Vacation season is here, and that often means a trip to a museum. Jared Phillips, a historian at the University of Arkansas, joined Ozarks at Large to talk about the history of art throughout the Ozarks.
Moore: Let's talk about, so, last time when you and I talked, we talked about cattle and beef. And you came to me and said, what do you want to talk about? And we've talked a lot about agriculture, we've talked a lot about culture, and I felt like arts was something that I don't know a lot about here in this region, and I'm sure that we've got a richness of it. So let's spend some time talking about what does the history of art look like throughout the Ozarks.
Phillips: Yeah. Well, you know, most people, when they think about arts and culture in the Ozarks anymore, they associate that with the establishment of Crystal Bridges, which is, you know, it's a really incredible museum up in Bentonville, probably the largest collection of American art in the country, if not the world. I don't know that to be the case, one or the other.
But one of the unfortunate, kind of unintended consequences of Crystal Bridges is that it's obscured a lot of the really important kind of folk culture or folk art, although I want to be careful using that term, because sometimes people think because it's not in an art museum, that it's not worthy of being considered art. And so I think for newcomers into the region, or even some old timers, it's always nice to take a step back and say, OK, what was the foundation of our kind of arts and culture community here before something as high profile as Crystal Bridges came along?
Moore: So let's spend some time talking about that. I think, like you said, many of us, we think of art as a place that you go visit in a museum. And that may not always be the case. It's probably not often the case here in the Ozarks, right?
Phillips: Yeah. So the way I think about it, I sat down like, how am I going to answer Matthew's question? I kind of divided it up into four different categories. And so that's kind of what we'll work through. Somebody else, you pull somebody from the art school or a different historian or cultural commentator, they'll think about it differently, because art in some ways is very much something that is subjective, right? And so we approach it from our own particular perspectives.
So the way I thought about it was, well, OK, an easy link to go from Crystal Bridges out into the broader community was thinking about painting. So I wanted to think about some painters. From there, I got to thinking about, well, one of the enduring artistic traditions in the Ozarks is music. And so thinking about music. And then another thing is the idea of folk craft, so the artistic component of just everyday living, right? And so what are some examples of that? And then the landscape of the Ozarks itself is actually an artistic thing, an artistic medium, if you will. And so that's kind of how that's kind of how I broke it down. So we can start with painting if you want.
Moore: Yeah, no, this is a very historian thing to do, is let's create a taxonomy here so I can better understand what I want to talk about.
Phillips: Yeah, I like lists, and they're in chronological order.
Moore: So let's talk about paintings first.
Phillips: Yeah. All right. So my first introduction to Ozark paintings and Ozark painters was actually when I was a kid, doing what a lot of kids do during the school year and in the summertime, as I went to a summer program at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History.
And at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, which is an incredible resource in the region for people who are looking for somewhere to go and get in out of the heat or find some cool programming for their kids, they have the collections of a woman named Essie Ward. So Essie Ward is one of many women in the Ozark region that were kind of nicknamed or dubbed the grandma, or grandmas, of the Ozarks. And the reason is they were what we call primitive artists. That just means they are self-taught artists. They're not doing things in this really high art fashion, like a Thomas Hart Benton, who's also one of our big kind of big name painters in the region.
But one of the things that makes Essie Ward's painting so unique and special to me is that she's intensely local, she's from the Ozarks, she's an Ozarker born and bred. She's from out in Searcy County, not too far away from where Kyle Kellams himself is from. And through, the, a series of paintings over the course of her life, she develops these somewhat fictional characters, Miranda and Hezzakiah, and she paints these two-dimensional, but everyday scenes of Ozark life as it's sort of imagined around the end of the 19th, early 20th century.
And through that, like a lot of the other Grandma Moseses, a woman named Daisy Cook, also a student in the history department, University of Arkansas, is working on a really great research project on Daisy Cook, who was out of Neosho. They capture and preserve for us what we looked like, what we did, how we lived our lives in the Ozarks. But they create this really fascinating artistic visual record. And you can go see the largest collection of S.C. Ward's paintings is at the Shiloh Museum, and they have them all hung up, and they have really great cards that explain what's going on, what the subject is in each of the different paintings.
And so that's the kind of historic introduction to Ozark art. But there's painters that are still working today. And so it wasn't just this thing at the beginning of the middle of the 20th century, there are active painters today. And so two of my favorite painters that I always think about, that are really integral and have been integral in the arts community in the Ozarks and in northwest Arkansas for the last 40 years or so, one would be a man out in Eureka Springs by the name of Zeek Taylor.
Zeek is this incredible human being, not just because he's a painter, he's also a renowned storyteller. He's won multiple awards for his storytelling, for his activism and for his art. And Zeek, one of the things that he does is he has this incredible series of floral paintings, which are, I mean, just, if you pull up Zeek Taylor and floral paintings, you'll take a look at these, they deserve to be hung in even a highbrow museum like Crystal Bridges. But my favorites are actually his chimp series. And in particular, he's got this one, so the eponymous chimp is in every single one of these, right? And he has this one where there's a chimpanzee with a butterfly just on its finger. And it's just this kind of question about, what is life? What is nature? How are we thinking through this? But so Zeek is this force of artistic kind of nature in the Ozarks. But he stays relatively local to the south, he's a fixture in southern arts and culture, not just in the Ozarks.
But somebody else that I think about is a woman from here in Fayetteville named Olivia Trimble. Like me, Olivia comes from a long Ozark family. And she's probably best known around here for her mural work that she does, right? And the signs, all these incredible signs that are extolling us to the better angels of our nature, this is Olivia's work around here, right?
But one of the things I love is that Olivia has captured all of these historic quilt patterns that I remember from quilts across my grandparents' bed, and my wife remembers, and we're fortunate enough we have one of her quilt squares hanging on our barn. But she does all these different quilt patterns, and she has vaulted Ozark knowledge of this kind of thing, right? This type of very simple yet peaceful art to the national stage. So she was instrumental when the Ozarks went on the road to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in '23. She did most, if not all, of the signage work there, including these big quilt patterns and describing what's going on. She's been in and out of Little Rock for the Arkansas Folk and Arts Festival that is going on down there.
And so these three painters kind of, to me, represent, OK, this is what visual culture can look like. There's a ton more people beyond these people, those are just kind of who immediately come to my mind when you talk about quilts.
Moore: Let's move kind of into, I think that helps us to segue into this idea of craft and art as a craft. And I'm sure that quilt work is something that we can think of in that framing too. What are some other ways you're thinking about that?
Phillips: Yeah, quilts are huge. I often think about white oak baskets. White oak baskets are a staple of really the upland South, not just the Ozarks, but also Appalachia. But here in the Ozarks, we have our own distinct style. And depending on where you are in the Ozarks, you'll find different families are associated with them.
In our part of the Ozarks, so here in Washington County, the Gibson family is historically kind of one of the big names in making split oak baskets. And so you're taking a piece of white oak, which is a very dense, slow growing tree in the forest, you're splitting it down into very thin strips, and then you're weaving a basket out of it, right? And so these baskets are incredibly tough, they're durable, they can withstand damp. They're used in households and on farms, you know, throughout, really until we get into the era of cheap plastics, right, and then they kind of shift and become something more.
But the Gibson basket world becomes really important, not just in thinking about the creation of baskets, but also in thinking about the way that folk art can transition into this high art. So Edward Durell Stone, famous architect and furniture creator, will contract with the Gibson family, when he, backed in part by J. William Fulbright, starts to create a lot of bentwood furniture, steamed and bentwood. And the folks in the architecture school can get really excited for you about this, but they get a hold of the Gibsons to come and do the woven oak mat for it, right?
And so the Gibsons, though, this is a more traditional way that we think about it. But out in Madison County, outside of Huntsville, there's a nationally renowned artist, his name is Leon Niehues. And Leon took, he moved into the region in the 1970s as part of the back-to-the-land movement, learns this traditional craft, and then turns it into a high art, kind of like visual, almost sculpture kind of thing. So if you go to his website and take a look, his work has been at the Smithsonian, it's been at Crystal Bridges, it's been around. It's incredibly fascinating stuff to take a look at, beautiful pieces of just taking the lived thing here, the white oak tree, very common in the Ozarks, and turning it into something that's intensely practical, or practical and beautiful all at the same time.
Moore: Well, let's end here by talking about music. I think this is something that is probably the most known to people outside of the region when we think about art here in the Ozarks. But when you think about art, when you think about music as a native Ozarker, what do you think about?
Phillips: Well, I mentioned Jimmy Driftwood a minute ago, we can't not talk about Mr. Driftwood, right? So he's this teacher who uses music to teach history to his students. And if I had an ounce of rhythm and some musical notes in my voice, then I would actually do that for my students. But he becomes really famous for a song called "The Battle of New Orleans," right? And so listeners can go find any number of recordings of this, but Mr. Driftwood was from out in the central Ozarks. He becomes instrumental in and around Mountain View in the creation of the Ozark Folk Center. And he's a part of what we think of as this big folk revival in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, which includes that craft culture we were talking about. But it's also a musical culture. And what Mr. Driftwood taps into is a folk song tradition that stretches back for generations.
And while he's really an interesting person to take a look at, the voice I hear in my head when I think about this a lot is actually the voice of Almeda Riddle. So Miss Riddle, like S. Ward, like Jimmy Driftwood, she's from the central Arkansas Ozark region here. And she was sort of, you know, quote unquote, discovered by the ballad hunters of the mid-20th century, including people like Alan Lomax, who's famed across American musicology for his work to preserve the traditional musical arts of multiple American populations.
But she becomes famous because of the amount of old music she can remember, that she learned as a child and never forgot. And so there's all these different stories about her being able to kind of list off a hundred different songs in a row, that she's like, oh yeah, I know that song and that song and that song and that song and that song. And she becomes not just an anchor for the preservation and the passing down of our musical traditions here in the Ozarks, alongside Jimmy Driftwood at the Folk Center and other things, she also becomes huge in things like the Newport Folk Festival. And so she'll go and she'll anchor the national folk revival, and be sharing the stage with people like Pete Seeger, and vaults the Ozarks and our preservation and evolution of these traditional forms into this modern world, right?
And then, so that's an old voice, a new voice that I hear in my head a lot, actually, is the people that my wife and I are fortunate enough to plant sorghum with, and that's Roy and Aviva Pilgrim, and their work with Seth Shumate and Clarke Buehling and the Ozark Highballers, right? And so they are all incredibly talented musicians, and they don't just do traditional Ozark music, but they take advantage of, like, a Jimmy Driftwood and an Almeda Riddle, of the old traditions, to both preserve and pass on, and then evolve new ways of thinking about Ozark folk art and folk music.
Moore: Well, thinking about Ozark history, starting in the fall, there's going to be the beginnings of a new minor at the University of Arkansas that you are helping to develop. There's going to be an Ozark Studies minor at the University of Arkansas.
Phillips: That's right. We are really excited about this. So I'm not the only person that's been working on this. I've been working on this with Joshua Youngblood, who is in charge of special collections, and Virginia Siegel, who is the head of Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts, she's the state folklorist. And so we, for the last several years, have been working very hard with Dean Brian Raines and Associate Dean Stephanie Ricker Schulte, to pull together a minor that would let students from any discipline across campus, whether you're in the ag school or in the business college, to come and learn about the place where we are living now, whether you plan to stay here or not.
The idea is that we can use the Ozarks, a place that I, and my family for a long time, have held very near and dear to our hearts, but use this place as a way to think about how we as humans move through the world, right? And so we can take examples and lessons from our history here to create and inform kind of an intellectual toolbox for us to be able to move through the world. So there's, you got to take an anchor class in Ozark history that's taught by me every fall. And then there's any number of classes that go from English to political science and beyond, for whatever you're interested in, how you want to tailor that study. And then the hope is that as the minor goes along, we're going to develop even more courses and more partnerships, not just here in Fayetteville, but across the region to facilitate this.
Moore: Yeah. Well, let's have a longer, more in-depth conversation about that, maybe beginning of the fall semester.
Phillips: You bet.
Moore: Jared, thanks as always for coming in.
Phillips: You bet.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
