Director Tate Taylor has recognized the need and appetite for local Mississippians to get into the film industry. The realization led him to start Film Natchez, a nonprofit organization geared toward pairing Mississippians with professionals in the film industry.
With the renovation, the organization hopes to have a permanent place to house “Reclaiming Our Legacy & Shifting the Narrative of Mississippi Granny Midwives: A Storytelling Project.” The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is providing a $50,000 grant to help document the stories of families in the state through interviews with families or communities that had midwives. The dialogue will focus on “granny” midwives and their roles in births as well as their interactions with children. The project will focus on the Jackson Prairie, Mississippi Delta, Black Belt and Loess Hills regions of Mississippi.
In 65 paintings, 29 works on paper and three sculptures, “Piercing the Inner Wall: The Art of Dusti Bongé,” available through May 23, covers the range of her work as Mississippi’s first consistently Modernist artist, progressing through periods of figurative and Cubist work, Surrealism and finally Abstract Expressionism, from the 1930s through the early 1990s.
Victor Hugo Green’s “The Negro Motorist Green Book” was the guidebook for African American roadtrippers during the Jim Crow era. The guide offered services and places that were friendly to African Americans, while also highlighting the dangers of travel with threats such as whites-only sundown towns. Author and journalist Deborah Douglas has published a new kind of civil-rights guide.
Karla McCullough is the executive director of the Juanita Sims Doty Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Black residents in Jackson, with a focus on tackling the dehumanization of Mississippians of color. The Franciscan Sisters gave the foundation small grants between 2018 and 2019. But then in 2020, the religious group called her about their new grant project called “Seeding the Legacy.”
A year later, the pandemic is still here, and the Oxford Film Festival is back stronger, this year rolling out as a hybrid affair that takes advantage of every screen opportunity available, physical and virtual. With the pre-warning and plenty of prep time, “we came into it with a game plan knowing all the areas we need,” Addington says. And they built a festival that kept every comfort level in mind.
Silbrina Wright, a native of Camden in Madison County, is the first Black executive director in the Greater Jackson Arts Council’s 40-year history. As such, she says it is essential to lead the organization in a closer examination of the intersection of the arts and social justice in Mississippi. First on her agenda: a listening tour.
When Gabby Graves-Wake, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, took her first programming class in the fall of 2019, she glanced around the room and made a quick count: There were 56 students, and six of them were women—and she was the only woman of color. Her story is not unusual, as women of color account for less than 3 percent of people employed in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields.
If eyes offer a window to the soul, paintings may be a peek into the psyche. That’s the lasting impression from a collection of artworks by famed playwright and native Mississippian Tennessee Williams, now on display at The MAX, the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience.
“Tennessee Williams: The Painter and the Playwright,” on view through April 11 at the Meridian facility, shows a surprising side of the literary master known for “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and more—showcases of raw emotion and classics of American theater and often, American film, too.
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