Spirit of the Delta: The Art of Carolyn Norris

Spirit of the Delta

Spirit of the Delta The Art of Carolyn Norris

Dorothy Sample Shawhan With an Essay by Patti Carr Black Featuring an Interview with the Artist by Tom Rankin Photographs by Kim Rushing

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The publication of this book was supported by

www.upress.state.ms.us

the following organizations and individuals:

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

American Association of University Women, Cleveland Branch Sharon and Martin Bond Maureen and Burrow Brooks Bonnie and Luther Brown Georgene Ewell Clark Judy and H. L. Dilworth Susan Allen and John Ford Virginia McGhee Friend Ava and Cordell Haymon Jeanne and Bill Hays Marion and Lee Jordan Beverly Maddox Moon Margaret and Jimmy Robbins Terry Kay Simmons Emily Eugenia Summer Margaret Ellen Swain Martha Helen Swain Carol Hederman Tatum Tri-State Educational Foundation Lenagene and Billy Joe Waldrup Stella and Tom Wear JoAnn and David Work

Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi Original works of art copyright © Carolyn Norris “Carolyn Norris: ‘A Moment That I Felt Something’” copyright © Patti Carr Black Photographs copyright © Kim Rushing All rights reserved Printed in China by Everbest through Four Colour Imports, Ltd., Louisville, Kentucky First printing 2011 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shawhan, Dorothy. Spirit of the Delta : the art of Carolyn Norris / Dorothy Sample Shawhan ; with an essay by Patti Carr Black ; featuring an interview with the artist by Tom Rankin ; photographs by Kim Rushing. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-60473-992-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60473-993-0 (ebook) 1. Norris, Carolyn, 1948–—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Outsider art—Mississippi—Cleveland. 3. Norris, Carolyn, 1948– 4. Artists—United States—Biography. I. Norris, Carolyn, 1948– II. Black, Patti Carr. III. Rankin, Tom. IV. Rushing, Kim. V. Title. VI. Title: Art of Carolyn Norris. N6537.N6735S53 2011 759.13—dc22 2010036219 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents Carolyn Norris A Life in Color 3 Carolyn Norris “A Moment That I Felt Something” Patti Carr Black 17 Interview with Carolyn Norris by Tom Rankin 27 Plates 45

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Spirit of the Delta

Black Madonna, 1974 18” x 26”, house paint and makeup

Carolyn Norris A Life in Color When she was twenty-five years old, Carolyn Norris began her life as a painter on a bet. Jackie Ray Taylor, a house painter, self-taught artist, and the father of her two youngest children, Jacqueline and Janet, bet her five dollars she couldn’t do a painting like he could. In fact, she did him one better, and once she started, she didn’t stop. She said she “picked up a magazine and found a picture that touched” her, she drew it, and she has been “paintin’ ever since.” But the painting that marked the moment when she first thought of herself as an artist was created a bit later as she nursed Jacqueline, called Yama. It’s a passionate painting in which a black woman holds a baby fiercely to her breast. She tore the wooden back off a dresser for a canvas, used house paint until that ran out, and finished with old makeup her social worker had given her. She calls it Black Madonna. Thus began an almost obsessive desire to paint—there are more paintings from her brush at this stage than she can count—and Jackie Ray began putting his name on them and selling them for

five dollars to a club in the Delta town of Shaw. Then Jackie Ray disappeared from the state and from her life, in trouble with the law and on the lam. The club in Shaw burned down and all those paintings with it. Black Madonna was given away, as so many of Norris’s paintings have been. A transplant to the Delta, Norris was born April 23, 1948, into a working-class family in Martinsburg, West Virginia, a town near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers where Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia meet. Martinsburg is only minutes away from Harper’s Ferry, where John Brown in 1859 led his famous raid on the federal arsenal there and triggered the War Between the States. She was born the second child of six to James R. Norris and Roberta Fox Norris. Her father worked for Corning Glass. Her mother worked as a nurse and cleaned houses and was superintendent of the church. The children, Di, Carolyn, Junior, Roberta, Gayle, and Billy, were cared for by an older woman named Mary Weaver. Norris remembers her as a “sweet old 3

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River, circa 1980 10” x 8”, pastel on paper

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woman” who lived with the family all week and went home on weekends. She had a paralyzed right arm with which she could hold a child down while spanking him or her with her good hand. Norris’s childhood was a happy one, untouched by the prejudices and poverty that would shock her when she moved to Mississippi. She spent a great deal of time in church, singing in choirs and listening to sermons. A playmate was always handy with six children in the family, and she kept a stack of coloring books under her bed and paper dolls she had cut from magazines. One of her favorite pastimes was fishing in the pond behind the Norrises’ house. She was always the first one up on days when they could go fishing. That West Virginia landscape would often show up in later paintings. She liked school and attended high school but quit before graduation. She left home and took a room in a boardinghouse in town, primarily because her mother was pressuring her to marry an older man from Florida, a preacher and an apple picker with “big ole hands.” To her mother, “preachers were like God,” and she was convinced that her daughter should marry him, but Norris had different ideas. She took a job at Corning Glass and made plans to be a beautician, working in the beauty shop of her cousin Elsie Green. Her mother encouraged the hairdresser plan, but even after the preacher returned to Florida and married, she sent Norris pictures of him and his family to illustrate to her daughter what she had missed. The pursuit of a beautician’s career ended suddenly and intuitively one

morning in the way that Norris has made decisions throughout her life. She got up, collected her uniforms and hairdressing supplies, and threw them in the garbage. She knew definitely that she “was done with that.” When she was nineteen years old, Norris met her first love. She had gone to a club after work with some friends, and a group of young men on leave from the Job Corps came in. She was attracted to Frazier Nash at once because he was very tall and was jet black. He reminded her of her uncle Dick, who came down from New York with his wife, Bessie, Roberta’s half sister, to visit them each summer and whom she admired and liked. Nash was from the opposite direction, the Mississippi Delta. The relationship developed quickly, with their children Ricky and Vicky being born within two years. Before Vicky was born, Nash had returned to his home in Bolivar County, Mississippi, but he sent for Norris to come south and marry him. She took the newborn Vicky from an incubator and the toddler Ricky by the hand and boarded a bus headed for Mississippi. She has never forgotten that bus ride and her amazement at the sight of cotton growing. She had to ask other passengers what it was. Years later that trip was pictured in the cycle of miniature paintings that she named The Story of My Life for the Bright Beginnings Foundation benefit show supporting early childhood education. Many other differences between her new world and the one she was leaving behind would soon become apparent. Nash was working in a factory, but was unable to provide a house for Norris and

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the children. First they went to his sister Sarah Wilson’s house. Next, he settled them in Symonds, a little rural community outside of Cleveland where they moved in with his mother, called Big Mama. Among the many adjustments Norris would make was the necessity of using an outdoor toilet and overcoming the fear of snakes and spiders that could be lurking there. From Big Mama’s, the little family moved to Pearly Jones’s, the wife of Nash’s friend. Norris got a job at Spotless Cleaners and then at the Holiday Inn to help support the family. Nash checked on them often, and Norris became pregnant with their third child, Cindy. Nothing else was said about marriage, and Norris would soon discover why. Nash had developed a relationship with a schoolteacher, she had become pregnant, and he had a decision to make. Norris had met the woman, described her as having “book sense” but being otherwise “innocent.” Philosophically, Norris said she felt that she was better able to deal with life than this woman, and so released any claims she had on Frazier Nash. He married the schoolteacher when Cindy was a baby. Soon afterwards Norris would marry another Frazier—Frazier McGee, whom she met when both of them worked at One-Hour Martinizing. She had come south to be married and so she was. The couple lived in Cleveland. McGee was young, inexperienced, and kind to her and the children, but the marriage lasted only a year. Norris said she didn’t know herself, her own identity as a person, when she married him, and soon saw that it was a mistake.

The rigid lines between the races in the Delta took some getting used to for Norris, but she soon adjusted. She was not a revolutionary; surviving and raising her children were her causes. She tells in the interview with Tom Rankin about going in the front door of a Cleveland drugstore and being told about separate entrances. She would learn about separate waiting rooms at doctors’ offices and about other more subtle ways that racial prejudices manifested themselves. Many women finding themselves in this predicament would have done what her parents urged her to do—come home to West Virginia to her own people. But her mother had already worked out how they would divide up the children, who would take which one to raise. Norris was determined to hold her family together, and so she stayed put in her adopted home. Her adopted home in the Delta was well populated with those who would have a great influence on her life. Through her job at Brinson Cleaners, an African American–owned business, Norris met Jackie Ray Taylor and with him had her two youngest children and began painting. A trip to the welfare office proved to be a turning point in both her work life and her life as artist. By good fortune she was assigned to Dorothea Vickers, a social worker. Vickers, also an artist, painted primarily with watercolors, and her favorite subject was magnolias. She gave Norris paints and encouraged her with her art. She also launched her into cleaning houses, and soon clients were lining up for her services. In the early seventies, she was paid three dollars for

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Bus to Mississippi, circa 2007 8” x 8”, pastel on wood

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cleaning a house. She was fast, efficient, and thorough, and she usually developed close relationships with her clients. Another of her social workers was Gloria McQuagge. Norris cleaned the McQuagges’ house, and, as was the case with many of her clients, painted pictures for them. At the beginning of the school year when McQuagge purchased school clothes and supplies for her two children, she would also buy for Norris’s five children out of her own pocket. McQuagge is now dead, but Norris continues to clean for her husband, Dan, and daughter, Leslie. As the decade of the eighties began, Norris was a single mother with five young children living in a small brick house in one of Cleveland’s housing projects. Never one for self-pity, she turned her enormous energy toward tending the children, work, and painting. In 1985 she first exhibited in the local Crosstie Arts Festival (Cleveland was founded as a railroad town, hence Crosstie) and won a two-hundred-dollar second prize in drawing. Her drawing depicted her daughter Jacqueline, called Yama. Norris often calls her painting her “sanity,” and yet when the passion to paint came upon her and she would stay up for two straight days and nights painting, she worried that she was losing her mind. No one in her immediate community understood that overwhelming urge. Through the Crosstie connection, she met painter and sculptor Emma Lytle of Perthshire Plantation. Lytle invited Norris to Perthshire for lunch one crisp winter day and reassured her before a warm fire that the artist’s passion was not to be

feared but welcomed. Lytle understood those feelings well. Lunch was served by Lytle’s helper, a young black man who also worked as a warden at the local prison. He dashed into the house, changed into a white coat, and when Lytle pressed the bell under her foot that rang in the butler’s pantry, he emerged and served the meal flawlessly. Here was another cultural difference for Norris to absorb. At the end of the meal, Norris rose and helped the young man clear the table. Lytle and Norris remained friends until Lytle’s death. Lytle’s sculpted head of Norris given her as a gift sits today in Norris’s studio. Norris is quick to point out that there have been many such encouragers of her artistic life. Another was art enthusiast Jamie Cuming, who came to all her shows and told her how good she was. When he saw that she had no easel, he bought one and brought it to her. One of her clients, Terry Simmons, an art professor at Delta State, bought a house for Norris so that she could move out of the projects. She allowed Norris to pay her mortgage through her labor along with monthly payments. A friend and companion for many years and one who inspired her was Joe Fields. She was always at work, and Fields, an ex-serviceman who worked in a local factory, would leave roses and candy at her door. One evening when she was home, he appeared with roses and candy and steaks which he cooked on the grill. He told her of the custom in which a man who had been out drinking and carousing all night would throw his hat in the door when he got home. If the

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Jacqueline, circa 1988 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

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Carolyn by Emma, 1997 Clay sculpture

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Throwing in the Hat, circa 1990 11” x 14”, pastel on paper

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woman threw the hat back out, it was OK for him to enter; if not, “he ain’t coming in.” Norris painted that custom and later painted her interpretation of Fields leaving this world. He had been very ill in the hospital and then went to a friend’s house across town to recover. Norris had a premonition that he was dying, and she didn’t want his spirit to be trapped in her house, unable to transcend. She left the house and checked into a motel on the night Fields died. Her children and her friend Trentice Hughes were in the house and said that Fields’s spirit did indeed arrive. Hughes has Native American blood and knew what to do. He and the children lighted a candle and coaxed Fields: “Go into the light, Joe.” Later Norris would paint her interpretation of the light that eased Joe Fields into the afterlife. The year 1985 began the public phase of Norris’s art. In addition to her Crosstie appearance, she exhibited her work at the Bolivar County Library during Black History Month. She took great pleasure in talking to people about her work and intense interest in knowing what they saw and felt when they looked at her creations. Other exhibits would follow during this decade, including one at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. In 1988 she was the subject of a Mississippi Roads documentary produced by Mississippi Educational Television and entitled “A Maid Who Paints.” During the 1990s, her Crosstie winnings continued, including the Best in Show one-thousand-dollar purchase prize in 1998 for Good Times. Another of her

paintings, Ballroom Nights, was purchased for the permanent collection at Delta State University. She had solo shows in Mississippi, West Virginia, and Georgia, and was invited to participate in exhibitions in Tennessee and Arkansas, as well as in Mississippi venues. Norris continues to win prizes at Crosstie, now renamed the Crosstie Arts and Jazz Festival, including a first prize in painting in 2008. She was featured in a 2005 Delta Magazine article, “Carolyn Norris: Filtered Folk Art,” by Clover Mellen. In recent years Norris has been one of the Delta artists placed in classrooms by the Delta Arts Alliance, an organization that has been successful in acquiring grants to keep art in the schools. She has taught art classes at Cypress Park Elementary School in Cleveland and in the Ruleville Middle School. And she continues to have a large number of clients whose houses she cleans. Perhaps the best way to characterize Norris’s art is with the word “connectional”—to the art world, her family, her clients, her community. One surprising connection with her father became evident years after she left home. Though she had never known her father to do anything but work at the factory and in the garden, in his retirement he became extremely close to a little grandson. He would draw realistic pictures for the child, a gift no one knew about until then. Another family connection is found in Norris’s daughter Janet who also has the gift when she chooses to use it. A different connection is with Norris’s clients; often she paints a picture that’s inspired by one of the families and gives it to them.

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Go Into the Light, 1995 20” x 24”, house paint on wood

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Little Boy Blue, 1983 14” x 11”, pastel on paper

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Fatherhood, 2009 House paint on garage door

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A strong community connection is formed by Norris’s garage doors series. For years she has painted murals on her garage door, and then when she tires of one or when the season changes, she paints over it and starts another. Sometimes neighborhood children will help, or sometimes her daughter Janet pitches in. Neighbors driving or walking by may see a fishing scene, or cotton fields ripe for picking, or homage to the Trojans

football team of Eastside High School, or Santa in front of a Christmas tree. The garage door typifies all that is best about Norris’s art. For her, art is to be shared, not tucked away in a museum or sold to the highest bidder. It’s her sanity, her passion, her connection to the art world and to her community, and her interpretation of the life she chose to live here in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.

Carolyn Norris “A Moment That I Felt Something” Patti Carr Black Of all the objects made by mankind, the art object—created out of emotional energy—links the mind and heart of the viewer to the artist and to human activity. The life of Carolyn Norris as an artist has been one of complex and consistent involvement with community and individuals. Her art, infused with her experiences in daily life, has a dynamism that animates it from within. For almost a half century art historians have struggled to find terms and categories for the almost indescribable and unaccountable work created by untutored artists from the South. Jane Livingston at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was one of the first art curators to realize the impact that this art was having on mainstream contemporary painters, especially in the South. Her groundbreaking exhibition in 1983, Black Folk Art in America 1930–1980, propelled an interest in all black artists and illuminated the nexus between untrained artists and contemporary trained artists, both black and white. Ed McGowin, Bill Dunlap, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg are among

southern mainstream artists influenced by unheralded and untutored southern artists. More than a decade after the Corcoran show, Susan Larsen, noted art professor, proclaimed: “This art [self-taught] sings a siren’s song of freedom and as such is a seductive influence to an art world grown overripe, increasingly uncertain of its direction and hungry for an infusion of energy from some source at once alien and yet accessible.” The debate goes on over the terminology used to define the disparate work in categories variously called folk art, naive art, outsider art, and self-taught art. Defining and assigning artwork to categories has been a major preoccupation for those in the museum world concerned with placing objects of art in their cultural and art historical context. Definitions have evolved, overlapped, and fallen in and out of favor. How would one classify Norris’s art? “Folk art” is most often defined as objects made of traditional design by artists using techniques handed down by word of mouth or direct teaching. It is a 17

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Christmas and Chitlins, 1995 14” x 16”, pastel on paper

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61 Club, 1991 14” x 12”, house paint on wood

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In the Projects, circa 1985 8” x 8”, house paint on wood

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communal art tradition rather than an individual one, and does not describe Norris’s art. The term “outsider art” is an urbancentric concept. Very few artists working in America today are isolated from or outside of the mainstream of American culture. Television, photography, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet immerse the nation every second with images and icons and art. As an academic term, “outsider art” can only be used to describe art created outside the attention of the established art world. And whose fault is that? Norris has not been an outsider. The term “naive art,” as the art world has used it, sounds disingenuous itself. Think of the ancient artists of Egypt, Incan and Mayan empires, Africa, Cyclades Islands, and many, many other areas, where artists eschewed perspective and anatomical accuracy, and embraced flat planes, flat color, abstract forms, and unabashed color to express the dynamism of their cultures. The term today usually describes quiet, narrative art in the Grandma Moses tradition, a tradition that has fostered many faux naive painters. Norris is not “naive.” Norris’s work falls under the catchall term “self-taught art,” used to distinguish work done by artists without formal training. The term is handy but not particularly useful since the category is wide ranging and divergent. Within the body of work by self-taught artists, styles may be picturesque, abstract, realistic, or surrealistic. The artwork may reflect religious or mystical tendencies or make robust sexual allusions. It is usually highly inventive and narrative

and it may be ironic and witty or scary. It often reflects personal or community histories. Carolyn Norris’s work reflects this last category. Her visual influences come from her milieu; her images are culturally based. Her sensibilities are attuned to looking, perceiving, and digesting her life and the life around her. Her milieu became the Mississippi Delta when she moved there from West Virginia as a young woman of twenty-one with two small children. Delta culture has exerted a powerful influence on her work, and inevitably her representation of its daily life is juxtaposed in the mind of the viewer to the history of the area. The Mississippi Delta, in the northwest quadrant of the state, was settled in the late nineteenth century. At the instigation of railroad companies, the swamps were drained, levees were built, and great virgin hardwood forests were cut, exposing the richest soil in the state. The area became famous for its cotton production and the wealth it produced. Black labor sustained the system and fostered its seminal music, Delta blues. After World War II, mechanization of farming displaced a large number of black workers. Cotton lost its standing as the principal crop, and by the 1960s Delta farmers were growing corn, soy, rice, and catfish, which require less labor. The Delta at the time Norris arrived enforced a strict code of conduct between the black and white races. It was a place of intimacy between the races in private spaces and, at the same time, menacing segregation in public ones. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s marked a transition in the

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legal status of black people and women. Carolyn Norris, from West Virginia, had to adjust to this culture. She said about the transition, “It’s like I had walked off into another world that I never knew existed.” Norris eventually settled in Cleveland, a Delta railroad town on the famous blues highway, Highway 61. She paints there not as a commentator on Delta culture, but as a participant, doing portraits, genre scenes of cotton farming, fishing, and logging, churchgoing, basketball games, football, honky tonks, beauty shops, socializing, baptizing, and personal memories—strong visual statements using her own individual vocabulary. She paints intuitively, responding to the activity around her and her personal experiences. In West African culture there is an important community figure called the griot, a poet or minstrel who relates local legends, events, history, and family lore. Carolyn Norris serves as the visual griot of Cleveland, Mississippi. Her art is a conversation between artist and place, and it is a conversation of universal accessibility. Her work is also paradoxical, shifting as well as fixed. It lacks an order, as if focus and apprehension were constantly changing. She paints an era of becoming. In her role as griot she uses her garage door as a giant mural chronicling community events, serving as an ever-changing image of Cleveland’s interests. She has painted her garage door to announce football season, fishing, baseball, Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, and the coming of the seasons. With these larger-than-life images she assures

the participation of a once-ignored people in the life of the community. In all of her work, large and small, she gives the community the pleasure of recognition, a sense of anchorage, just as many of our fiction writers do. Another characteristic of “self-taught art” is the improvisational use of materials. For Norris this has been both an economic necessity and an act of passion. To create one of her first paintings of her child, she tore off the wooden back of a dresser to use as a canvas; she used available house paint and completed the painting with face makeup. This was the beginning of her realization that she has a passionate need to paint. She has used a variety of media, painting on canvas, wood, paper, cardboard, glass, plates, tiles, sheets, floor covering, mirrors, and her garage door. She has used oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, poster paints, house paints, even Crisco with color ground—whatever is needed to achieve aesthetic solutions. Though her painting materials and surfaces may limit the permanence of some of her work, they reflect the powerful essence of spontaneity and the joy she finds in the work itself. In the landmark exhibition and book on “self-taught art,” Passionate Visions of the American South (New Orleans Museum of Art, 1993), Alice Rae Yelen notes that self-taught artists often settle on their own style early in their efforts and do not pursue stylistic development. She writes that self-taught artists generally are not aware of or do not pursue concepts of contemporary or classic art. This is not true of Norris. Even though initially untutored in art, Norris has

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Man with Blanket, circa 1977 15” x 20”, pastel on a sheet

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Starry Cotton Night, circa 1990 10” x 8”, house paint on wood

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worked toward refining and redefining her media and her presentation. Cleveland is the home of Delta State University and the site of the Crosstie Arts and Jazz Festival, and both have been significant to Norris’s life and artistic development. She has sought knowledge, assimilated visual information, and learned from the efforts of others. Many people connected to Delta State have offered encouragement and assistance by furnishing supplies, buying and commissioning paintings, and introducing her to a broader population. She has earned the community’s approbation. She was one of the artists selected by the Delta Arts Alliance to teach art in local classrooms and has exhibited in most of the local venues. She was awarded her first art prize (two hundred dollars) at Crosstie in 1985 and has won prizes there consistently in the last twenty-four years. The linchpin of Norris’s appeal is her passion. She expressed it to Tom Rankin in this way: “Some pictures I done through changes I was going through. And others it was a moment that I felt something.” She expresses her passion with stylistic energy. Although she experiments with various approaches, there is little that is obscure or abstract in her work.

Her portraits and her genre scenes have expressive power and authenticity, a strong sense of nowness. In the final analysis, Norris’s art cannot be described by a predominant style or a coherent cultural ethos. Her work is simply embedded in its own time and place, in her life as a woman living in Cleveland, Mississippi, making a living as a cleaning woman, trying to shepherd her intense drive to paint. Meanwhile, in the larger academic world of art, the words of Susan Larsen, art professor and writer, still beg for attention. Larsen wrote in 1993: [Self-taught art is] a unique and vital ongoing complement of American cultural life, difficult to contain or chronicle, ubiquitous and unlicensed, a wilder, more perilous domain of artistic freedom. . . . It is time to lose our selfconsciousness and sentimentality over this work and to treat it as art, nothing more, nothing less. . . . By respecting [the artists’] very genuine achievements, we create a common ground for them with other contemporary artists and broaden our own perspectives for analysis and understanding.

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Interview with Carolyn Norris Tom Rankin Tom Rankin recorded this interview with Carolyn Norris on October 19, 1991. Rankin was chair of the Delta State University Art Department at the time. The focuses of the interview were an exhibit of Norris’s work for Black History Month and her process as a painter. Dorothy Shawhan and Terry Simmons, friends of Norris and DSU faculty members, were also in the room.

TOM What did you do with those first paintings? CAROLYN Ricky got ’em. I never got rid of ’em. I got rid of a whole lot of ’em. I done eighteen, eighteen when I first started out. Didn’t get rid of the ones I loved so well, though.

When did you move to Mississippi? Sixty-nine. Following behind the children’s father. TOM

CAROLYN

Can you remember the first time you drew anything? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. It was a Saturday afternoon, I was nursing one of the chilluns on this breast, and picked up the paintbrush and got turned on to red and black, what Terry got on. Start from there. And it was house paint, though. TOM

TOM

So the first painting you did was over

here.

CAROLYN

CAROLYN Uhm-hm. This is where I grew up at! Well, you know, what I’m saying is, you mature. You know, you only a child when you leave home, and nobody ain’t told you what’s gonna happen, look like. So you might say I experienced and learned and matured right here in the South.

Now that was back—about what? Seventy-three, seventy-two. They go for five dollars, and I didn’t get the five dollars, but it inspired me to do what I had to do.

I want to talk about the things you first painted. What was the subject matter? CAROLYN It was whatever I felt like I got turned on to. Whatever I liked, I done it. ’Cause I was fascinated that I could do it, and I really couldn’t believe

What did you paint it on? One strip of drawer. I had tore up a lot of dressers in my lifetime. TOM

TOM

TOM

CAROLYN

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that I would do it till I got finished with it. And after I got finished with it, I’d throw it in the corner and go on to something else.

Everybody got a story or a, what do you call it, something they can fall back and say this is their excuse— Of why they’re not painting? CAROLYN Right. TOM

TOM So you were doing—I mean, you might do a portrait one day, and the next— CAROLYN Something another day. I might stay up all night long, all day long, and so on, and go to work and get back on it. I didn’t have no idea I was gonna be a painter. Still don’t. It does not faze me one bit, when they be tellin’ me that. It seem like it’s a hobby, some way to keep my sanity.

Like it’s a release? CAROLYN Yes. ’Cause you can’t go nowhere, you can’t correspond with people unless it’s, uh, “Bring me the book.” It’s like being in the world by yourself. TOM

By yourself? In what way? CAROLYN Because you do not have anyone to understand you other than a few friends, you know—you know, Dorothy listens to me all the time, Terry listens to me all the time, and it’s only a few more. Other than that, you are really in a world by yourself. You know, when you have a common subject and you want feedback, they don’t have feedback, they tell you off-the-wall stuff. Soap operas and everything else. I know I’m unusual. DOROTHY There aren’t many painters in your immediate community. CAROLYN Uh-uh. Those who think they can paint, they criticize what I do, you know, like next door. He could be a painter if he wanted to, but went off into that—business and all that mess. TOM

TOM Did they say that like they’re trying to prove to you that they could do that if they really wanted to? CAROLYN Uhm-hm.

Did you look at many paintings before you started? CAROLYN Uh-uh. I just pick up magazines and say, “Hey, I like that,” and done it! And then as the years went by I started doing things the way I felt it. TOM

TOM With your first paintings—you were using house paint, what kind of brushes did you have? CAROLYN House paint brushes. And then Miss Vickers [Norris’s social worker] gave me a whole thing full of makeup, and then I ran out of paint and I used her makeup to finish the first painting I done. So it was halfand-half. TERRY Do you think we could get that painting down here? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. I have to tell Ricky to send it. TERRY That’s the first painting you ever did, of you holding Yama [Norris’s fourth child]? CAROLYN Yeah, I’m breast-feeding Yama and painting all at the same time.

And what’s the painting of? A mother and a child. She is caressing her child. TOM

CAROLYN

I N T E R V I E W W I T H C A R O LY N N O R R I S

You said when you first moved here that you couldn’t believe it, you know, just the way life was in Mississippi compared to West Virginia. What’s the first painting you did that dealt with that realization? Or was there? Did you ever get up and say, “I’m gonna paint something about the way I see . . .” CAROLYN I did do some paintings like that, but they were in a café in Shaw, and the café burned down. So there were six of them that got burned in that fire. TOM

tryin’ to find out where is the snakes? It’s devastating, you don’t know what you gonna do. TOM

How long did you have to deal with

that? Until I got the determination to say, “I’m coming into town and do it for myself,” after all the money ran out and all that, you know. CAROLYN

TOM

That was a couple of years? I think it was in ’71.

CAROLYN

They hired you to do them inside? Uh-uh. I done them and they put them in their café, and the café got caught on fire. So none of that saved. I can remember that. TERRY Well, were they café scenes, or— what were they? CAROLYN No. It was basically about the surroundings of the area, like people in the cotton fields, and an old house, and then there was one with an old lady sittin’ on the step of her old house, and it had cracks in it, you know, and people standin’ at the door, you know, children runnin’ round in the yard, and I had a little outhouse on that side. And I dwelled on that outhouse because that was something that scared me. TERRY You had not seen an outhouse? CAROLYN You know, I had never had to go to any. I was brought up with a bathroom in the house, and to go to an outhouse scared me to death. They’d tell you before you go out the door, you go out the back door and they say, “Now don’t be gittin’ in there, snakes and things be out there now,” and so how you feel, you standin’ up there tryin’ to use the bathroom, and you all at the same time TOM

CAROLYN

That you moved to Cleveland? CAROLYN And then that’s when I met Clarence Simmons, drugstore owner. And I came in the wrong door, and he bought me a cup of coffee and explained the way life was and everything. TOM

TOM

You went in the black entrance? No, I went in the front door.

CAROLYN

The white entrance. CAROLYN And he said I came round the wrong door. I said, “Well, ain’t you open for business?” and he said, “Yes, but you came round the wrong door.” I said, “Well, I came in to buy me a cup of coffee.” And he said, “Your accent’s telling me you ain’t from here, so sit down. You got more nerve than anybody I ever seen.” I said, “Well, thank you.” And he explained it to me, way of life and what it was, you know. TOM

That was in ’71? You know, he just didn’t like me going through the wrong door, which I didn’t know, that I came in the wrong door. I ain’t going all the way around and TOM

CAROLYN

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check. He was open for business, wasn’t he? I had to adapt to a lot of things, in the South. Were there a lot of those kind of experiences, where you had to figure out new rules? CAROLYN No. I didn’t know about prejudice till I come in the South. And I still couldn’t absorb it, because everybody I met did not treat me that way. DOROTHY Mixed signals. CAROLYN Right. So, you could hear it from someone else, telling you about it, but actually experiencing it . . . I guess that was the way I was brought up, you know . . . We all got along real well, everybody treated everybody as family, and which I absorbed a whole lot of that when I went home for Mama’s funeral. I will never forget that funeral. She was well liked, she was well respected, and everyone who come up to you will tell you something that she had experienced or they experienced together. So it was not like that. It’s amazing what life will give you. TOM

Do you get attached to them? CAROLYN Uh-uh. I’m attached to ’em while I’m doin’ ’em, and after I get through with ’em I’m through with ’em. And I’m ready to go on, because there’s so much more I can get attached to, and pass on. Too much for me to hold on to. TOM

So you never have any regrets, that you can’t look at a painting you did three years ago because so-and-so bought it. You don’t miss your paintings? CAROLYN Uh-uh. I miss what I can’t do, because it bothers me, you know, like a needle that torments you always, ’cause you constantly wants to do it, and you know you can’t do it, because you gotta do this and that. That’s like I was tellin’ Dorothy the other day, I got all these photographs on the table that people want me to do, and I can’t get to them because I’m taking care of this and that. And I have to single it out sooner or later, what comes first and what doesn’t. TOM

TOM

TOM So it sounds like you’re more concerned with what’s right now than what you’ve already done. CAROLYN In the past. Right.

TOM Could you explain that? Because a lot of artists, you know, they can tell you— CAROLYN There’s a point and a period and a moment that you dwell on, and when it’s over with, you’re ready to move on to something else.

Like that painting we have in the art department—do you enjoy seeing it, you know, when you go in there and you see it, does it mean anything to you to be able to see it again? You know, the big Ballroom Nights? CAROLYN I remember how much time it took and how many interruptions there was for me to get it down and all that. I

You talk sometimes about your paintings like after you paint them you really don’t remember much about them. CAROLYN I don’t.

TOM

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Flamenco Dancer, circa 1983 24” x 36”, paint on wood

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remember those moments. Other than that, no. TOM What do you think it’s going to be like to see all these paintings hanging up? I wonder how it’ll be for you to see ten to twenty of your paintings all in one room that you haven’t seen in a long time. CAROLYN Well, it might flash me back, depends on where it was and how I was, you know, what kind of situation I was going through. Dorothy and Terry knows all the situations I was going through. Some pictures I done through changes I was going through. And others, it was a moment that I felt something.

And you just got it out. CAROLYN Uhm-hm. It’s like when I wanted to wring Janet’s neck and couldn’t, so I wringed it on that painting. DOROTHY Yeah. The dancing woman. CAROLYN Uhm-hm. And it was all gone. TOM

Pretty good therapy. TERRY The one that looks sort of like a voodoo queen, that one? DOROTHY A flamenco dancer? Yeah. TOM

TOM What about that Bouncy Floor? Tell me about that painting. CAROLYN I’m still at that painting, ’cause I’m still feeling them bounces.

That’s why you’re doing another café painting? CAROLYN Uh-huh, until I get the rhythm. That means, to get the vibe, get it all out of my system so I can go on to

something else, and which I do want to go on to something else . . . I don’t know what it is. All I know is, it started out with a bus. See, I don’t know. My hand tells me what I’m gonna do—well, not tells me, but does that. It does not tell me till it’s all over with. I know I’m strange, ’cause I say to myself, I’m a strange person ’cause I cannot understand my own self. I do. I say that. Why do you say that? Because I don’t know. You know, you get up in the morning, you go outside and you enjoy just seeing the sun come up and then people that depends on you say “Hi” in the morning or ask you how you feelin’ in the morning, then you sit down and listen to what they have to say and all, then you go inside and you drink, if you’re like me, four or five cups of coffee, and then you figure out what it is that you gonna put on—it take me for hours to figure out what I’m gonna put on. But I can go in that studio and get busy and don’t have to think. TOM

CAROLYN

It just kinda comes? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. Once I shut the door. TOM

Is that natural? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. I guess it is. ’Cause you don’t do no thinkin’, you just glad to be in there. Away from everything. TOM

TOM

TOM So your paintings just sorta come out? I mean, sometimes obviously somebody just gives you a photograph and says—

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The Discussion, circa 1988 28” x 28”, house paint on canvas

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Yeah, and I get some ideas and things like that. Like them little boys that’s on them rocks. I got an idea by a photograph, but it went further than that. CAROLYN

It’s like a little seed that you’ve got. CAROLYN It just keeps on growing and growing until something says, “That’s enough of that.” And that’s that. DOROTHY What’s happened with that bus, just that one window of the bus? CAROLYN Well, I’m gonna tell you. I come right on in after you left, went and fixed dinner, listened to that baby holler and carry on and something irritated me, I went out there, got me a Budweiser, went out there and shut the door and the hand went to doin’ this, again. Now it’s got seats in there, and that bar that you get up on the bus, you hold on to, it’s on there too, and the wheel where somebody’s gonna sit there and drive. Don’t ask me what else is gonna happen. Wait till I go home this evening. But why was it grayishlooking, I’m trying to figure out why we picked that color, why the hand picked that color, you know. I’m still trying to figure that out. DOROTHY Like a dream bus. CAROLYN Yeah, because the waves, you know. And the hand changed the strokes, you know, from the regular up and down, it went [makes movement], and I was just watchin’ it as it go. DOROTHY Some of those things you did earlier you used to say were like dreams, it was almost like you were asleep as you did them. CAROLYN Yeah, because I’m not aware of what I’m doin’ until after it’s done. TOM

And people can talk to me, they do, they stand around and talk to me and everything. I can hear ’em, but it’s still it’s like I’m in a shield. And I can correspond with you, but I’m not gonna pay that much attention to you. And the barrier won’t stop until you say so. I can’t understand it. I don’t think I can explain it, either. Oh, you’re explaining it. CAROLYN It’s like a shield. TOM

TOM But then after a certain point you can step back and maybe see why you—it was like the other day we talked about the bus and you made reference to that fellow from Chicago at the bus stop. Maybe that’s where the bus came from. CAROLYN Uhm-hm. You talkin’ ’bout in Memphis. I don’t know. We did experience a little moment of seven of us sitting there talking, seven of us, you know, but he was the only one that connected it. I don’t know, I can’t explain, all I know is when I’m in the shield it’s like—you ever see bubble gum, how bubble gum be stickin’ and then you pull it away, how it pulls and pulls, you can go any direction and you gonna come right back to that same thing? It’s just like that. That’s how it is. You can step out of it and do what you gonna do, but you gonna go right back ’cause you still in that shield. I don’t know if I’m explaining it right or not.

Makes sense. DOROTHY But you can almost make this happen if you go into your studio, can’t you? TOM

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Yeah. Everything in the house has to be in organized condition, everything, ’cause when I come in to go to the bathroom whatever I see out of socket, then I’m on that socket. You see what I’m saying? Everything has to stay in a socket. And then I can go right back into it, then it’s like going in, and shutting that seal, you know, and then whatever I do, all of it’s still in that same . . . shape. I can reach and get something, and all of it’s still there. But everything has to be in the right order. You know how I tell you I go and clean the whole house up, and they ’bout kill me when I go home, like if I go home today, it’ll probably be like a cyclone hit it. And I have to go all over again, and straighten it up before I go out in the studio. CAROLYN

Do you paint at night, sometimes? CAROLYN Night, day, all night long, all day long. When it hits, sometimes it hits two and three days and I stay in that site, I get up and go to work, I tell them, I say, “Well, I been up all night.” I do my job, go right on home, and go right back into it again. I like those cycles, though. I really do. You can get a whole lot done. TOM

Uhm-hm. But I’d rather be in the studio any day. CAROLYN

TOM Do you ever get tired of working, of painting? CAROLYN Oh, no. I’m looking forward to this thing here where they keep on telling me I’m gonna have a dry spell, of which I ain’t never had none yet. I wanna know what that is going to do to me. I ain’t never had none. I been painting since ’73, since I started out, I ain’t had none yet.

How important is it to you to show your work, sell your work, have people come by and see your work? CAROLYN I think the importantest thing is, listen to what people say, comments. You’d be amazed how many people stops and talks to me, and their version of how they see it and what they see out of it. TOM

And you enjoy hearing that? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. TOM

TOM

TOM Like when we put stuff up in the gallery, in February at Delta State, will that give you a lot of satisfaction? CAROLYN Uhm-hm.

So it provides that link between people.

Does it give you satisfaction when somebody says, “I like that so much that I wanna give you a hundred and fifty dollars for it?” CAROLYN Well, they have to like it. The money is not [important] even though you got to have money to live on. But if they like it, and tell me why they like it, that’s what gives me satisfaction, ’cause it gave you the satisfaction to own it,

Well, besides making money, working cleaning houses, what good is cleaning houses to you? Does it provide any kind of outlet, or— CAROLYN Well, I guess communication, because everybody needs to sit and talk. And I sit and talk with all of them, like we doing here. That’s what we do, just sit and talk and talk and talk. TOM

TOM

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is the reason why you do it. Something that turns you on. It goes like clothes, jewelry, anything else. You have to like it if you want it. TOM Well, a lot of people like your work. You’ve sold a lot of work around here. And I don’t know half of them, but I know where – CAROLYN Yes, I realize that. TOM And I think that’s why selling a work is a strange thing, in that it can become for some people the primary goal, to sell their work, which can really change their work. I don’t think that would ever happen to yours ’cause you don’t really sit down and—some artists sit down and say, “What am I going to do today?” and in that formula is “Well, what would people like me to do today?,” which is an unfortunate thing that happens. But that never happens with your work and probably won’t ever happen. CAROLYN Naw, because I like drawing what I see. And then what aggravates me is because I don’t get a chance to do everything I see, like a moment that you might see, like a tender moment or a emotion moment or a passion moment that I see and I want to put down, but I might have to go someplace else and do this and do this, and it’s in there and it still turns me on, but if it turns me on enough that I need to go home and do it, then I got it. I got that feeling.

But if you don’t do it soon enough, will it leave? CAROLYN Yes. Because I can see something else that might move me just that TOM

much. So I guess it wasn’t meant for me to do, that’s what I always say. TERRY But some things you do work out, and you’ll work on something over a pretty long period of time, like the Vietnam memory, you worked on that for a year. CAROLYN And that stayed in the news for several years too, so you always had that flashback. TOM What’s the difference between working on things that come into your mind and then these projects where people bring you a photograph or ask you to paint a mural, like that mural that you were talking about in the church in Boyle? How do you deal with those differently? CAROLYN Depends on which one I got the next morning, the one to do first. TOM So you just sorta wait till you feel like doing them. Pick out one painting that you’ve done, and talk about how it came. Any of them. CAROLYN How it came to be? It’s the strangest thing. You start out with something else, but it always ends up with something else. It never be’s the way you thought it was gonna be. And then something lead you on . . . Let’s see, what shall I say? What about the cotton? What about that cotton picture that’s in your window on the sill, got that white blouse and Terry was trying to change the blouse for me. And that started out as just cotton field. It really did, ’cause I was fascinated with the cotton. I actually planted cotton so I could see how it developed.

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You planted some? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. Like flowers, so I could see how it developed, because, see, I was amazed about cotton. When I commented, some people laughed at me . . . ’cause I kept asking, “What is that white stuff out there?” And everybody just laughed at me and laughed at me, so I ended up growing cotton so I could see how it developed. Then it end up with a woman, in a cotton field, old shack in the back, where people do work until just dark, picking cotton. Then I had a boat in there, with the ship going through with the sunset coming over the water. TOM

TOM

In the same picture? Uhm-hm.

frame. Somebody gave me this frame, which—it’s amazing how people give you this stuff to work on. But it’s in a frame. TOM Where do you get most of your things to paint on? CAROLYN Whatever I see, whatever somebody gives me, whatever I see that I like that texture. TOM You like—some painters would say that they always want to paint on the same thing. But you like— CAROLYN Anything that turns me on. It could be a piece of wood, whatever the texture, whatever I see in it before I paint on it.

CAROLYN

TOM

Where is that painting now? CAROLYN I think it’s in the welfare office, if I’m not mistaken, you know, I—you know. TOM

You don’t know. Yes, I do. I think it’s in the welfare office. TOM

CAROLYN

TOM You know, it’s just funny the way you really don’t care where they are. Welfare office in Cleveland? CAROLYN Uhm-hm.

What did you paint it on, what material? CAROLYN It’s in a frame now. On the back of it was something else I was getting ready to draw, but I choose the other side to draw on. It’s in a TOM

This tabletop? Ooh, yes. Be fantastic.

CAROLYN

Have you ever painted on glass? CAROLYN Hmmm. That’s what I’m sayin’, I got so much to do! I wanna do everything. DOROTHY Do you remember that little painting that Emma Lytle bought? That was on glass, wasn’t it? CAROLYN That was on the mirror. Yes, it was. I forgot about that, ’cause, see, the frame came apart and she wanted it anyway. And she said she was gonna put—yes, that was on the mirror. I can’t remember everything I paint. TOM

I like the material you paint on—it’s different. Each painting sort of seems to have its own— CAROLYN Texture. TOM

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The subject seems appropriate oftentimes to the material. Like that one that we had, Ballroom Nights, is on a floor covering. CAROLYN I had no idea that was gonna come. TOM

TOM It’s great. I mean, that’s what a dance ought to be on, is a floor covering, right? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. DOROTHY Tell them about that seascape where you had some grease from the french fries on your hands. Remember that? That big one on Bell Street that about took up your whole— CAROLYN Yes! I did that with grease.

The one of the lighthouse? Yes. I first did that with old grease. Crisco grease. And color ground. TOM

had a boat coming down in the raft, took the boat out. TOM Have you ever painted the inside of clubs? We talked about this the other day and I— CAROLYN Uh-uh.

No murals other than— CAROLYN The church. TOM

TOM Have you thought about that anymore, how we could track that down if it’s still around? CAROLYN Well, I think he no longer has a church. I have asked around, they say they don’t know if he still—he’s still listed as a Reverend—

CAROLYN

What’s his last name? Reverend Johnson. Leroy Johnson. So—Joan’s mother’s looking into it, to let me know about it. TOM

CAROLYN

TOM Uh-huh. Now how did you put that on? I mean, you put the grease on first and then the color? CAROLYN No, I went along and put the color ground on first and came back with the grease and just rubbed.

TOM

And so it kind of picked the color

What was the scene? CAROLYN It was a picture of Jesus, and he was coming down the steps and he had all this excitement, people on this side and people on that side. It was on wood. TOM

up— And it just kept on melting down. And then when we moved, the movers were helping us, took and folded it up, and all of it ruined. So I had to go back over it and this time in paint. CAROLYN

I like that one. Did you do it pretty much the same way it had been in grease, or did it change? CAROLYN Hmmm. We didn’t have the boat in there. The boat’s not in there. I TOM

TOM

Big?

CAROLYN Uhm-hm. Two parts. I got to find that picture, ’cause we photographed it. TOM Well, even if you just had the photograph we could probably do something with that that we could show. Have you done many religious paintings? CAROLYN Yeah. I done one painting of Jesus and gave that to Becky for

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Christmas, one year. She still has it, too. And the Madonna, Mona Lisa. Get that. There’s one you will just like. But in the background it’s got everyday modern life. TERRY Is it the Mona Lisa or looks like her? CAROLYN It looks like her, it is. To me it is. I just got the background of everyday life in it. TERRY Did you see this picture of Mona Lisa in a book? CAROLYN In a book. About the artist. Done the best I could with her, and I just put the everyday life in the back. I can’t tell you how many pictures I done. TOM

Try.

CAROLYN I can’t. I can’t even begin to count ’em, either. I never counted ’em.

Since ’73. CAROLYN I never counted ’em. TERRY Okay, this is the list that we have.

Uhm-hm. And it was on paper, and I glued it on that board and painted the scenery—you know. I did that a long time ago. CAROLYN

Long time ago? Uhm-hm. Threw it in the corner and the paper got all messed up, and I was trying to save it, so I just made it into something else. TERRY And what about the one with the girls running? You don’t have that one in your studio anymore—the foot race? CAROLYN Oh, someone got that. I gave that to a lady who gave me sixty-four frames. TERRY Oh, really? CAROLYN Yes. I told her to pick out whatever she wanted and she got that. TERRY That wasn’t one of my favorites. TOM

CAROLYN

TOM

The Discussion? TERRY I call that The Discussion—the two boys? TOM

Okay. The Carpenter? TERRY That’s the—there was a worker building a house. Did you see that one, Tom? It was kinda down on the floor. It’s not large, it was about this size, and then there’s The Man On the Cliff. I don’t think I put The Man On the Cliff on. TOM

Yeah, it’s on here. Man With a Bicycle? TERRY That was a cutout—the man with the young boy? He was coming down the road. TOM

TOM Where is The Reunion? Is it in here somewhere? CAROLYN Uhm-hm. She has The Reunion. TERRY This is one—I’ve got a good one here . . . CAROLYN I don’t know about all these names. DOROTHY Yeah. TOM So a lot of these names other people have come up with, right? CAROLYN Yeah, because I just do what I feel.

Well, what would you call this one? CAROLYN Oh, it’s a family reunion, that’s exactly what it is. But it was not original painting, you see what I’m saying? This was something that I was working on, TOM

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Carpenter, circa 1988 15” x 27”, house paint on wood

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remember? And I was getting ready to do it on a big piece. And she liked it the way it was. DOROTHY That’s where they were pinning the money on the woman.

Was it the oldest grandmother, got the money pinned on them? CAROLYN Yeah. And all of them standing around hugging her, but I never seen anything like it before.

Now where did you get that idea from? CAROLYN I went to a family reunion.

No. That sounds pretty good. CAROLYN Anything that it surprises me, or it makes me be aware of it, I do it. It just done something to me, and I just kept it in my mind, and I got home, I just sketch it out like that, and at the Crosstie I was getting ready to work on it. And Terry liked it. I did another painting—your friend got it, you know? Remember it was a little girl looking out in a window, on a chair? DOROTHY Wasn’t she looking in a mirror? CAROLYN Yeah. TERRY I took that out of the frame and it’s just on the wall, and it looks real good. Rabbit Jenkins has one of yours, I’m not sure what it is, when you sold— CAROLYN Yeah. I sold two of them that day.

TOM

Where they pinned the money? TERRY Now you actually saw this? CAROLYN Yes. I actually seen that. TOM

I’ve photographed that before. TERRY You have? TOM

TOM Not so much at a reunion, but a Portuguese Halloween sort of festival, where you pin it on a fairy. It’s a celebration—it is a reunion in a certain sense, but— CAROLYN Well, that’s what they do.

Where? It’s in—no, not Okolona, Columbus? TERRY South Mississippi or Louisiana. Was it south Louisiana? TOM

CAROLYN

TOM

TOM

His name’s Rabbit? Robert is his real name. He has one—they bought those that same day. I think we could collect hundreds. TOM

TERRY

Columbia. Columbia, Mississippi. And when you say that’s not original, do you mean you just meant it as a sketch? CAROLYN A sketch! Yes! TERRY Well, I wish I hadn’t taken it away. I wish you would go on and do it. CAROLYN Well, I don’t wanna do it anymore. TOM

DOROTHY

And this is a black family reunion? Right. They sit around and barbeque, and—

It’s gonna be hard to decide which ones of these we need to show, because there’s so many. You’re going to have to help us decide which ones are the best and most representative. OK, Carolyn? CAROLYN You don’t mind if I leave that up to Dorothy and Terry, do you? TOM

TOM

CAROLYN

Whatever you want. CAROLYN Well, I’m gonna have to leave TOM

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Family Reunion, circa 1988 12” x 18”, pastel and pencil on paper

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Nude on Pillowcase, 1988 26” x 20”, pastel on pillowcase

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that to them, because all of them . . . you know. Hard for you to decide? Yes. You know, because each one of them was a period that— DOROTHY Was significant. CAROLYN Yes. Just like John and Susan’s picture, you know. And then, Dorothy, you got one that I done during that period, that’s on sheets—you know, that naked woman? DOROTHY Uh-huh. CAROLYN I don’t know about putting that one in, though. DOROTHY Kent Wyatt might not like it. TOM

CAROLYN

TOM

Yeah, we need to put that in there.

Or we could do it like, say the ones with children and family, and then you have some clubs, and we could do it by categories, and then the categories chronologically, so if we had the clubs, we had children and family, portraits— CAROLYN I can’t think of the portraits I done. TERRY

TOM We got some nice portraits that I mentioned, and some early portraits in your house. Like little family portraits that you had. CAROLYN Oh, yeah. TOM I think we need to show a couple of those.

Plates

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Man with Hoe, circa 1994 16” x 24”, house paint on wood

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Obama, 2009 16” x 24”, pencil on wood

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Obama and the Path to Change, 2009 22” x 30”, house paint on wood

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Choices, 2009 22” x 18”, house paint on wood

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Alphonso, 2009 14” x 18”, pastel on wood

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Man in Hood, 1982 18” x 28”, house paint on canvas

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Back in Mama’s Arms, 2009 18” x 20”, house paint on wood

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Walking on Water, 1984 14” x 28”, charcoal on paper

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Delta Landscape (detail), 2004 60” x 26”, house paint on wood

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Birth of the Blues, circa 2007 11” x 15½”, acrylic on paper

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Baptism, circa 1995 24” x 29”, pastel on pillowcase

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Boy Eating, circa 1995 Pastel on wood

59

Country Road, circa 2007 10” x 8”, paint and pastel on wood

60

Going to Work, 2008 20” x 18”, pastel on wood

61

Recess, circa 2000 House paint on garage door

62

Football Players, 2010 House paint on garage door

63

Faces, 2008 House paint on garage door

64

Go Trojans, circa 2004 House paint on garage door

65

Hoops, circa 1975 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

66

Sunset II, circa 2006 60” x 36”, pastel on wood

67

Sunset in the South, 1987 12” x 3½”, house paint on wood

68

The Garden, 1995 12” x 8”, pastel on wood

69

Dorothy, circa 1988 22” x 24”, pastel on paper

70

Yellow Tree, circa 1989 24” x 18”

71

Cypress Break, circa 1992 8” x 8”, paint on tile

72

Worried Man 36” x 36”, paint on particle board

73

The King, circa 1970 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

74

Penguins, circa 1988 10” x 8”, paint on wood

75

Ploughing, 2008 36” x 30”, paint on particle board

76

Round the World, 2008 Acrylic on day care wall

77

Tweetie Bird, 2008 Paint on day care wall

78

Jook, 1988 36” x 36”, house paint on board

79

Brothers, circa 1973 11” x 14”, house paint on board

80

Johnnie Taylor, circa 1990 15” x 27”, house paint on wood

81

Woman in Yellow, detail, circa 1980 House paint on wood

82

Man Dancing, detail 36” x 36”, house paint on wood

83

Sketch for Electric Slide, 2008 15” x 27”, charcoal on paper

84

Ladies in the Windows, circa 1995 11” x 14”, house paint on wood

85

Bulb Portrait, circa 1988 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

86

Cabinet Door, circa 2010 18” x 26”, house paint on wood

87

Woman on Bell Street, circa 1975 16” x 20”, charcoal on paper

88

Leon, 2010 8” x 11”, pastel on canvas

89

Biscuits, 2010 18” x 26”, pastel on cabinet door

90

Disco, circa 1990 16” x 16”, house paint on wood

91

Firemen, 2005 27” x 15”, pastel on wood

92

Self-Portrait, circa 1975 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

93

Froggie Goes to School, circa 1979 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

94

Pregnancy, circa 1981 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

95

Newborn, circa 1985 18” x 12”, pastel on cardboard

96

Chains, circa 1975 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

97

Jackie Soul, circa 1979 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

98

Joe Fields, circa 1988 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

99

James N., circa 1988 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

100

Puttin’ on Shoes, circa 2008 8” x 11”, house paint on paper

101

Children’s Friend, 1979 8” x 11”, charcoal on paper

102

Panoramic Landscape, circa 1986 10” x 6”, house paint on wood

103

104

Fishing, circa 1983 8” x 11”, pastel on paper

105

Consequences, 2010 18” x 28”, pastel on wood

106

Reed Dancers, 2005 20” x 24”, house paint on paper

107

Soap Opera, circa 1983 8” x 8”, house paint on tile

108

The Bath, circa 1996 8” diameter, pastel on paper

109

Picking up Pecans, circa 1989 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

110

Strength of a Woman, circa 1988 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

111

Trees at Sunset, circa 1987 12” x 27”, pastel on wood

112

Jessica, circa 1978 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

113

Lovely Lady, circa 1978 8” x 12”, pastel on cardboard on black velvet

114

Boy Reading, circa 1979 12” x 18”, charcoal on paper

115

Father’s Hands, circa 1978 6” x 9”, charcoal on paper

116

Mama’s Front Door, circa 1981 4” x 6”, pastel on paper

117

Midnight, 2009 8” x 8”, house paint on wood

118

Sunflowers, 2009 8” x 12”, house paint on wood

119

Gingko, 2009 20” x 16”, house paint and pastel on wood

120

Sarah, 2009 9” x 12”, pastel on paper

121

Good Times, 1988 96” x 50”, house paint on particle board

122

Bully I, circa 1977 15” x 20”, house paint on cardboard

123

Bully II, circa 1977 20” x 15”, paint on canvas

124

Ladies, circa 2009 15” x 27”, paint on wood

125

Checker Box, circa 2007 10” x 24”, paint on box

126

The Lesson, 2008 36” x 24”, house paint on wood

127

Fixing Mama’s Hair, circa 1984 15” x 20”, pastel on paper

128

Mother and Son, circa 1985 House paint on papier-mâché

129

Sister, 1978 8” x 10”, watercolor on paper

130

Electric Slide, 2000 18” x 12”, house paint on wood

131

Christmas Street, 1999 14” x 22”, pastel on cardboard

132

Plowing, 1996 25” x 23”, house paint on canvas

133

Dancers, 1989 12” diameter, house paint on paper

134

Blues Singer, 2004 30” x 79”, house paint on trifold door

135

House Party, 2002 19” x 10”, glitter paint on Masonite

136

Fish House, 1990 12½” x 11”, oil and acrylic on illustration board

137

Get Back Boogie, 2010 11” x 22”, acrylic on finished plywood

138

Janet, circa 1988 12” x 18”, pastel on paper

139

Father and Children, 1993 18” x 24”, pencil on paper/construction paper

140

Cotton Field, 1997 Garage door

141

Dorothy, Emma Lytle, Carolyn, 1991 At the opening of the Delta State exhibit

142

Carolyn and Family, 1992 Crosstie Arts Festival

143

Quilts, 1992 Only fifty Mississippi artists were invited to contribute to the multimedia piece “The Quilting of Artists’ Ties with Each Other and Society.”