Special to The Clarion-Ledger Gladrags: Sketches, Swatches and Costume Designs by Myrna Colley-Lee will be on display Saturday through Oct. 15 at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. DETAILS What: Gladrags: Sketches, Swatches and Costume Designs by Myrna Colley-Lee. Where: Mississippi Museum of Art, 201 E. Pascagoula St., Jackson. When: Saturday through Oct. 15. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, closed Mondays. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors, $3 students (age 6-college), free for children younger than 5 and museum members. Phone: (601) 960-1515, 1-866-VIEW ART or http://www.msmuseumart.org/.

Costume design is just one part of theater design that creates a "living painting" onstage, said Myrna Colley-Lee.

And that's her part, managing the delicate balance of fit without undue focus, outfitting the two-hour world of a play in a way that works.

Costume design, along with sets, lighting, hair, makeup and the actors involved, "all of those things together make the picture," Colley-Lee said. "It's one color of it, one texture of it, one facet."

The artistic side of that facet goes on display Saturday in Gladrags: Sketches, Swatches and Costume Designs by Myrna Colley-Lee, through Oct. 15 at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. The exhibit's title comes from her business, Gladrags Designs.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS Recipient of the Wynona Fletcher Award for Outstanding Achievement and Excellence in Black Theatre. Nominated for Best Costume Design for The Wedding Band by The Black Theatre Alliance. Pioneer and founding member of the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art (R.A.C.C.A.), New York City Designed the costumes for the ACE award-winning ABC movie, Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill, starring Ruby Dee and Earle Hyman. Costume designer for the world premiere of X, an original opera commissioned by Bill Cosby and performed at the Walnut Street Theater.

Nearly 100 works by Colley-Lee, including renderings and fabric swatches, production photographs and several costumes span almost 30 years of design, from graduate school to recent productions.

Colley-Lee, who lives in Charleston with her husband, actor Morgan Freeman, is known largely for her work in the regional theater circuit, with companies such as Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and the Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio.

The museum exhibition is timed to coincide with the USA International Ballet Competition, June 17-July 2 next door at Thalia Mara Hall. "We wanted something on view that tied into performing, staging," said curator of exhibitions Robin Dietrick, "and preferably, we wanted someone from Mississippi to fit the bill."

Colley-Lee had a smaller show at First Street Gallery in Grenada two years ago, but a museum show is a first, and something of a milestone. "(Costume design) is not a fine art, and it's a collaborative art, so I was surprised the museum would do it," she said, adding with a laugh, "one doesn't think of one's portfolio as being museum worthy."

Viewers can follow the costume design process from sketches, collages, renderings and play synopsis to production photographs and actual costumes.

"I think what it does more than anything is acquaints the audience with things they may not be familiar with, how the designer works with the director ... the collaborative effect of the whole discipline." Usually, designers are assembled as a team with the director from the get-go, determining the concept of the show.

"Her work doesn't just clothe a character. It also helps create characters, and helps an actor create a character," said Karen Allen Baxter, producer and managing director of Rites and Reason Theatre, the arts component of the Africana Studies department at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Colley-Lee has costumed and designed about a half-dozen new plays produced by Baxter, who praised the designer's creative mind and intelligence.

The latest is Till by Chicago-based playwright Ifa Bayeza, co-produced by Rites and Reason Theatre and Providence Black Repertory Company. Colley-Lee is the production and costume designer for the play, based on Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy brutally murdered after allegedly whistling at a white woman at a Mississippi store in 1955. The play, still in development, has had two public readings; the hope is for a 2007 premiere.

"We've just begun to talk about visuals. It's real preliminary," Colley-Lee said. "The only image for the scenery involves kudzu because of the claustrophobic, creeping, covering everything quality. That's just an image in my head."

The museum hosts a public discussion, "Till, from Script to Stage," June 27 with Colley-Lee, Baxter, Bayeza and a moderator.

Benny Sato Ambush, a director who worked with Colley-Lee most recently on Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage (TheatreVirginia, 2002), called Colley-Lee "my favorite costume designer in the whole wide world." Why? "Her careful attention to the actors' feelings and how clothes reveal the inner life of the character ... her patience, her calm, caring, amicable personality ... her depth of understanding of the souls of black folk ... her insightful, perceptive eye on story and meaning," Ambush wrote in an e-mail.

For costume design for any play, Colley-Lee's research can range from actual clothing "if you can find it," to paintings and art from the period, said Colley-Lee, admitting to owning tons of art books.

Period settings are her preference. "The research process is just so much more fun, although ... contemporary is not so bad. Totally up-to-date can be kind of boring. Contemporary, to me, is all the way back to the '50s, which most people can remember in their lifetime but different in line from what people are wearing now," from hemlines to the amount of exposed flesh.

Costumes can also tell the actor much about body language and posture for a character. "You can't sit with your legs that far apart in a peg skirt. ... You wouldn't be able to stride across the floor and flop down in a chair," Colley-Lee said. With period clothing, "You get a young actress who doesn't have a clue about that kind of undergarment or armor. ... It's a real education process for them."

Colley-Lee, 65, said painting is one of the things she'd like to do when she retires. But ask if she's anticipating retirement and the answer is a laughing "Nope."