Honors College Fellow Natalie Brown Exhibits New Work on Her Southern Past

Natalie Brown, Beautiful Things Are Usually Entwined with Violence, Mixed media on paper, 2015

Natalie Brown, Education, Copper etching, 2016

Natalie Brown, Strasbourg -- What's Your Silver Pattern? Copper etching, 2016

Natalie Brown, She Does Come from a Good Family, Copper etching, 2016

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Natalie Brown, Honors College Fellow and honors art major.

Natalie Brown's latest paintings and drawings are steeped in the South where she was born and raised. Coats of arms, Strasbourg silver, roses and garden arbors allude to the faded glamour of the antebellum South. But the artist has left clues, through titles and technique, that this work is not a slice of nostalgia served up for the viewer's pleasure.

Brown is an Honors College fellow and honors art senior in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Her work is currently on display in the Honors College wing of Gearhart Hall.

Thanks to her fellowship, Brown has traveled widely, finding artistic inspiration in the vernacular architecture of the English countryside and the coral reefs of Mexico. Last summer, while participating in the painting program at the Yale School of Art at Norfolk, she felt homesick for the first time, and decided to explore her conflicted identity as a Southern woman.

"My family has a long heritage in the South," she said. "My third great-grandfather surveyed the border of Arkansas — and his payment was land and slaves. On the outside, I don't want it, I don't want to claim it, but inside I missed it. There's a crazy ambivalence."

Brown explores that conflict in paintings such as Beautiful Things Are Usually Entwined with Violence, where carmine, coral, black and gray roses tumble down the paper sheet with a visceral intensity. The allusion to psychological violence is made explicit in Holding On, where an abstracted figure cradles a womblike bundle of silver cutlery and roses bleeding trails of ink. 

Brown's discomfort with the silver, crystal, porcelain and mahogany opulence that she grew up with is complicated by matters of gender.

"These old objects, most of which are decorative or tied to hospitality, also reflect the only creative opportunity that women in my family were allowed to engage in," she wrote in her artist's statement. "If I indulge in the decorative it's because that is what I have been taught to do with my eye for my entire life. Now to reject the objects and aesthetic sensibilities I've inherited on the grounds of race or class would mean rejecting the traditions and values of the women in my family, the people who matter the most to me."

Brown's paintings and etchings will be on display in the second floor Honors Study Hall through the fall. Paper works by honors alumna Emily Chase (B.F.A., summa cum laude, '13) are also displayed on the second floor of Gearhart Hall.

The Honors College is eager to exhibit creative work by honors students, faculty and alumni. In addition to Brown and Chase, artists whose work has been featured include honors alumna Jeanne Vockroth (B.F.A., summa cum laude, '13) and Kristin Musgnug, an associate professor in the Department of Art.

The Honors College also seeks creative work by students for A+ magazine and other communications materials. To submit student work for consideration, please visit the On Display page on the Honors College website. Alumni and faculty wishing to share their work should contact Kendall Curlee at kcurlee@uark.edu.