Martha McCarty Wells, President of the Martha McCarty Kimmerling Wells Foundation, will present a lecture on American visionary artist Alexandre Hogue (1989-1994) and his “The Erosion Series” on Wednesday, April 1 in the Callaway Theatre of the South Arkansas Arts Center. A reception will be hosted in the Merkle Gallery beginning at 6pm. Beginning at 6:30pm, Wells will make a short presentation about Alexandre Hogue and his “Erosion” series from the 1930’s and the early 1940’s. The lecture is based on the Dallas Museum of Art exhibit and is made possible by Elise Drake of the Union County Community Foundation and the Madeline M. and Edward C. McCarty Fund. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Drake said, “The Union County Community Foundation began our relationship with Martha Kimmerling Wells in 1999 when she visited us with her mother, Madelyne Murphy McCarty; Mrs. McCarty was a descendant of pioneer Union County settlers, and although she’d lived most of her life in Texas, she was born and reared in Union County, and she wanted to establish a philanthropic fund to help the community of her childhood. Mrs. McCarty, who was in her nineties when she established the Madelyne M. and Edward C. McCarty Fund (Mrs. McCarty met Edward C. McCarty, a native of north Arkansas, when he moved to El Dorado as a young man to work for First National Bank, and they married in 1930) passed away not too long after, and it was Martha who continued her mother’s work to support the local nonprofit community by recommending the McCarty Fund underwrite our annual grant awards from the Union County Public Trust Fund. Martha is important to us as a generous donor, but our friendship is equally important. Martha is a lot of fun to be with; doing good things with her is always accompanied by a lot of laughter.”
“Martha’s philanthropy is far reaching; she supports many educational, medical and fine art institutions throughout the USA through her foundation in Dallas. Her work as a docent, for 36 years, at the Dallas Museum of Arts is what led to the current lecture series on Alexander Hogue that she is presenting to the community via the SAAC,” said Drake.
The Madelyne Murphy McCarty Fund was established by a gift to the Union County Community Foundation from the Madelyne M. and Edward C. McCarty Foundation of Dallas, Texas, and was designed to benefit educational, charitable, or cultural non-profit organizations in Union County, Arkansas. Her desire to enhance the quality of life for the community where she was born and where many of her relatives reside, led Mrs. McCarty to recommend the Fund’s creation.
“It just so happened that AETN was airing the marvelous ‘Dust Bowl series’ at the same time that the Dallas Museum of Art was having a showing of Alexander Hogue’s work, and I made a point of familiarizing myself with both. Simultaneously, climate change was affecting various parts of the world, and I was always reading news articles about terrible droughts in the southwest, especially parts of Texas. It seemed to me that Hogue did a powerful job through his paintings of telling the story of the devastation of the land during the dust bowl period, and I thought our local students could benefit from learning about art and the environment, and the relationship between artists and the land, and how they can encourage us to take care of the land. My daddy’s people were farmers, and the Great Depression, which coincided with the Dust Bowl, made such a huge impact on his family. He was a little boy at the time, but he remembered it vividly. His family was in good enough shape to survive unscathed, and their land was cared for, but they watched hundreds and hundreds suffer through it, and never forgot about it. So, it seems a timely subject, and Martha is the ideal person to bring the Dallas Museum of Art’s fine presentation on Hogue to the SAAC to share with all of us in Union County. We encourage everyone to attend and enjoy the event,” said Drake.
For more information about the lecture, contact the SAAC office at 862-5474.