Ole Miss museum to host talk on Mississippi folk artists

A free conversation at the University of Mississippi Museum will bring two of Mississippi’s best-known cultural voices into one room on Wednesday, June 17, giving Oxford and Lafayette County residents a rare chance to hear the state’s folk-art tradition discussed from both the scholarly and the local-gallery side.

The program, listed as part of the museum’s lectures series, runs from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. CDT at the University of Mississippi Museum, 412 University Avenue, University, Mississippi 38677. A reception begins at 5:30 p.m., and the talk starts at 6 p.m. The museum says the discussion will explore the creativity, ingenuity and cultural storytelling of self-taught and folk artists represented in its collection.

That matters in Oxford because Ole Miss museum programming has long been part of the city’s public life, drawing students, faculty, collectors, art lovers and longtime residents into the same space. The museum’s permanent collections include Southern folk art, and its Southern Folk Art collection features work by Pecolia Warner, Amanda Gordon, Jennie Lee Gorton, Sulton Rogers, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Victor “Hickory Stick Vic” Bobb, Lanier Meaders, Mary T. Smith and Sybil Gibson.

The conversation will also sit against the backdrop of one of the museum’s most important holdings: Theora Hamblett. Ole Miss describes Hamblett as one of Mississippi’s most celebrated self-taught artists and says her work is a cornerstone of the collection. The university also says it houses the world’s largest collection of Hamblett artworks, underscoring how closely this event connects local museum programming to a broader Mississippi art legacy.

Bill Ferris brings deep authority to that discussion. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where he was the founding director, says it was founded in the mid-1970s and was the first regional studies center in the country. Ferris’s Mississippi Encyclopedia entry says his first book was Blues from the Delta in 1970, and the Mississippi Blues Trail describes him as one of America’s leading folklorists, noting that he documented Mississippians through recordings, books, film and photography.

Milly West adds another familiar Oxford name. A Meridian Community College profile identifies her as a two-time Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award recipient in photography. An Oxford profile from 2023 says she founded Southside Gallery in 1993 on the Oxford Square with sculptor Rod Moorhead, giving her a long record of helping shape the region’s art conversation from the ground up.

For Lafayette County readers, the draw is not only the museum setting but the subject itself: a conversation about how Mississippi’s self-taught artists made meaning, preserved memory and built an artistic language outside formal training. In a town where university and community culture often overlap, that makes the June 17 program as much about regional identity as about art.