Mary Sims : A Retrospective

Mary Sims: A Retrospective celebrates this distinctive late-twentieth century Southern US artist whose works express a very contemporary form of retro cool.

A painter and printmaker, Sims (1940-2004) was an exceptional colorist whose meticulously constructed compositions are at once both whimsical and off-beat, displaying an idiosyncratic viewpoint and sly sense of humor.

This volume spans her entire career, from her elegant intaglio prints made in the late 1950s, through spare, optically flat portraits of isolated figures on monochrome backgrounds from the 1960s and 1970s, monumental religious paintings that draw on Old Testament stories and mythology to riotous, maximalist still lifes from the 1980s and 1990s.

Although based for most of her active career in Arkansas, Sims maintained connections to a variety of art-making centres across the South and Midwest USA. Born in Jackson, Tennessee, she spent her childhood and youth in Memphis where she took classes at the Memphis Academy of Arts (later Memphis College of Art). After finishing a BFA at the University of Iowa, she continued her studies in Rome, then completed an MFA at Tulane University in New Orleans. Returning to Memphis in 1968, she got a job teaching painting and printmaking at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). In 1977 Sims and her family moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, an artistic and cultural town in the Ozarks where she lived and painted until her death.Featuring 64 works, this publication also includes an illustrated biographical essay by art historian Marina Pacini, and a checklist of the accompanying exhibition.

Marina Pacini is an independent curator and author based in Memphis.