Artist Kate Freeman Clark left behind over 1000 paintings now stored at a gallery bearing her name in her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi. But it was not until after her death in 1957 at the age of eighty-one that citizens even discovered that she was a painter of considerable stature. In this talk Carolyn J. Brown brings the reclusive artist’s story and art en plein air, or out into the light, for the first time. As a young woman, Clark studied art in New York with some of the greatest American artists of the day, most notably William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League and his Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island, where she mastered the plein
air technique. Using Clark’s own journals and letters, Brown provides firsthand reporting of an artist-led school in the early twentieth century as well as displays many of Clark’s paintings, several of which were exhibited in the most important venues at the time. Clark returned to Holly Springs in 1923 and never resumed painting, but her memory lives on through the important work of the the two institutions that, since her death, have worked to keep Clark’s legacy alive.
