Thoughts about art and community.
I made a short video about the early stages of Cultivation, a new painting still in progress that’s based on a conversation I had in 2019 with Benjamin Saulsberry, Public Engagement and Museum Education Director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.
Read MoreLocated 20 miles from Oxford, Mississippi, in nearby Yalobusha County, Water Valley (pop. 3325) got its start in the 1800’s as a railroad stop for the Illinois Central Railroad. In the last decade, Water Valley has been home to one the first craft breweries in the state, Fat Possum Records, Violet Valley Bookstore (to date Mississippi’s only queer feminist bookstore), and Base Camp Coding, a free, non-profit software development academy for Mississippi high-school seniors.
Read MoreGuest post by Mrs. Velma Benson-Wilson of Jackson, Tennessee and Marks, Mississippi. Mrs. Benson-Wilson wrote this autobiographical essay in response to a 2013 visit back to her hometown of Marks, Mississippi. Author of What’s in the Water: Fannie, a Legacy of Love, Mrs. Benson-Wilson is currently the Director of the Quitman County Tourism and Economic Development, and was instrumental in the 50th Anniversary of Marks’ Mule Train and Poor People’s Campaign in 2018.
Read MoreBack in September, I left Oxford, Mississippi, to drive to the Delta to rendezvous with some Chinese American friends for their small family homecoming. Kelly and Norman Seid had been classmates of mine, and more so than with any other friends, we had kept up with one another, some years better than others. Norman had been a year ahead of Kelly and me, the class of 1971, and Norman had been student body president.
Read MoreAccording to David L. Cohn, the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, TN and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg, MS. The geographically isolated “Delta”, as called by locals, is an alluvial plain used historically for cotton plantations in northwestern Mississippi along the Mississippi River.
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