History Is Lunch: Mattie Codling, “The Horn Island Logs of Walter Anderson”

The celebrated Ocean Springs artist Walter Anderson (1903-1965) is famous for the array of prints, pottery, drawings, and paintings he produced over the course of his life. During his last decades Anderson spent more and more time exploring, observing, and making art about a small barrier island—Horn Island—off the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Anderson recorded his experiences in a vast collection of journals over the last fifteen years of his life. In the 1980s Redding Sugg Jr. drew from the most complete of those diaries to create the book The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson, which has just been republished by the University Press of Mississippi.

“Walter Anderson had a complex relationship with Horn Island,” said Codling, director of collections and exhibitions at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. “Ultimately the spiritual connections he found there were what kept him coming back.”

Mattie Codling graduated from the University of Mississippi with a BA in art history and a BA in anthropology. She holds an MA in art history from Florida State University. She has worked in the museum field for a decade, and has been at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art since 2016.

History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state’s past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building in Jackson. MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page,