KOSCIUSKO, Miss.—Independent curator Annalise Flynn gazed off the porch of the L.V. Hull Legacy Center’s administration building, taking in the sweep of mown grass and a mound of marble and granite out back, remnants of the monument company that formerly occupied the site.
“That’s why you’ll see things like urns and the pile of marble and granite and monument-making material,” Flynn said. Like the nearby James Meredith marker erected in 2024, the center represents another bit of Attala County history. The visual-arts campus stands as a monument to folk artist L.V. Hull, born in McAdams, Mississippi, before living the bulk of her life in Kosciusko before passing away in 2008. Juxtaposing the cold, hard slabs of stone residing outside, the center’s warm, engaging spaces honor Hull’s life, art and the generous spirit that welcomed the world into her orbit. Those behind the center hope to carry her creative approach forward.
The Legacy Center’s pair of renovated houses, now connected by a wooden ramp for accessibility, opened June 13 and marked completion of Phase 1 in a project that will ultimately include, too, a pavilion and an artist studio.
The administration building’s upstairs apartment can host a creativity residency. Its front room, on opening day, held tables and chairs where children and adults grabbed mystery bags from a shelf or plucked beads and trinkets from trays to create their own Hull-style plaquettes. In another room, visitors recorded oral-history stories and impressions of Hull and her art.
The cozy museum building displays a collection of Hull’s artwork in a colorful exhibition, shows clips from Yaphet Smith’s affectionate home-movie portrait of the artist, and presents a timeline of Hull’s life and creative practice as well as admirers’ preservation efforts after her death. A reading room holds additional resources. Smith and Flynn curated the exhibition.
The artist’s famed home and studio—added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2024—was too tightly packed in its neighborhood setting to support the vision for a lasting tribute. “Ideally, we wanted a place to expand upon L.V.’s legacy, and a place to be able to welcome the community and offer programming that’s comfortable,” Flynn said. “Luckily, this space at the end of her street was available.”
A grant from the Kohler Foundation made purchase of the property possible, and the Arts Foundation of Kosciusko renovated the buildings with its first round of funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission Building Fund for the Arts.
The Legacy Center is just down Allen Street from Hull’s home, the catalyst for her tremendous creative output in art-making and decor. The self-proclaimed “Unusual Artist” built her small home, porch and yard into a unique, colorful environment where found and recycled objects, paint and glue became plaquettes, signs and works of art that crowded walls and surfaces.
Within the National Register of Historic Places, Hull’s home and studio is listed at the level of National Significance, the highest level, making it the first creative home of a Black woman visual artist in America to be listed at that level, documentarian and Arts Foundation of Kosciusko board member Yaphet Smith pointed out to opening day’s dozens of visitors on hand to celebrate.
Preservation work continues at Hull’s home and studio, which in Smith’s words was “the landscape of her imagination.” Now owned and stewarded by the Keysmith Foundation, a nonprofit Smith created, the house still holds traces of the artist who turned it into a full-blown creative environment, from color on the front steps to shadows and nails on walls where her artwork and decorations once hung.
“Her presence is still there, and it’s a great place to kind of commune with her as a person and with her spirit, without the work in there,” Smith said.
Surviving artwork now owned by the Arts Foundation of Kosciusko, a collection of about 850 pieces, was conserved by the Kohler Foundation in 2022.
‘Let’s Come Back Here’
Born in McAdams in 1942 to a cotton farmer and a midwife, Hull (née Bentley) found an early outlet in the little dogs and dolls she crafted from mud at home in the country. She wed Frank Hull in 1961 and settled in Kosciusko, but the couple divorced in 1965 and lost their son to illness just three years later. Supporting herself through domestic work, Hull bought her own home in 1974. The site and structure at 123 Allen St. become her sanctuary and canvas.
Home and garden filled with her creative expression and flourish. She transformed buttons, beads, bottles, trinkets, shoes, household objects, hats, hubcaps, paint and more into assemblages, plaquettes, signs and decor. Hull’s display, well-known locally, became a destination for folk art fans and tourists far beyond the small town, receiving attention and documentation by photographer Birney Imes and portraitist Jason Bouldin of Mississippi, African American artist collector and advocate Bill Arnett, and a German guidebook to the U.S.
Arts Foundation of Kosciusko President Allen Massey knew of Hull and her art his whole life, but it wasn’t until he bought a local department store that he became part of the sourcing that tied Hull’s art so directly to her community.
“A friend of mine would come up there and ask, ‘Do you have something you’re not going to sell, that I could take to L.V. for her to paint?’ And I always had some kind of something in our homeware department that we didn’t sell, so I’d send it,” Massey recalled. “Then, she’d bring me a little trinket back every now and then.”
At some point, Hull called him directly at the store. He visited her home, and their friendship began.
“Everyone knew Miss L.V.,” Kosciusko Mayor Tim Kyle said. “When I was younger, when you went to Miss L.V.’s house, you had to go in every room. You couldn’t just say, ‘Miss L.V., I like this.’ She’d say, ‘Let’s come back here,’” Kyle said, remembering the proliferation of art, the way she pulled visitors in, and art works that rose among the canna lilies in her yard. “She had her own style.”
Screenwriter, lawyer and documentary filmmaker Yaphet Smith of Round Rock, Texas, was just a child of 4 or 5 visiting his grandmother in Kosciusko when he first encountered the artist. The artist, ever involved in her community, gave Smith and his cousins Freeze Pops, which won him over.
Years later as an adult embarking on his own creative journey, Hull came to mind as an inspiration and exemplar of a creative life, performed to the fullest, he said. Smith crafted his “Love is a Sensation” home-movie portrait of Hull from recordings made off and on over several years, premiering it in April this year in conjunction with a spring art exhibition on Hull at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. Several other screenings followed.
When Hull died in 2008 following declining health, local supporters formed the Friends of L.V., packing up her art for safekeeping and partnering with her surviving sister, Q.T. Tinnin, to settle her estate.
Curator Annalise Flynn, a Mississippi native based in Wisconsin with expertise in artist-built environments, was managing SPACES Archives, which stands for Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments, in 2019 when she came across records of Hull, the last one from 2011 with news of the Friends group’s salvaging of her artworks and their storage at Kosciusko City Hall.
Calling city hall, Flynn asked, “Hey, do guys still have this stuff?” The mayor connected her with Massey, then with the Friends group, and she connected them with the Kohler Foundation, which took on the Hull art collection as a preservation project.
The Kohler Foundation cleaned, conserved and catalogued the works and gifted the collection back to the new nonprofit steward, the Arts Foundation of Kosciusko, Flynn said. Her own thrill that this cultural asset would remain in her home state pushed her further involvement, as the primary curatorial and administrative consultant for the Arts Foundation of Kosciusko.
‘I’m Really Proud of This’
Hull is having a moment. While Hull’s work has been featured in multiple outlets such Country Road Magazine, an exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art that lasted from March 20 to June 14 this year titled “L.V. Hull: Love Is a Sensation” was the first major museum exhibition devoted to Hull’s life and art. The exhibition and related programming drew just under 10,000 visitors to the galleries, MMA Associate Director of Communications Andrea Donelson said, noting that grant funding could make a traveling version of the show possible.
The L.V. Hull Legacy Center’s opening, just a day before the MMA exhibition closed, attracted townsfolk and interested parties from around the state, all braving the sweltering heat to honor a local treasure.
The concentration of attention on Hull translates to “hopefully, continued abundance and awareness,” said Ryan Dennis, co-director and chief curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and co-curator with Flynn and Smith of the Hull exhibition in Jackson.
“For an artist to have an impact in a place like Kosciusko, and then have more attention be gleaned by the work in Kosciusko—I think it’s nothing but good stuff going on,” he said. “… The way the community shows up here is really just special to watch.”
“This is just another thing that’s a great plug for our community,” Mayor Kyle said. “It showcases the great people that are from Kosciusko.”
“It’s really wonderful. I’m just speechless,” Q.T. Tinnin, L.V. Hull’s sister, said as she enjoyed a piece of celebration cake with her cousin Bernice Wingard on a bench in the museum at the Legacy Center’s June 13’s opening. “I remember when she started,” Tinnin said, recounting her yearly visits from Memphis, watching the collection grow and grow. She looked around the room at the colorful photographs and works of art, and smiled. “I’m really proud of this. I sure am.”
“It’s just amazing to me,” Wingard shared.
Youngsters and adults gathered in the air-conditioned administration building, channeling their creativity in Hull-inspired projects. Greenwood artist Yolandé van Heerden arranged the “art sparks” to get them going—mystery bags, beads, trinkets and more, with old records perfect for a plaquette base.
Members of the Canton-Madison County Historical Society sat around a table, adding crafts to their field trip fun that afternoon. Society President John Kennedy showed off his pom-pom and button-bedecked Chuck Berry LP, emblazoned with the initials L.V.H. in Hull’s honor. “I’m going to hang it in my workshop when I get home,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on June 13.
Outside, Hollis Cheek, the Arts Foundation of Kosciusko’s first board president and now its vice president, was already looking ahead to Phase 2, with the completion of the pavilion and a separate artist studio they hope will reuse wood salvaged from an old barn on the property expected sometime next year. “I think we all have a little sense of halfway accomplishment,” he said. … We’ve done fairly well so far, but now we’ve got to put on a jersey and go back out and play again.”
The work continues, and the legacy does, too. “One of the things that we hope people take from this is learning about L.V., but also realizing that she let her light shine, and she worked on her talents and shared her talents with the world every single day, right there from that little house,” Smith said.
“Hopefully it inspires you all—children (and) people of all ages—to do the same in life.”
For more information on the L.V. Hull Legacy Center, visit lvhull.org.
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