McAnally among MIAL winners in music, art and writing

McAnally among MIAL winners in music, art and writing

 Sherry Lucas, The Clarion-Ledger

Two renowned Mississippi artists — painter, muralist and lithographer William Baggett and ceramic artist and sculptor Ron Dale — will share the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters'  prestigious Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award this year.

Much-awarded country music stalwart Mac McAnally, artist Martha Ferris and photographer Maude Schuyler Clay are among the seven category winners, honored for works published, performed or shown in 2015. Composer Samuel Jones, novelist Taylor Kitchings, author Joseph T. Reiff and poet R. Flowers Rivera complete the roster.

Recipients will be feted at the 37th annual  MIAL Awards Banquet, being held in Jackson, in the grand hall at the Mississippi Museum of Art June 11. Lemuria Books will host readings and book signings by award winners that afternoon.

MIAL winners are selected from a slate of nominees put forward by the membership and chosen by out-of-state judges prominent in their respective fields. "For every winner there are multiple worthy nominees in each category," May Thompson, a member of MIAL’s board of governors, said, and the awards are a reminder of what a deep bench Mississippi has in the creative fields.

"Because this prize is a juried prize, it also recognizes artists and writers and musicians in early stages of their careers" and encourages their talents.

Category awards come with a $1,000 cash prize and a Mississippi art work; this year's gift is a custom-designed McCarty Pottery piece (chosen to honor McCarty Pottery founders, the late Lee and Pup McCarty, 1996 MIAL lifetime achievement winners).

MIAL has had dual lifetime achievement award winners six times, Thompson said, most recently in 2012 (Sam Gore and Andrew Bucci).

Baggett, professor emeritus of art and design at the University of Southern Mississippi, taught in university art and design programs for 39 years, and his art works are in collections throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. Described by some as "the delicate surrealist" for his imagery, Baggett has created art on a monumental scale for public spaces in Mississippi and Alabama, and in 2014 was recognized with a Governor's Arts Award for visual excellence. Baggett has studios in Mississippi and Maine.

William Baggett

Dale, owner of Irondale Studio in Oxford, is a leading figure in contemporary ceramic art and a veteran of 26 solo exhibitions and nearly 100 group shows. His art includes both tableware and multidimensional sculptures that, in his words, "evolved out of the traditional vocabulary of the vessel." A previous winner of the MIAL visual arts award, Dale has taught at the prestigious Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, as well as in Scotland and Italy.

Ron Dale

Kitchings, a musician and songwriter as well as an author, wins the Fiction Award for "Yard War," a young adult novel set in 1964 Jackson, about a 12-year-old boy's encounter with racial prejudice. Kitchings teaches English and creative writing at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Jackson.

Taylor Kitchings

Jackson native Reiff, department chair and Floyd Bunyan Shelton Professor of Religion at Emory and Henry College in Virginia, wins the Nonfiction Award for "Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society." The memoir and biography tells the history and aftermath of the statement signed by Methodist pastors and published in the Mississippi Methodist Advocate in 1963.

Joseph T Reiff

R. Flowers Rivera

Mississippi native Rivera wins the Poetry Award for "Heathen," a collection that "melds classical myth and modern living," poetry judge Mitchell L.H. Douglas noted. "Heathen" also won the 2015 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize.

Martha Ferris

Mixed media artist Ferris, of Vicksburg, wins the Visual Arts Award for her exhibit, "Foreign and Familiar Places: Paintings by Martha Ferris" at Fischer Galleries, which showcased the vivid colors and captivating geometry that mark her work. The show explored her response to cities around the world and her family farm. Ferris said she'd been so impressed by other nominees' "just stunning, stunning works," she thought a win was "such a long shot." "It's a wonderful affirmation from an organization that I have a great admiration for."

Maude Schuyler Clay

Maude Schuyler Clay wins the Photography Award for "Mississippi History," a collection of color portraits of Mississippians spanning about 30 years. The color portraits in low light, taken with her old Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera, was a labor of love, she said. "I didn't set out to make a statement about family life, but ... it really turned out to be kind of an intimate portrait of our family and our community and the Delta and Mississippi." She's a previous winner of the photography award.

Samuel Jones

The Music Composition (Classical) Award winner is Samuel Jones, for his "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra," described by judge Quinton Morris as "the perfect blend of pain and pleasure and delight and discomfort." Inverness native Jones is a past president of the Conductor's Guild, founding dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and served as Seattle Symphony Orchestra's composer in residence for 14 years. The Grammy nominee is a multiple MIAL winner.

Mac McAnally

McAnally, CMA Musician of the Year eight years straight and a Hall of Famer as a Nashville songwriter and a Mississippi musician, wins MIAL's Music Composition (Popular) Award for "AKA Nobody," deemed by judge Steve Markland so nearly perfect he'd give it to those aspiring to study the craft of songwriting.