Bearing Witness explores themes of death, remembrance, and rebirth through the lenses of art and the Southern land. The exhibition features more than 60 works, primarily by Mississippi artists Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) and Jason Bouldin (b. 1965). These artists, one passed, one living, have been inspired by the artistic tradition of nature morte, or “dead nature.” Selected works by Anderson made in the mid-twentieth century are positioned in dialogue with Bouldin’s contemporary meditations, which include still lifes of decayed arrangements and intimate portraits of dead birds, a mouse, a rabbit, and other creatures. 

 

Anderson and Bouldin have encountered mortality in their art in much the same way as they have in life; through animals and plants, the deaths of which have intersected with the artists’ paths and shattered the boundaries between vitality and decay. For them, art making is a testament to something deeply felt and truly seen. Through painting, the dead live on.  

 

Contextualizing paintings by Bouldin and Anderson are a collection of works by other artists and craftspeople who have also sought to understand loss. These objects, from the collection of the University of Mississippi Museum, including a 1930s photograph of a child’s grave by Walker Evans, a carved wood coffin and figure by self-taught artist Sulton Rogers, visions of the world beyond by painter Theora Hamblett, and items of material culture such as a mourning fan and bonnet.

 

In his Horn Island Logs, Anderson writes, “I walked as far as the black post and on the way home stopped to do a watercolor of a very dead gallinule – poor Harlequin had danced his last dance and I stopped to do honor to his remains.”