The following information was submitted by Kathy Sullivan:

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2005 "Her Own Woman," Smithfield Cultural Arts Center, Smithfield, VA
2004 Museum of Art, Tyler, TX
2000 Retrospective, "Daughter of the Bayou" (traveling), Meadows Museum of Art, Shreveport, LA
1998 "Crossing the Threshold" (traveling), Steinbaum/Krause Gallery, New York,
1997 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
1994-1995 The Ogden Collection (traveling)
1994 Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, TX
1992 Retrospective with Adolph Gottlieb, Mills College, Oakland, CA
1990 Galleria Vallois, Paris, France
1990 Galleria C.N. Voutat, Geneva, Switzerland
1990 American Women Artists, Knoxville, TX
1989 Arnold Herstand, New York, NY
1988 Hiriam Butler Gallery, Houston, TX
1985 Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA
1984 Delahunty Gallery, New York, NY
1982 Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS
1981 The Clocktower, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP SHOWS
1989 "Making Their Mark" (traveling), Maidenform
1988 "Different Drummers," Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
1988 "Just Like a Woman," Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC
1986 "Other Gods" (traveling), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles,
1986 Awards in the Visual Art 5, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY
1985 Brandt Gallery, New York, NY
1984 "Works by Women" (traveling), Gihon Foundation & Collection, Dallas, TX
1983 New Orleans Triennial, New Orleans Art Museum, New Orleans, LA
1982 "Four Artists," Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY
1981 Delahunty Group Exhibit, New York, NY

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY; "Bistineau Song," 1986
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX, "Non-person Post"
Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (Menil collection), "Swamp Song"
Weisman Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
National Women's Museum of Art, Washington, DC, "Dialogue Gate"
El Centro Cultural Del Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico, collage 1990
Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA
Laguna Gloria Museum, Austin, TX, outdoor sculpture
Breneau Art Museum, Breneau University, Gainesville, GA
Ogden Museum, New Orleans, LA
Baton Rouge Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA
Meadows Museum of Art, Centenary College, Shreveport, LA
Atlantic Richfield, TX

SELECTED RELATED ACTIVITIES
1998 Award, "Louisiana Legend" by the State of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, LA
1988 Visiting artist, Williams College, Williamstown, MA
1986 Awards in the Visual Art 5, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY
1985 Award, National Women's Caucus for the Arts, Los Angeles, CA
1985 Film, "Swamp Song," Adam Simon, Harvard University
1985 Slide lecture, Museum of Fine Arts and Women's Caucus for the Arts, Houston, TX
1984 Panelist, "Artists Discussion," Gihon Foundation, Dallas, TX
1984 Artist in residence, lecture series, University of Texas, Arlington, TX
1984 Slide lecture, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
1982 Artist in residence, Mississippi Art Museum, Jackson, MS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sculpture Magazine Dec. 1998, p. 28, "Clyde Connell 1901-1998"
Art Forum 1990, "Speaking the South" by Lawery Sims
The Sciences May/June 1990 (published by the New York Academy of Sciences),"The Mother Tongue"
Clyde Connell, The Art and Life of a Louisiana Woman, Charlotte Moser, 1988,
University of Texas Press
Shreveport Journal, July 19, 1988, "Weissman Collection Brings to Life Museum," by David Connelly
Art News Nov. 1987, "The Envelope Please" by Lawery Sims
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., "Clyde Connell Papers, 1952-1981

Clyde Connell (September 19, 1901 – May 2, 1998) was an American self-taught abstract expressionist sculptor. Her works are known for reflecting the nature of Louisiana and the culture of Jim Crow South.

Born as Minnie Clyde Dixon on a cotton plantation in Belcher, Louisiana, and raised in Belcher, near Shreveport,the seat of Caddo Parish, in northwestern Louisiana, Connell married Thomas Dixon Connell, Jr in 1922. She lived and worked in a cabin at Lake Bistineau during her later years.

During her lifetime she was a member of the Presbyterian Women's leadership, representing Louisiana, and traveling to their annual national meeting in New York City. It was there that she discovered abstract impressionism, and became a painter and sculptor. In the 1960s, she set up studio, and worked full-time, making sculpture assemblages of wood, iron, and found material. Connell didn't find national recognition until she was 81. In 1984 she was one of six women honored by the Women's Caucus for Art.

She is represented by the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans,[6] and her works are held in many private and public collections, including: The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College of Louisiana, the Masur Museum of Art, Tulane University's Law School, the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum and University of Albany Art Museum.

Connell is the subject of a one-woman play, Louisiana Women: Clyde written by Lake Charles playwright Carolyn Woosley. The play was on tour throughout Louisiana in Fall 2010. Notes on the research sources for the play were included in Woosley's play scripts' book.


In the year of her death, she was named a Louisiana "Living Legend" by the state of Louisiana. In 2011, the Cameron Art Museum held a retrospective.

Works
Connell was a regional artist and was inspired by the nature, and people of the Louisiana Bayou. She grew up in a segregated American South in a period known for lynchings. Exposure to Black culture of the South at the black congregations she went to as a child and the penal farm her husband supervised affected her works. She volunteered at a Presbyterian church school for black children and was terrorized by night riders circling the schoolhouse to frighten her and the children.

During one of these incidents, Connell conjured up the sounds of the "swamp orchestra," sounds of night herons, owls, frogs, cicadas, crickets, and the winds of the Louisiana night. Years later she recorded this night music with intricate calligraphic notations on large rolls of brown paper, which she called her "swamp songs."

She explored regional themes of social conscience, nature, sound, and a deep spiritual world. She used the nature around her Lake Bistineau cottage home to inspire her style saying “you are in different world. It became a part of me. Where the moss swooped down, I wanted my sculpture to look like it grew out of the earth and was trying to touch the moss.”

Her sculptures are known for slender constructions of found objects often covered in a "skin" made of macerated newspaper, brown paper, and Elmer's glue. Connell often applied broken pieces of metal, tools, or other found objects that her son Bryan brought to her by the truckload. Her yard, studio, and home were littered with completed compositions, works in progress, and scraps that eventually found their way into her sculpture.


Source:
Wikipedia, Mar. 2019