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By Deborah Freeland

The University of Mississippi Museums will proudly showcase a selection of paintings by Mississippi artist Kate Freeman Clark June 25 -September 15 in the Speakers Gallery. The paintings in this exhibition are oil on canvas and were created 1894-1914. Clark's work alternates surprisingly between dark traditional portraiture and the bright plein-air concept of painting spontaneously on location.

The story of Kate Freeman Clark and her quest to have a life in the arts began when she left Holly Springs, Mississippi with her widowed mother to study painting. After taking classes in Memphis, she enrolled in 1894 at the Art Student League in New York under the painter and great teacher William Merritt Chase.

She spent the subsequent years working shoulder to shoulder with other talented students at the League. When Chase opened his own school he drew away many students from the League including Clark. These were what she described as her happiest and most productive years.

In 1924, Clark put away her brushes and stored her paintings in the Lincoln Warehouse, New York. Following a series of losses in her life, she had decided to return to her antebellum family home in Holly Springs. She locked the door on over 20 years of work, and never returned to New York or took up her brushes again. "Don't embroider," wrote her friend Mary Lyman in 1925, "let things go unembroidered." Instead of painting again, Miss Kate took up the quiet life of a spinster expected of her "station."

When 81-year-old Clark died, in 1957, her neighbors were amazed by the news that she had bequeathed hundreds of paintings to the city of Holly Springs. "A few friends faintly remembered that she had studied art in the North years before but no one realized how accomplished an artist she had become," said Bea Green, curator of the Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery. No one knew.

The paintings she left to Holly Springs are a tribute to the teachings of Chase, but the talent and skill are all her own. Clark's decision not to work again after returning home is a statement about social expectations at a time when women were just beginning to be accepted in the arts.

This exhibition has been planned in conjunction with the annual Faulkner Conference. A special presentation on Kate Freeman Clark will be scheduled later in the summer.