No matter what path you take into “Delta Triennial” — the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts’ newest exhibition, dedicated to artists from the Mid-South — it’s difficult not to be struck by the scale of the work on display.
If you start your journey through the front entrance of the Harriet and Warren Stephens Family Galleries, the first piece you’ll notice is likely “Two days until I go home, and that makes me wonder what home even is” by Lindsay Peyton (Houston-born; Kingston, New York-based) — a wave-esque unfurling of charcoal, graphite and paint-smudged canvas cloth that’s suspended from the ceiling and drapes into a pile on the floor. Large, partially-legible words are scrawled throughout the fabric in a tense cursive script, perhaps the product of nervous journaling.
The other primary entrance — through the Townsend Wolfe Gallery, where some of the museum’s permanent collection resides — puts you face to face with “So Many of Us Die Angels Must Look Like Us” by Kevin Demery (Modesto, California-born; Kansas City, Missouri-based), another piece that hangs from the ceiling, this time by a conspicuous chain. Situated in the middle of the room, the central feature of the sculpture is the silhouette of a Black boy, identified in a posted description as George Stinney, a 14-year old from South Carolina who received the death penalty in 1944, making him the youngest person to be executed in the 20th century. Under the head of Stinney, whose conviction was vacated 70 years after his death, dangle wind chimes and golden cherubs that emanate both eeriness and tranquility.
The third possible way into “Delta Triennial” is through a narrow hallway that houses Anne Lindberg’s “passages,” a site-specific installation that’s been up at AMFA since it reopened in April 2023. This entrypoint guides the eye toward “Ferrous Form” by Molly Kaderka (Austin, Texas-born; Stillwater, Oklahoma-based), which won the exhibition’s $5,000 Grand Award and takes up the entire back wall of the far room. From a distance, it looks like a painting of a celestial galaxy, but it becomes earthier and more geological the closer you move, the true texture — of hand-marbled papers — revealing itself.
Despite the commonalities in size between these three pieces, the overall work in “Delta Triennial” is remarkably diverse in terms of proportion, subject material and medium (ranging from sculpture to collage to textiles to painting to audio recordings and all shades in between) — a reality that makes sense in light of how the show was put together. Though the triennial (once every three years) model is debuting in 2024, “Delta” programming — which highlights artists who either live in or were born in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee or Texas — has been a longstanding annual tradition from AMFA’s days as the Arkansas Arts Center, with its first juried exhibition starting in 1958.
This year’s three jurors — Amy Kligman, Alexis McGrigg and Takako Tanabe — were tasked with independently evaluating over 1,200 applications, a record-breaking number. Rather than intentionally assembling a group of work to be shown in tandem, their job instead was to peruse digital images of the submissions and assign each piece a subjective score from 1-20. From there, the museum averaged the jurors’ scores, ordered them and made a judgment call about how many of the highest-ranked pieces they could accommodate.
Of the 39 artists selected by the jurors who made the cut, 19 have ties to Arkansas and six either work in or are native to Little Rock: Tim Hursley, Ajamu Kojo, Lisa Krannichfeld, Megan Mattax, Clark Valentine and Louis Watts. AMFA invited seven additional artists, each of whom represents one of the states in the Mid-South region, to be thrown into the mix: Kevin Demery, Christian Dinh, Anita Fields, Coulter Fussell, Letitia Huckaby, Jerry Phillips (who’s also Little Rock-based) and Andrew Scott Ross. In other words, there’s a lot to look at within a set of fairly wide confines, but thanks to an intentional layout design by AMFA curators that prioritizes associative groupings over simply organizing by geography, the viewing experience is one of surprising resonances.
For instance, Brian J. Lang, the museum’s chief curator, drew my attention to the material links between two somewhat closely located but seemingly unrelated pieces: “Collected Specimens” by Amelia Key (Dothan, Alabama-born; Norman, Oklahoma-based) and “M.E.A.L.T. Phase 1” by Michael Louis LeBlanc (Blomington, Indiana-born; Bentonville-based). In an effort to “elevate everyday objects” — as Lang puts it — the former presents a luridly bright array of found plastics in all of their textured, angular glory while the latter casts in bronze a set of lowbrow foodstuffs, including a corn dog, a donut and a bottle of ranch dressing.
With this new framing in mind, I soon noticed “No Standing Around” by Tim Hursley (Detroit-born; Fayetteville-based), which pairs a modestly-sized photograph of a decrepit small-town storefront with an actual rusted piece of the building, inviting different questions about materiality. Hursley’s image is powerful, but when dwarfed by the much-bigger physical remnant, it appears less significant, causing the viewer to wonder just how effective and accurate a tool photography is for documenting things that we’re losing to time.
“Delta Triennial” might be the finest exhibition that AMFA has featured thus far, with so many varied works worth dwelling on (and finding unexpected connections between) that it pains me not to mention more of them. Fortunately, if your favorite piece falls outside of this write-up (it likely will), you’ll have the chance to uplift it by casting your vote for the $1,500 People’s Choice Award via tablets in the galleries.
“Delta Triennial” is on display at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts until Friday, Aug. 25. The seven invited artists will give an artist talk at 6 p.m. on July 25, and various artists from the exhibition will be offering a series of demonstrations and workshops on July 27-28.