A new exhibit of works by Arkansas-born artist Carroll Cloar, many of which have not been exhibited, will open Nov. 7 at the South Arkansas Arts Center, 115 Main St., El Dorado.
"Carroll Cloar's Arkansas" is curated by Greg Thompson of Greg Thompson Fine Art in North Little Rock. The show will hang through Dec. 19.
"The art is from private collections, with the exception of a loan from Historic Arkansas Museum," Thompson says.
The exhibit consists of 22 paintings, including the Cloar masterpiece Children Pursued by Hostile Butterflies; 10 drawings and two lithographs. Butterflies was in the centennial retrospective "The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South," which was at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock Feb. 28-June 1.
Thompson's gallery also had a Cloar exhibit, "Carroll Cloar: A Road Less Traveled," which ran Feb. 20-April 12. Thompson says five works in "Carroll Cloar's Arkansas" were in a 1987-1988 Cloar exhibit at the Arkansas Arts Center.
"What a wonderful way to end our golden anniversary celebration," Jack Wilson, executive director of the South Arkansas Arts Center, says in a news release.
The Cloar exhibit will follow the museum's current exhibit of works by internationally known folk artist Clementine Hunter, which closes Friday.
"Carroll Cloar was an Arkansas artist who moved to New York City and staked his claim in the modern art world with the Rockefellers, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and others," Thompson says. "He came back to the South and settled in Memphis to be close to his beloved Arkansas and the Delta and still be in a metropolitan area.
"Probably 90 percent of his work were scenes of rural Arkansas."
Thompson says the vision of the show, as its title suggests, is "the Arkansas we all know and love; the Delta, small towns like Marked Tree and Sweet Home, as seen through the eyes of Carroll Cloar."
A guideline for the show came from Cloar himself, Thompson says. "As the artist said: 'I wanted to come back to the South and paint the places I knew as a child; places I knew were not too long for this world."
Thompson will give a talk at 6 p.m. Nov. 13, followed by a reception at 7 in the gallery at the South Arkansas Arts Center.
The center's regular hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m Monday-Friday. It will open 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays and 1-4 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 15-Dec. 19. For information, call (870) 862-5474.
Style on 10/26/2014