Southern Tenant Farmers Museum to host Norwood Creech's 'Perspectives from the Delta' Jan. 14

Dec. 15, 2009 -- 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 isauthor, 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 the museum at 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.
  
Images from top:
Norwood Creech
"Pivot over Defoliated Cotton," photograph, courtesy of Norwood Creech
"Landscape in a Box," watercolor, courtesy of Norwood Creech
Dr. Jeannie Whayne

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