Maude Schuyler Clay: Portraits of a Place features nearly 100 photographic works by Clay of images that move across time. They are of objects and people informed by the past, belonging to Clay and her family and the larger community. Each image serves as a memory device that assists the viewer with recall. The works presented in this exhibition trace the disappearance of time within our present. Sumner, Mississippi, with its current population of under 500 inhabitants, is the setting for the majority of Clay’s images. The porch of Clay’s intergenerational home, built in 1911 by Clay’s great grandfather Joseph Albert May, offers an idyllic view of Cassidy Bayou, one of the longest bayous in the world. Images in the exhibition inform us of a people, their social placement, their fading architecture, and the freedom of existing in the shadows of historical constraints.
While visitors might be familiar with Clay’s images of Delta landscapes and Delta dogs in a distant fog, the majority of this exhibition, guest curated by Phoenix Savage, is a compilation of Clay’s family portraits represented in an intimate size to convey the relationship between the photographer and the subject. These portraits speak to the domestic realm that binds femininity to motherhood and home. In documenting her immediate family, Clay transcends the boundaries of domesticity and serves as a visual archivist, recording the daily life in a manner that brings awe and delight.
The exhibition is accompanied by a complimentary brochure.
A presentation in the Myra Green and Lynn Green Root Memorial Exhibition Series, Maude Schuyler Clay: Portraits of a Place is presented with support from the Thomas G. Ramey and Peggy Huff Harris Fund at the Community Foundation for Mississippi.
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About the Artist
Maude Schuyler Clay was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and assisted photographer and first cousin William Eggleston during her nascent years as a photographer. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts Washington, D.C., among others. In 1999, the University Press of Mississippi published Delta Land, which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award and the Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. Clay was the photography editor of the Oxford American, from 1998 to 2002. She continues to reside in the Mississippi Delta.
A Mississippi photographer with generational roots, Clay records history as a visual archivist, illuminating the domestic, agricultural, and civic manners of the Mississippi Delta, a place that resonates mystery for many but is home to her. What has been described as a “languorous flat-scape” has served as the agricultural homeland of Mississippi since 1817 when the state joined the Union as the 20th state. The titles of Clay’s published works lay claim to a place. Mississippi History and its seductive imagery renders the quotidian extraordinary; Delta Dogs, depicts canines that at times eluded photographic capture as they roamed the barren landscape; and Delta Land traces the disappearance of the past.
About the Guest Curator
Phoenix Savage, Associate Professor of Art at Tougaloo College is the guest curator for Maude Schuyler Clay: Portraits of a Place. Savage and Clay met nearly twenty-five years ago. Savage, then a young anthropologist, interviewed Annie Walker Gibson, at the behest of Clay, for her research on Black Southern Hoodoo in the Mississippi Delta.
Savage received the 2019 Humanities Council of Mississippi Teacher of the Year Award. In 2012 Savage was awarded the Being Humans Fellowship from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University. The United States State Department awarded Savage a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011 that allowed her to spend nearly a year in Nigeria conducting research on the Yoruba philosophical concept of the origin of the human head while also investigating metal casting in the city of Ile-Ife.
Savage co-authored African Americans of Jackson, a book of vintage photography that brings together a historic presentation of Jackson, Mississippi, and its African American community. Savage is currently Artist in Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico where she is working on a photographic installation.
