A sprinkle of rocking chairs, kitchen sinks and family photos in Mississippi Museum of Art’s “2025 Mississippi Invitational” exhibition pepper the galleries with near universal touchstones. Signs of love and signs of loss, frayed connections, conflicting expectations, notions of belonging and the creep of time come through in artworks, too, evoking the deeply personal relationships and complex emotional ties forged in that place called home.
The museum’s 14th biennial survey of recent works by contemporary visual artists living and working in the state opens a fresh window into Mississippi and into this particular moment. The exhibition is on view through Sept. 7.
Its 12 featured artists were selected from about 180 applications and 37 studio visits across the state. Guest curator TK Smith, an Atlanta-based writer, curator and cultural historian, drew on his conversations with artists in their studios and tapped into his own summer visits with grandparents in Mississippi for the exhibition’s “Call Home” theme.
“All of these artists are reaching out — reaching to connect in some way, either to their audiences, to other artists, to communities, for political reasons, personal reasons,” Smith said. “Everybody is just kind of yearning, and I think that is shaping the work that’s in the show.”
Both up-and-coming and established artists are among the show’s 12, with creations covering a broad swath of media. Painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, photography, film, assemblage, installation and more deliver a diverse, vibrant and provocative portrait of the state of art in Mississippi. Unfolding across three sections, or “three breaths” in Smith’s words, the exhibition explores home as a physical space, as a body and beyond, and artists’ works in each section showcase their individual range.
An actual phone opens the exhibition — the vintage Panasonic Easa-Phone telephone and answering machine in artist Emma Lorenz’s “You Have XX Messages.” Personal voicemails and audio from the Golden Record combine in Lorenz’s study of how technological progress can risk losing touch with the past, and how even content inaccessible in the moment is still proof of life, care and love.
Lush hues on handmade paper lend beauty, depth and inviting texture to domestic scenes in a suite of paintings by Ocean Springs artist Jerrod Partridge. An open fridge, a puddle of clothes, even a laundry room peek of a baby lulled to sleep by the dryer, put viewers right at home in the messy comforts of daily life. Other exhibition works highlight coastal natural surroundings and, in a nod to the much-traveled artist’s global home, a series of drawings from Italy. Partridge was awarded the Invitational’s Jane Crater Hiatt Artist Fellowship, a $20,000 grant that he will use to develop a series of paintings about communities within the Gulf Coast’s seafood industry.
Laser cut metal fronds arc up from a circle of sandbags, forming a prickly dome in “Garden Pavilion (Cutgrass)” by Connor Frew of Jackson. Inspired by a semi-aquatic grass with serrated leaves that can cut skin, Frew tucked in concepts of resilience and resistance in wilderness, likening the sandbags’ text to a search engine query of how to grow strong enough to destroy the blades (in stronger language).
“It’s this idea of wild, unrestrained growth and collectivity as a means of resisting attempts at culling, or destroying a particular community.”
Wander through the large-scale pop-ups in Sue Carrie Drummond’s installation “My Mold Garden,” drawn from an artist book collaboration with a cultural anthropologist (digital copy of the book also on display). Post-heartbreak grief coupled with mold growth in the home became a journey to emotional self-help.
“It puts you in the experience of someone who is dealing with slow breakdown, and then how they put themselves back together. And, the mold mimics that,” Drummond said, breaking down matter to raw material that can be re-used.
“A Beautiful Snare,” another interactive installation, confronts ideas of femininity through the etymology of lace. Its maze of voile, chiffon, charmeuse and cotton panels deepen from white to reddish hues, with increasingly intense coil designs the farther inside you wander. Is it fragile or strong? A lure or a snare, enticement or entrapment, or maybe both?
Artist Alexis McGrigg’s works in photography, film and painting embody deep family and ancestral ties, as in “A Personal Constellation.” There, gold leaf signifies departed members in a collection of old family photographs, to moving effect. Those are the souls that have touched “The Beloved” (her term for a heaven-like space, or origin of humanity).
“We have these people that are connected to us, that are no longer here,” McGrigg said, thinking of them as guardians who still watch over her.
A family photo finds a place, too, in Christina McField’s home scene installation, soothing in its details of a crocheted afghan on a rocking chair, worn books, antique table and the framed 1920s photo on its surface. It pictures her great-grandmother with her grandfather, then a small child, standing atop that very table.
“I wanted to bring them back to life and honor them,” McField said, fondly recalling family visits to Philadelphia, Miss., as a child. “This is what I think about when I think about calling home.”
Elsewhere in the exhibit, her sculptural triptych assembles architectural scraps — ceiling tiles, spindles, brackets — in a meditation on past lives, the erosion of time and enduring fragments of memory.
Groupings of Hattiesburg ceramicist Allen Chen’s remarkable vessels channel generations of ancestors and migratory patterns, from the “original tribe” of earthen-hued pairs to different colored and carved “offsprings” bearing the changes new environments bring.
Forms are similar, “the bones” are the same, he said, but colors — a surface quality, like skin tone — are different.
“Home is not really a static place. We would like it to be, but wherever you end up comes from long lines of people moving around.”
Chen’s “Passage of the Spine,” with its concentric ceramic shapes suspended in a horizontal line, may call to mind ancient whale fossils. The shadow this large piece casts only heightens its dramatic appeal.
“2025 Mississippi Invitational” selected artists also include: Rylee Brabham, with sculptures and installations exploring gender and society, with a dash of humor; Kaleena Stasiak, with windsocks, mobile and folk warnings about the weather conveying whimsy and wisdom; Ashley Gates, whose touching installation overlays images of her late mother with projections of a solar eclipse; and documentary photographer Betty Press, whose eye for intimacy and design shines through in photos of home births, pairings of Kenyan and Mississippi storefronts and more.
Three larger-than-life sculptures by Jason Kimes of Laurel follow a life cycle through the galleries, each one bearing a name that, together, form Julius Caesar’s famous phrase. A fetal position baby in clear epoxy is the blank-slate start (“Veni’). The 8-foot striding figure in weathering steel, made of thousands of individually welded squares, carries the rusty patina of experience (“Vidi”) and a noble skull in polished stainless gleams at the exhibit’s close (“Vidi”).
“You start with nothing. You build up all the way through until you end up with something praiseworthy,” Kimes described a lifespan. And then, “It’s the ultimate call home.”
“2025 Mississippi Invitational” is on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art, 380 S. Lamar St. in Jackson, through Sept. 7. Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors 65-plus, $10 youth 6-17 and college students with ID. It is free for museum members, children 5 and younger, active military and families this summer, and for certain groups on designated days. Find more details at www.msmuseumart.org.
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