MISSISSIPPI MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS Maude Schuyler Clay: Portraits of a Place

On view from October 29, 2022, through March 5, 2023, the images are drawn from the artist’s personal collection of her black-and-white and color photographs. The exhibition is organized by MMA guest curator Phoenix Savage, Associate Professor of Art at Tougaloo College and visiting Professor of Art at Brown University and long-time friend of Clay’s. The coordinating curator is Ryan N. Dennis (she/her), MMA Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Museum’s Center for Art & Public Exchange.

Savage said, “It is an honor to work with Maude and Ryan to realize this special project. The exhibition examines four realms of Maude’s work: biography of the artist as seen in Little Gems, her intimate portraits of her family and friends; chronicles of the social milieu of the Mississippi Delta told through a timeline of images of people who worked for Maude’s family over decades; Fruit Suite, an on-going series of still life images; and her allegorical landscapes conveying a profound sense of place and time. The Delta carries implications of mystery and otherworldliness, but to Maude it is home. These are truly portraits of a place.

Family portraits are presented in an intimate scale to convey the bond between the artist and her subjects, her husband, children, and pets, in her dual role as a mother and chronicler. In documenting her immediate family, Clay transcends the boundaries of domesticity to record quotidian activities.
Works depicting the social sphere contain poignant historical contexts. Clay lives in Sumner, Mississippi, the site of the infamous trial of the two men accused and subsequently acquitted of the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. The trial was a pivotal case in the Civil Rights Movement. Sepia toned images of Tallahatchie County reveal the hold that history still imparts upon the landscape.

Clay’s photography traces the disappearance of time within our present to inform us of a people, their social placement, and their fading vernacular architecture. Several images from her Highway Memorial series are included marking both loss and memory of life.

Regarding her book Delta Land (1999, University Press of Mississippi), Clay described the collection as “a photographic project which involves the recording and preservation of the Mississippi landscape and its rapidly disappearing indigenous structures: mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, commissaries, crossroads stores, tenant houses, cypress sheds, and railroad stations.”
Fruit Suite, a set of six large-scale images of fruit are from an ongoing body of work in which Clay captures the spontaneity of these objects in relationship to light.

Clay’s photography traces the disappearance of time within our present to inform us of a people, their social placement, and their fading vernacular architecture. Several images from her Highway Memorial series are included marking both loss and memory of life.

Regarding her book Delta Land (1999, University Press of Mississippi), Clay described the collection as “a photographic project which involves the recording and preservation of the Mississippi landscape and its rapidly disappearing indigenous structures: mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, commissaries, crossroads stores, tenant houses, cypress sheds, and railroad stations.”
Fruit Suite, a set of six large-scale images of fruit are from an ongoing body of work in which Clay captures the spontaneity of these objects in relationship to light.

The exhibition features an installation, Erasing Sally Mann, that shares with the audience Clay’s relationship with American photographer Sally Mann dating back to the 1980s. Mann frequently sends personal notes to Clay on the back of her discarded photographs that still carry the odor of processing chemicals. In Erasing Sally Mann, Clay selected to air an image on her clothesline. Harking back on the famous conceptual work of Robert Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Clay left the image from Mann on the clothesline for a full year. Clay photo-documented the deterioration of Mann’s photograph. The remnants of the photograph are displayed on a clothesline in the gallery along with Clay’s documented images.
Maude Schuyler Clay: Portraits of a Place will be accompanied by a brochure and a roster of public programs. For more information visit msmuseumart.org.