The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians will host the third annual Veterans Day Weekend Powwow November 7-9, 1997. The powwow will be held at the Pearl River Recreational Ballfield on the Choctaw Indian Reservation in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The weekend will feature men's and women's fancy shawl, southern straight, buckskin, traditional, grass, cloth, and jingle dress clothing contests as well as drum performances and competition. Tickets for the powwow are $3 for the day and $7 for the weekend. Limited arts and crafts space is available. For more information call the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians at 601-656-5251.
Cities of the Dead: Life in New Orleans Cemeteries will be exhibited at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans from October 1997 to October 1998. The exhibit's 50 color and black and white photographic images are drawn from a book by brothers Robert and Mason Florence. Thirteen regional burial grounds are featured in the photographs, which focus on tombs and the individuals integrally connected to them. The exhibit delineates the various forms of above-ground graves that illustrate New Orleans distinctive mosaic of cultures. For more information, call the Museum at 1-800-568-6968 or visit their website at www.crt.state.la.us/crt/museum/lsmnet3.htm.
The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is offering two fellowships a year to support emerging scholars who wish to study architecture of the South prior to 1860. The Beehive-Mills Lane Architecture Fellowships are open to advanced graduates, independents scholars, and new professionals in the fields of architecture and historic preservation. The areas eligible for architectural research are Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Stipends of up to $1,500 per month will be awarded for periods of three months. Residence in Winston-Salem is not required, but fellowship recipients are expected to take advantage of the extensive resources of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. To receive a fellowship form, contact Bradford L. Rauschenberg, Director of Research, Beehive-Lane Architectural Fellowships, Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, P.O. Box 10310, Winston-Salem, NC 27018; telephone 910-721-7366; fax 910-721-7376.
The University of Michigan Library is celebrating the centennial of William Faulkner's birth with an exhibit and a two-day conference. The exhibit includes items from the Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman William Faulkner Collection and will be on display through November 22, 1997. The conference will be held on November 7 and 8, 1997. Topics will include Faulkner's "families," trends in Faulkner teaching and collecting, and Faulkner's place in world literature. Lectures and presentations will be given by Robert Hamblin, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University; Arthur Kinney of the University of Massachusetts; William Boozer, a collector and editor of The Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review; and Engelsina Pareslegina, librarian at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. Further information is available from Kathryn Beam at the Special Collections Library, telephone 313-764-9377.
The editors of the Journal of Southern Religion invite submissions for its first issue scheduled to go online in January 1998. The journal is sponsored by Mercer University Press and is available free of charge on the World Wide Web. Submitted articles should broadly address religion in the South, including regionalism (e.g., Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, Florida, and the Caribbean); religious aspects of Southern culture; civil religion; local and folk religions; ethnicity and slave religion; and issues of race, class, gender, and disability. The journal also publishes book reviews. The most outstanding article will receive the Sam Hill Award in Southern Religion, a prize that includes article publication, a cash award, and a gift certificate from Mercer University Press. For more information contact Briane Turley, managing editor, at bkt9@wvu.edu.
Walker Evans Simple Secrets: Photographs from the Collection of Marian and Benjamin A. Hill will be on display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, March 24-June 13, 1998. The exhibition will feature over 90 vintage prints including Evans's early abstractions and New York street scenes, images of New England and New York Victorian architecture, his work in Georgia, West Virginia, and Louisiana, and his Farm Security Administration photographs. Call 404-733-4437 for more information.
The Dewitt Wallace Gallery in Williamsburg, Virginia, will open three exhibits this fall. Mark Catesby's Natural History of North America: The Watercolors from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle will begin November 20, 1997, and will be on display through February 16, 1998. This exhibition of 52 watercolors is accompanied by a full-color catalog and is part of a national tour. The exhibition demonstrates the groundbreaking nature of Natural History as a study of relationships between species and their habitats. Virginia Samplers will run October 31, 1997-September 8, 1998. The exhibit will feature more than 100 Virginia samplers and related embroideries created between 1650-1850. The Furniture of the American South exhibit, featuring more than 150 of Colonial Williamsburg's finest examples of Southern furniture, will be on display November 8, 1997-December 31, 1998. A symposium entitled "A Region of Regions: Cultural Diversity and Furniture Trade in the Early South" will be held in conjunction with the exhibit November 13-16, 1997. For more information on the exhibits, contact the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation at 757-220-7286. To find out more information on the symposium, call the Williamsburg Institute at 1-800-603-0948.
The 24th Annual Pilgrimage Garden Club Antiques Forum will be held November 5-7, 1997, in Natchez, Mississippi. The theme for this year's event is "A Southern Sampler: Arts, Architecture, and Antiquity." Activities include lectures at the Natchez Eola Hotel by seven of the nation's most distinguished art historians and museum curators and excursions to antebellum homes and plantations. Tickets and additional information are available from Melinda Pritchartt, Forum Registrar, at 888-840-7265 or 601-445-2072 or Stephanie Anderson, Publicity Chairman, at 601-445-9844 or 601-446-6204. The Pilgrimage Garden Club's web site address is http://www.bkbank.com/ncvb/antiques/.
The Historic New Orleans Collection at 533 Royal Street will display Haunter of Ruins: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin from October 7, 1997, through March 21, 1998. This selection of 65 original photographs and accompanying writings from the Historic New Orleans Collection archives features the decaying monuments and Southern landscapes that made Laughlin famous. The exhibit is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. For more information, contact Elsa Schneider at 504-523-4662.
The Department of History at the University of Mississippi is sponsoring a graduate conference on Southern history March 20-21, 1998. The two-day conference will feature paper readings on various aspects of Southern history from the colonial period to the present. Readings will be given by M.A. and Ph.D. students from across the nation. The conference's keynote speaker is Professor James Oakes of Northwestern University, author of The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. Contact Ted Smith or Steve Bundey at 601-232-7148 to request information about the conference or to receive guidelines for paper submission. The web address for the University of Mississippi History Department is http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/history/.
Furman University's Department of English is hosting a conference titled "Women Writers and William Faulkner: A Conversation" March 26-28, 1998. Speakers will include Ellen Douglas, Karla Holloway, Mary Hood, and Cynthia Shearer. Anyone interested in submitting a paper to be considered for presentation at the conference may do so by December 15, 1997. Papers should be sent to Professor Willard Pate, Department of English, Furman University, Greenville, SC 29613; telephone 864-294-2066.
