The Mississippi Invitational, a biennial exhibition, is a survey of recent works created by contemporary visual artists living and working in the state. Artists from across the state are invited to submit for consideration. This year’s artists were selected by guest curator Katie Pfohl, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The 2023 Mississippi Invitational features works across a variety of media—painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video—by the following artists:
Adrienne Brown-David, Water Valley
Kwasi Butler, Brandon
Brenden Davis, Jackson
Adrienne Domnick, Jackson
Rory Doyle, Cleveland
Kariann Fuqua, Oxford
Caroline Hatfield, Starkville
Monica Hill, Jackson
Sabrina Howard, Jackson
James Kane, Water Valley
Taylor Loftin, Water Valley
Robin Martéa, Jackson
Robyn Wall, Cleveland
Hannah Wegner, Perkinston
Brooke White, Oxford
The art in this year’s Invitational reflects on the theme “Gulfs among Us,” which confronts a world marked by social, political, cultural, and geographic divisions. The artwork in this exhibition responds to a series of ever-widening gulfs: between people and communities, humans and the environment, and our interior and exterior selves. These 15 artists from across Mississippi are united in envisioning how art can speak across and between divides.
Invitational artists will be eligible to apply for The Jane Crater Hiatt Artist Fellowship—a grant of up to $20,000 awarded to one artist. The recipient will be announced during an opening reception on June 8.
A publication accompanying the exhibition will be available in The Museum Store.
The Mississippi Invitational and its biennial exhibition and catalog are made possible with support from the Community Foundation for Mississippi/Jane Crater Hiatt Fund.
2023 Mississippi Invitational Guest Curator, Katie A. Pfohl: Pfohl is a curator and writer who works to amplify the voices of artists, foster connections between communities, and create space to engage with the urgent issues of our time. Since July 2022, she has served as Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she is organizing a re-installation of the museum’s contemporary galleries, and developing a series of new projects and partnerships. From 2015-2022, she was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she curated almost 30 exhibitions, acquired or commissioned over 100 works of art by local, national and international artists, worked collaboratively on innovative educational programming and community engagement, and reinstalled the museum’s 20th century and contemporary galleries. Major projects included Mending the Sky (2020), which featured eleven artists responding to a world in distress, Bodies of Knowledge (2019), which invited artists to reflect on questions surrounding monuments and memory, Ear to the Ground (2019), which explored environmental activism in contemporary art, and Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories (2018), which focused on forgotten or marginalized histories of the city. In 2014, Pfohl completed her Ph.D. in art history at Harvard University, and in 2006 she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Pfohl has held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the LSU Museum of Art.
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