Patti Carr Black, curator of the Remembering Welty exhibition at the Old Capitol Museum last fall, spoke to friends who gathered in Jackson on September 28, 2002, to tour the exhbition before attending a dinner celebrating the Center’s 25th anniversary. The comments, printed here, cover the exhibition as well as plans for the Welty House and the Welty Collection.


     When Eudora died in July 2001, there was an outpouring of assessments, nationally and internationally, of her achievements: the power of her fiction, her influence on the development of the American short story, her broad understanding of--and contributions to--literary modernism, and the formative effect she had on other writers. Here in Mississippi we grieved over the loss of a warm, perceptive, witty, and invariably kind friend. Our two major museums in Jackson--the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Old Capitol--quickly began planning for exhibits honoring Eudora Welty. I hope some of you got to see the exhibit at the art museum.

   Eudora’s nieces, Mary Alice Welty White and Elizabeth Welty Thompson, made this exhibit possible through their generosity in making these items available. The exhibit is a brief look at Eudora’s life through objects that she cherished. Our space here was extremely limited, but we chose things concerned with her lifelong interests: gardening, travel, theatre, books, and of course her writing. Most of the objects in the exhibit have never been on public display.  They range from Eudora’s baby doll to her presidential medals. They also show an element so dominant in her life---laughter. We have on display a whimsical book she created as a child to amuse her little brother when he was sick. We also have caricatures that she created as a young adult to amuse a friend, Frank Lyell, off at Princeton.

   There are also objects she specifically mentioned in her beautiful autobiographical work, One Writer’s Beginning: her childhood books, her father’s pocket watch, his telescope, an early camera. We have the desk where she worked and the typewriter she used during one period of her life. We believe she had at least four typewriters during her long career, adamantly stopping at the idea of acquiring a Word Processor. She could process her own words.  

   Her literary career, of course, brought her virtually every honor and prize possible in the literary world. She was the first living writer to be published by the Library of America series, joining our great immortals, like Mark Twain. We have a side exhibition of some of her photographs juxtaposed to her writing. And, by the way, the medals and awards that you see on exhibit represent only a small fraction of those she received. I want to give you a chance to walk leisurely through the exhibit, read the text, and experience the objects themselves.

      Before we break up I want to tell you a bit about the plans for the Eudora Welty House. The house, as you know, was left to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which will open it as an interpretive literary site. Because of the generosity of her nieces, it will be one of the most substantive literary houses in American in terms of authenticity of furnishings, books, paintings, furniture, rugs, draperies. Virtually everything will remain intact. The fabric of the house itself will be as it is with the addition of those mechanisms necessary to operate a first-class museum house: air conditioning, humidity control, smoke detection, and fire suppression equipment. Unobtrusively added, we hope.