Blues@Home: Mississippi's Living Blues Legends - Tapa dura

For almost 30 years, visual artist H.C. Porter's environmental portraits have captured the human spirit of her neighbors and everyday Mississippians. In December 2010, Porter set out to document Mississippi's living blues legends through Blues @ Home: Mississippi's Living Blues Legends, a collection of 31 paintings and coinciding oral histories collected by collaborator Lauchlin Fields. For more than two years, Porter and Fields traveled the entire state documenting the current landscape of blues in Mississippi, the birthplace of America's most authentic music form. Porter's paintings, combined with the first-hand accounts from the blues legends themselves, became a powerful multimedia traveling exhibition that tells Mississippi's blues story in a unique way and brings awareness to the blues in Mississippi. Blues @ Home first opened April 2014 and was on exhibition for four months at the University Museum on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. It traveled to the Mississippi Delta August 21, 2014, at the B.B. King Museum & Interpretive Center in Indianola, to the National Blues Museum in St. Louis Missouri on April 2, 2016, where it was the premiere rotating exhibit, and will travel to Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis Maryland in January of 2018. This book is the companion piece to Porter's groundbreaking exhibition.

H.C. Porter, a Jackson, Mississippi, native, is an internationally known painter, printmaker and photographer with a signature gallery in historic downtown Vicksburg, Mississippi. Her artwork is in private and corporate collections around the globe and has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions for the past 30 years. Most recently, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., added one of Porter’s pieces to their collection. In 2015, her Backyards and Beyond painting series became a permanent exhibition in the Ground Zero Hurricane Museum in Waveland. Her work is featured on CD covers, including one featuring the voices of Maya Angelou, Patti LaBelle and Chaka Khan. Porter’s work is also featured on the cover of Beyond Katrina, a book by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. Her work hangs in the Mississippi Senate offices in Washington, D.C., and is in the collection of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Marsha Barbour. In 2009, Porter received the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Visual Arts Award and was included in the 2011 Mississippi Invitational at the Mississippi Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of a Visual Artistic Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission.