The Greenville Arts Council (GAC) will host an exhibit with an opening reception beginning at 5:30 p.m., Friday, in the Roger Malkin Gallery at E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center, 323 S. Main St.
Free and open to the public, the exhibit will feature 47 poems by Ann Fisher-Wirth and 47 color photographs by Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay that explore the history, culture and ecology of the state of Mississippi.
Fisher-Wirth’s fifth published book of poems, “Mississippi,” is a poetry/photography collaboration with Clay and is the “brainchild” of the exhibit.
“She is very renowned in her own right,” GAC executive director Eleanor Wright said about Fisher-Wirth. “She has won quite a few prizes…she was teacher of the year in 2006 and again in 2014.”
Fisher-Wirth is a professor with the University of Mississippi’s English department.
In addition, Wright shared Fisher-Wirth was a finalist to become Poet Laureate of Mississippi in 2012 and has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Uppsala University, Sweden — a few among an impressive list of awards and accolades along with being published in numerous magazines.
Clay, whose reputation in the field of photography somewhat precedes her, was born right here in the Delta.
Wright said about the Greenwood native, “Maude is from a photography family — her uncle, William Eggleston, who is world renowned, gave her her first camera.”
Wright went on to share Clay and her husband both worked for Vanity Fair while living in New York and is how they met.
Clay assisted her uncle after attending the University of Mississippi and the Memphis Academy of Arts and soon after, moved to New York City where she has worked as a photography editor and photographer for not only Vanity Fair, but Esquire, Fortune, and other publications according to jacksonfineart.com.
“When Clay returned to live in the Delta in 1987, she continued her color portrait work for which she received the Mississippi Arts and Letters award for photography in 1988 and 1992,” her biography on jacksonfineart.com said.
She was the photography editor of the literary magazine The Oxford American from 1998-2002.
Clay’s photography is in the collections of the the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the National Museum for Women in the Arts.
According to the GAC’s website, Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian and Fisher-Wirth has resided in the Magnolia State for 30 years; so, the exhibited images and words symbolize elaborate, complex accumulations and recombinations of visual and linguistic experience.
Aside from Fisher-Wirth’s celebrated sixth book of poems, The Bones of Winter Birds, published by the Terrapin Press in Feb. 2019, others include Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces.
The University Press of Mississippi said of Clay’s work in Delta Land, “Although many acclaimed photographers have focused their cameras on the Mississippi Delta, no photographer, until now, has attempted to produce an interpretation of the land itself; the work of Maude Schuyler Clay, are the result of that undertaking.”
Following the reception will be signing and speaking by the artists and the event will conclude at 7:30 p.m.
The exhibition will run until April 17.
