Will Henry Stevens Portrait

Will Henry Stevens, 1922
Collection of the Ogden Museum

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art houses a collection of over four hundred works by the late Will Henry Stevens in its permanent collection. While working with a curatorial panel for the current exhibition, Will Henry Stevens: Louisiana Waterways, I found this studio portrait of Will Henry in the archives. Dated 1922 and titled "Will Henry Moses," this photograph was donated to the Ogden by Stevens' daughter, the artist Janet Stevens McDowell.

Barry Hannah (1942 - 2010)

Barry Hannah, 1997, gelatin silver print by David Spielman
Gift of the artist in honor of J. Richard Gruber

On Monday March 1, 2010, Barry Hannah passed away in Oxford, Mississippi. He was sixty-seven. A giant in the rich literary tradition of the South, his influence is not only evidenced in the critical praise his work has received over the past thirty-plus years, but also in the heartfelt outpouring of memorials and remebrances by writers in the past few days. The following are just a few examples that stand out: The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Oxford American.

In honor of Barry Hannah, his portrait from David Spielman's Southern Writers series has been placed in the atrium of Goldring Hall. Over a period of 120 days in 1997, David Spielman photographed 72 Southern writers, including Barry Hannah. The complete series was shown at the Ogden Museum in 2007. In December of 2009, Spielman donated thirty-four prints from this series, Hannah's included, to the Ogden Museum in honor of J. Richard Gruber, who retired as Director in November.