Church Goin Mule has been drawing and painting her whole life.
Although she was born in Richmond, Virginia, she got to the Mississippi Delta as fast as she could. She keeps her studio outside of Alligator, south of Clarksdale, with her two dogs, cats, chickens, and garden.
The name Church Goin Mule re-fects her ancestry-her grandfathers on both sides were Appalachian men, one plowed with mules and fought in the navy in World War Two, while her other grandfather was a Methodist minister. They worked, lived, fought, and loved hard so that decades later she had the opportunity both to grow up in a loving home and to be encouraged in her pursuit of the arts. She often gets her inspiration from his sermons and her own garden.
She is an outsider artist and on the backs of the paintings you'll find what year it was painted, where, and a number.
She has quickly become one of the most important and renowned outsider artists in the Country, critically acclaimed for her happy and uplifting depictions of mules and the natural world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Church Goin Mule's work is a memory jug, a death var mash of the collective southern past, pearls and rusted nails, song and story, Lore and loss.
The mule is our common ground, the creature that every man, woman and child of all origin knew, in a time before t-models and tractors.
In a time of remarkable and perhaps increasing polarity, the mule is our grounding rod, pointing to not a better past, but a different one.
The blues was born behind a plowing mule. Stories and poems, jokes and songs were prolific about the south's four legged machine.
Like much of our history, it's been forgotten and framed to tell a different tale. That story is a well known one, of glory and triumph. Our true story, our true flag is the white one of surrender, and of hard work, poverty and loss.
The mule was the first hybrid and he was always there, able to work harder, live longer, eat less. He stood beside moonshiners, levee builders, cotton farmers, timber-haulers, oil drillers, sugar cane men. He worked six days and brought his folks to church and town on the seventh.
big love & brayerfully,