University of Mississippi alumna, Maude Schuyler Clay, who has become a highly accredited photographer, is exhibiting her work in the Meek School of Art.
Clay has work displayed in The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and The National Museum for Women in the Arts. She is the former photography editor for The Oxford American and has been published in Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
“For finding poetry in this slow, languorous country-scape, Ms. Clay deserves much credit,” acclaimed The New York Times.
Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, Clay attended the University of Mississippi and the Memphis Academy of Arts. She received awards such as the Mississippi Arts and Letters for photography in 1988, 1992, and 2000, as well as the Mississippi Art Commission’s Individual Artist Grant in 1998.
Clay returned to live in the Delta in 1987. In 1999, her monograph Delta Land was published by the University Press of Mississippi and has received praise for her study of the Mississippi Delta.
“Delta Land is project which involves the recording and preservation of Mississippi Delta landscape and its rapidly disappearing indigenous structures,” stated Clay’s website.
As a sixth-generation native of the Mississippi Delta, Clay views the Delta in a special way. With pictures of old mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, tenant houses, railroad stations, and more, Clay captures the soul of the Mississippi Delta with her photography.
Clay’s exhibit came to the Meek school on October 1, and will be moving the 31. The reception will be October 31 between the hours of four and six in the evening.
“As a student at Ole Miss, I really wasn’t in the Art Department, but I was enamored with it,” said Clay. “There’s a certain sort of nostalgia and respect for the Art Department at Ole Miss.”
The first of the works displayed at the Meek School of Art is a photograph from the Big Black River Project, which was a series taken in Flora, MS across the four seasons for four years, with ten pictures from each season. This photograph is the first season of fall, from 2006.
The other works are from Her Circle, a collection of colored portraits inspired by the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, a British pioneer of female photography. Clay’s family and other close friends are featured as subjects in many of these pieces.
As a sequel to Delta Land, Clay has a new book coming out called Delta Dogs, where each photograph has what Clay calls the “indigenous canine presence,” an important element of Delta culture.
To view more of Clay’s work, visit her website, www.maudeclay.com or her Facebook page, Maude Schuyler Clay Photography.
— Sara Elizabeth Baker
