Picturing Mississippi

“One place understood helps us understand all places better,” wrote the Mississippi author Eudora Welty. A new exhibition in honor of her home state’s bicentennial in December aims to present a full picture through the eyes of artists past and present. On December 9, in concurrence with the grand openings of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, will open Picturing Mississippi: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise. With the work of more than a hundred artists on loan from sixty different institutions, the exhibition traces the entirety of the state’s history, from its native people and the first European settlers through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and up to the present. “This is a very complicated place,” says the museum’s director, Betsy Bradley, “and the complications affect artists at a very deep level.”