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Paul:

Have you ever wondered what it takes to plan and execute a major art exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art? Our guest today, a Texas native by way of New York City for the last 17 years, gives us an inside look. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine.

Today, Kaegan Sparks, the new curator at the Mississippi Museum of Art, talks to us about the significance of their latest exhibition - the final stop on a multi-state tour that focuses on the landscapes of an artist that everyone knows - Pablo Picasso. Kaegan is settling in and says she's traded the Big Apple for a cozy slice of Southern life.

Kaegan:

I am lucky to be renting a really beautiful historic home in Bellhaven, which is kind of was my big incentive for moving here, moving from a shoe box with roommates for my entire adult life to being able to live in a really beautiful home. So that's been a great part so far. Honestly, I've been checking out some restaurants and met some people here and there, but really still finding my footing.

Paul:

Well, there's no shortage of good restaurants here. That's for sure. And no shortage of good people either.

Kaegan:

Yeah.

Paul:

Let's talk about your job at the Mississippi Museum of Art. When we hear curator, we think, hey, you're the person who is responsible for bringing all these awesome exhibits to the museum.

Kaegan:

Yeah, that's exactly right. So basically, a curator is a person who stewards and cares for a collection of artwork in a public or private institution and or someone who creates exhibitions. So, this involves devising a concept that could be a kind of theme or it could be a deep dive into one particular artist's work, research, a selection of works that sometimes that involves soliciting loans from other institutions or private collections, and then designing the exhibition in cooperation with many other colleagues within a museum's staff that devise a kind of experience for viewers - a way of encountering art that might, you know, teach something about art history or open up just a different part of culture that might not otherwise be available. So, it's really a creative job and I'm lucky to have it for that reason.

Paul:

So, the Picasso exhibition that we were seeing on display now at the Mississippi Museum of Art, that was already in the works before you came here, right?

Kaegan:

Oh yeah, definitely. The Picasso exhibition is curated externally. So this is another thing that I do is sort of facilitate, projects that might have leads outside of the institution. And so this exhibition was curated by a Picasso scholar from France, Laurence Madeline, who curated the exhibition under the auspices of an organization called the American Federation for the Arts. And this exhibition actually toured throughout three different venues in the United States and the Mississippi Museum of Art is its final stop.

Paul:

I think everybody has grown up hearing the name. You at least have seen some of his works in different places, even if you're not super familiar with fine art. And so when the announcement was made, it was like, oh wow, gotta see this one.

Kaegan:

Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually the first Picasso solo exhibition to ever come to the state of Mississippi, which was an impressive factoid for me. As I said, I'm coming out of a context where a Picasso exhibition is basically banal in New York City, but it's really quite a special opportunity to bring this world-renowned work to the Jackson community and the Mississippi community more largely. This exhibition is part of a whole slate of exhibitions that have been around the United States and Europe this year in particular because it's the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso in 1973.

Paul:

What type of Picassos will we see in this exhibition?

Kaegan:

It is an exhibition that focuses on Picasso's landscapes. So this is a pretty older traditional genre of painting that most people are somewhat familiar with. It features depictions of a natural or built environment. And within Picasso's oeuvre, this is not necessarily something that is highlighted often. It traditionally was a lesser genre compared to something like portraiture in the academic tradition that Picasso was coming out of. And maybe for that reason it hasn't been treated so widely in his work, but the curator was keen to emphasize how important this particular type of work was for him throughout his career. It was particularly important to the development of Cubism, which is the style for which Picasso is best known. That's around 1908, 1909. And then at other moments in his career, he really comes back to it frequently. And so the exhibition is organized chronologically.

We see very early work that Picasso did while he was still in Spain as a teenager, all the way through a major painting that he created a year or two before his death. And it's organized roughly by place. So there's an opportunity to kind of engage with historical material archival footage, as well as documents like postcards that give a kind of sense of the time and place and the setting in which Picasso was making his work.

Most of the work corresponds to different locations in France where Picasso spent the vast majority of his life. The exhibition will be on display through the first part of March at the Mississippi Museum of Art.

Paul:

Surely there are some educational or cultural enrichment programs that go along with this?

Kaegan:

Yeah, definitely. So we actually have a really full slate of school programs, tours. You can request an educational tour through our education department but also public programs, including our monthly series, Museum After Hours. There will be a couple more of those. And I should mention that the exhibition is accompanied by a smaller exhibition that comes to us from the Mint Museum in Charlotte that features the work of Romare Bearden, who is a Southern African American artist who in some aspects took cues from Picasso. He was a younger generation, a generation of artists in the United States that started making work in the 30s and 40s dealing with, at that point, Picasso's looming legacy or soon-to-be legacy is his influence on American art. This exhibition highlights a few of Bearden's works and their confluence or intersection with themes and styles the Picasso also engaged.

Paul:

What have you seen has been the reaction thus far to people who have come through and experienced this Picasso exhibition?

Kaegan:

I'm just starting to witness that because the exhibition just opened, but I actually just gave a school tour. And it's really special to see the excitement in the galleries and the questions that especially our youngest visitors are posing when looking at these works. And I think it's exciting to see work by a person who has such an outsized reputation as kind of iconic reference point that is a household name to actually see works that were made by his own hand. So I think it's a really unique opportunity and we're happy to be able to offer it here at MMA.

Paul:

You know, we talk all the time about giving experiences as gifts and what better time than to buy memberships to the Mississippi Museum of Art so that you get into exhibitions like the Picasso for free, right?Kaegan:Absolutely. Yes. So the MMA's galleries are split between a long running exhibition that features our permanent collection and these temporary galleries where we host rotating exhibitions. So those rotating exhibitions are typically only available through purchase tickets. But if you're a member, you always get free access to those exhibitions. So this is a perk that you would enjoy if you were to join or to give a membership this holiday season.

Paul:

My thanks to Kaegan Sparks, the curator at the Mississippi Museum of Art here in Jackson. Kagan gave us a preview of future exhibitions coming in 2024, a deeply personal, very local exhibition of the archival works of Noah Satterstrom, inspired by his grandfather's time at the Mississippi State Asylum, part of the UMMC Asylum Hill Project. And there's an exhibition coming next fall of African American quilts gifted to the museum last year. As always, you can check for museum hours, special events, and more on their website. We've got a link in our show notes.

Soul Sessions is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's Capital City. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. You want to know more about what we do about our mission at Visit Jackson? Head to our website. It's VisitJackson.com. I'm Paul Wolf and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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