography and printmaking from the University of Memphis in 1996.

Amber Haycox

“I am extremely excited about the Delta Exhibition this year and feel honored to be included,” said Haycox, who is from Pilot Point, Texas. “It is my first time to enter.

“My chosen work, Vigilante, is actually one of my favorites. Due to the media I use (collage), I never quite know exactly how each piece will turn out. I start with a vision and let it emerge naturally.

“Vigilante was inspired by my boyfriend, and it really embodies the feeling I was looking for. It invokes a certain bold benevolence, with the underlying spirit of an outlaw.”

Haycox is a self-taught artist.

“I’ve always been interested in art and dabbled growing up,” she said. “I was partially raised by my aunt, who was a very beloved art teacher at a local high school in Texas, and of course, she inspired me. She kept my brothers and me in the summers but died too early of cancer when I was 19.

“Back in October of last year, I decided to start making collages. I’ve always been fascinated by them and played around a little but never really tried to show my work to anyone. Collage, or mixed media (because I do use some acrylic paint in all my collages), is all I do.”

Haycox’s artwork was included in the 30th annual Texas and Neighbors Regional Exhibition from April 18-May 16 in Irving, Texas. Her work was also included in the “special merit” category of the 2014 Open Art Exhibition sponsored by the Light Space and Time Online Gallery in Jupiter, Florida.

Haycox is the vice president of revenue operations at Allcare Pharmacy in Arkadelphia, where she has lived for eight years.

DebiLynn Fendley

“The Delta will be my 16th of 17 exhibitions so far for this year, and I’m truly pleased to be included again,” said Fendley, who is a printmaker, documentary photographer and painter, as well as a writer. This is the second year her work has been selected for the Delta Exhibition; her work in the 2014 exhibit received an honorable-mention award.

Fendley’s graphite mixed- media piece in this year’s show is titled The Dryads.

“It is a departure for me in that I don’t usually depict women in my art. Ninety percent of my images focus on the male model and particularly the male nude. I’m very well known as one of the few female artists who concentrates almost solely on the male figure,” she said.

“My work is contextually conceptual realism/symbolism or complete documentary, and The Dryads is a documentary piece based on my work within the biker culture. When I first announced the work’s inclusion in the show, it was a biker who immediately guessed the origin of the piece. He said, ‘I was at that bike rally,’” Fendley said.

“The work is based on a compilation of photographs shot late at night at various bike rallies where only hard-core riders are present — hard-core riders and one particular photographer, that is. I’ve been working with bikers for a great number of years now and have been honored to be one of the few allowed to bear witness to and document the realities of their lives,” she said.

“The difference between my work and the work of other artists working with bikers is that I have become a member of the community and can depict the culture from a vantage point that is both on the inside and the outside of the culture,” she said. “There are rules, and I abide by them.

“Respect — that’s the No. 1 rule. For the past several years, the only women I have photographed or featured in any work of art are women who are connected to the biking culture, and this piece is representative of that. It speaks volumes about the place of women in that particular culture, and that placement, I think, is very indicative of the sexual role of women in society at large today. … There is one thing, however, that I can say about the biker culture: The men there love the female body in any shape, size or form, and that is something, I think, that sets them apart from society as a whole.”

Fendley holds graduate degrees in both art and English from Henderson and finished her Master of Fine Arts degree in interdisciplinary art at Goddard College in Vermont. She is a longtime resident of Arkansas. She has taught art and English at Henderson and art at Ouachita Baptist University.

Katherine Strause

“I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of the Delta Exhibition again this year,” said Strause, whose work has been in several Delta exhibitions.

“My work Delta Couple; After Dorothea Lange is about the Arkansas Delta and the couples that farmed that area after the Great Depression as part of the federal Resettlement Administration’s group farming projects,” she said.

Strause said the projects in Arkansas included Plum Bayou, Dyess and Lake Dick at Altheimer.

“Johnny Cash’s family lived in one of these communities at Dyess,” she said. “These communities weren’t always on good land, and that was the problem.

“The house in the background [of Delta Couple; After Dorothea Lange] with the turned soil is from a Dorothea Lange photograph that is quite famous and concerns the use of tractors or equipment to turn the soil and how that changed farming. The couple is a found photograph. This reminded me of the people that were resettled to places in the state, given land that was not usually that great. It was part of the New Deal.”

Strause often uses found photographs as the source material for her paintings.

Born in Independence, Missouri, Strause holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in visual art from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She exhibits nationally and has work in many public and private collections.

Strause has been at Henderson State University for eight years and is the chairwoman of the art department and an associate professor of art.

The 57th annual Delta Exhibition will remain on view in the Jeannette Edris Rockefeller and Townsend Wolfe galleries at the Arkansas Arts Center through Sept. 20. There is no admission charge.

The Arkansas Arts Center is at Ninth and Commerce streets in Little Rock. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. The center is closed on Monday and major holidays.

For more information, call (501) 372-4000 or visit arkansasartscenter.org.

Upcoming Events