Art Nights | Ordinary Courage

Paul Mellon prized art for its power to turn “the ordinary, everyday object or scene into a universal one.” Stuck at home, we can take heart from the artists in the exhibition Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Their Times. They had the courage to break from the ordinary artistic routines of their times and transform scenes from everyday life in unique and surprising ways. Van Gogh, speaking to this very quality, wrote, “What would life be like if we had no courage to attempt anything?” In this Art Night, a partnership event with the Millsaps College Visiting Writers Series, we will explore art’s power to interrupt and reimagine the ordinary, opening up space for change. Dr. Sarah Williams, Faculty Teaching Fellow in Art History at Millsaps College, will deliver a gallery talk on this exhibition. Afterward, the journalist, filmmaker, and author Casey Parks will read from her forthcoming memoir, Diary of a Misfit, a work that pierces the mores of everyday Southern life and plumbs its mysteries in an effort to “forge connections across the gulfs that divide us.”