The first time she pulled into the parking lot at the Ole Miss Motel in Oxford, Erin Austen Abbott’s only intent was to turn her car around. She had grown up in Oxford but never had this close a look at the motel, in operation since the 1970s and within walking distance of the town’s iconic Courthouse Square. The cute little red hearts on doors, pull-right-up-to-the-room layout and retro vibe caught her eye and connected dots for Abbott, a Water Valley-based freelance writer and photographer.
That was 2006. The city did not have many places in the area for young, not-yet-established artists to show their art. Abbott’s own background in the DIY punk-rock music scene back in Tampa in the 1990s, seeing bands play and setting up shows in out-of-the-box venues, likely played a role, too.
Looking around at the row of rooms and the motel’s parking lot, she thought not of weekend football games, romantic trysts or weary travelers. She thought, “This could make a really cool gallery space.” And then she thought, “But we could probably only rent it for one night. Oh, a one-night stand at the Ole Miss Motel.” It was a cheeky eureka moment. She ran the idea by friends and motel management to gauge interest, found some, and the first exhibition unfolded in that location the next year.
Saturday, Oct. 25, will see the 18th-annual show, “The One Night Stand at the Ole Miss Motel,” taking place from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. and featuring eight rooms turned over to the exhibition of art for the evening. Seven individual artists are part of this year’s by-invitation show, and Vox Press’ Parchman Prison Art will have the creative works of men incarcerated at the prison in the eighth room.
The pop-up galleries were a success from the start, generating a fun reaction mix of “What do we do? Explain this to me,” and “I wish I had thought of this,” Abbott said. “It was just a lot of, I think, shock and awe,” she chuckled, “of just like, ‘Wait, I’m so confused, but this is so awesome.’”
Viewers quickly adapted to the festive hang in the parking lot, and the room-to-room progression to look at art and buy what they liked. The annual event is now a staple on Oxford’s arts calendar, and it even earned a Citation of Merit from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters earlier this year. Abbott estimated that “One Night Stand” draws about 1,200 visitors who come and survey the artwork over the course of the event’s four hours.
The art show is free and open to the public starting at 6 p.m., but a First Dibs ticket priced at $25 allows early entry at 5 p.m., plus food from one of the food vendors. Two food trucks and a coffee shop/bar will be on hand.
Shapeshifting Spaces
Motel rooms are transformed into mini galleries for the evening by the diverse set of artists, with the roster typically ranging from eight people to 12. “I’m fluctuating, to figure out what works best for the artists, because at this point, they keep 100% of the sales,” Abbott said. “I really want to make it worth their time because they’re putting a lot of time and effort into creating art for a one-night-only show.”
She does have big plans for a showing of 20 artists when the event hits that milestone anniversary two years from now, including some historic participants who got their start at the event and have gone on to become full-time artists with art shown around the world and collected all over.
How do artists turn a motel room into an art gallery? Any way they want. Some rearrange the furniture, some prop of the beds and use the bottom as a place to hang art, and some just work around the layout. “They get creative with these spaces, and as long as they put it back the way they found it, they can do that,” Abbott said. “It is their room for the evening.”
“It’s definitely a quirky space,” returning artist and illustrator Heather Sundquist Hall of Smithville, Texas, said of the Ole Miss Motel. “But, I think maybe because I live in a small town now, I’m used to those kinds of spaces, or seeing them on the side of the road. It adds to the charm of it. You can put more of your own spin on it, and I think that’s great.”
This year will be her sixth in the show, and even with the 12-hour drive from Texas, “It’s one I really look forward to,” she said. She finds inspiration in the Texas terrain. “It gets pretty desolate and quiet, and that really is therapeutic for me—that quiet, serene landscape.”
Her art nestles whimsy, nostalgia and long-forgotten things from childhood into that terrain, with rabbits jumping through a desert with disco balls or a collection of newspaper vending machines (Tumbleweed Tribune among them) far from the presence of people.
By this point, she and her husband have the motel-room-to-art-gallery transformation down pat. She usually has the tiniest room because her art is small. They take apart the bed and move it into the bathroom ”(It’s) a comical thing where one of us will get stuck in it every year,” she laughed.
Hall likes a clean slate, to pull in her own touches, like a tumbleweed one time, or a vintage blow mold another year. “It’s the opportunity to not only put work on the walls, but also to just share a little bit more about yourself,” she said.
‘Creative, Insightful, Perceptive Human Beings’
Artist Janelle Douglas of Madison will make her motel art show debut at Saturday’s show, sharing the abstract paintings and landscapes that have been her focus. Douglas spent her early years in Merigold, junior high through college in Cleveland and 11 years in Greenville. Those Delta roots feed her inspiration, in more realistic landscapes of cotton and soybean fields, but also in her bold and colorful abstract paintings.
“The Mississippi River runs through every abstracted piece that I do,” she said. “That’s kind of what I start with. It is an abstracted version of the Mississippi River, but it is in every single piece that I do, so home is in all of those pieces for me. You may see it a little bit, and you may not see it all, because I build layer after layer after layer in my works. But it definitely informs every piece that I do.”
As the show evolved in recent years, Abbott has turned over one room to a group, organization or nonprofit. Vox Press will occupy that space for this show, with works made in a creative arts class at Parchman. Incarcerated men find an underlying, therapeutic benefit in projects, said Sally Lott McLellan, who ran the workshop through Vox’s Prison Writes Initiative.
“There’s something about working with one’s hands that causes something to click,” McLellan said. “I always just call it the creative spirit.”
Their display at the show will include the art that is part of McLellan’s book “Intersections: Seeking Self at Parchman Prison,” a brief memoir of her experience with the workshop, which will also be for sale in their space. The men created masks, Gullah and yaya dolls, wall hangings, pillows, and drawings.
“This is a bare-bones project, and they rocked it,” she said of the artists’ use of glue sticks and crayons, donated fabric, old pieces of jewelry and whatever else they could get for the project.
“It’s extremely important for people to see what these men can do and that they’re creative, insightful, perceptive human beings,” McLellan said. It is important, too, for the men. “They love knowing that other people see their art. For the timeframe that the art show goes on, they’re ‘free.’ They’re out there. … To them, it means they’re established artists.”
While art-sale proceeds will benefit the incarcerated artists, McLellan adds that for many of these men, “to be recognized as an artist is a gift that goes beyond money.”
The show’s 2025 slate of artists also includes Kaylan Buteyn and Hannah Burnworth of Indiana, as well as Lamar Sorrento, Hannah Burnworth, Anderson Goin and Rebecca Dodson—all of Tennessee.
Just as integral to the art show’s longevity and success are the viewers. “The community that comes out every year is just some of the best supporters of art,” Hall said. “People remember you year after year. … Everybody is just so happy to be out, happy to be just looking at interesting things.
“It’s a month’s worth of an exhibition, with that energy condensed into four hours.”
For more information on the “One Night Stand” event, visit olemissmotel.com.