Lora Ellinwood looks at an exhibit at the UM Museum Tuesday. Photo: Anna Brigance, The Daily Mississippian.
“The thing about being from Mississippi is that blues is like air down here and you breathe, you going to get some blues.”
This is just one of the sentences you hear from Zac Harmon’s audio when you visit the UM Museum’s new exhibit, titled “Blues @ Home: Mississippi’s Living Blues Legends.” The exhibit opened yesterday.
Painter H.C. Porter, in collaboration with Tena Clark, CEO of DMI Music & Media Solutions, and Lauchlin Fields, project manager, assembled a work of art that narrates and illustrates the history and music of some of the best names in blues.
“The exhibit has some really amazing concepts and overall is very interesting,” said Marti Funke, collections manager at the museum.
Once inside the museum, a visitor has two options. The viewer can take a regular tour or an audio tour of the exhibit. For the audio tour, the receptionist will ask for a form of ID in exchange for an audio player equipped with earphones and will then point the viewer in the way of the exhibit.
The exhibit stretches along one full room and two more walls. It is made up of 30 portrait paintings of artists such as B.B. King, Kenny Brown and Bobby Rush. The paintings are medium-sized square blocks of vivid imagery and portraiture.
Porter’s process is explained on one of the information panels within the exhibit. First, a black and white photo is taken. Next, a high contrast copy is put on paper using a silkscreen, a stencil method of printmaking in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh. Then, Porter hand-paints the silkscreen. The end result is a highly colorful photo of a great artist peering directly at you.
Each photo has an audio number that the viewer types into the audio player and each photo seemingly comes to life. While the viewer is looking at the portrait painting of the artist, the artist’s voice is within the ear of the viewer. It is as if the interview between the artist and Lauchlin Fields is happening right beside you. The commentary from the individual artists is a very important factor to the exhibit. It adds an element of emotion and liveliness to the photos.
“My work is a narrative, storytelling about day-to-day trials and tribulations and rejoicing in simple accomplishments of hanging laundry and shelling peas,” Porter said of the exhibit. “I tried to capture in paint the sense of place we call home.”
The UM Museum jrecently acquired this traveling exhibit and it will be on display until Aug. 2, 2014. Afterwards it will be moved to the B.B. King Museum in Indianola. The museum welcomes visitors to come and see these pieces of Southern culture.
— Samantha Abernathy
slaberna@go.olemiss.edu
