JACKSON, MS.- The Mississippi Museum of Art is presenting White Gold: Thomas Sayre, an immersive installation by Thomas Sayre evoking a cotton-field landscape in the American South. White Gold is on view through July 8, 2018, in conjunction with the special exhibition celebrating the state’s Bicentennial: Picturing Mississippi, 1817‒2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise.

The history of cotton is one of the nation’s most contentious and layered chapters, and one with which almost every Mississippian has a personal relationship, either directly or indirectly. Cotton’s position as an international commodity is at one with the economic, racial, and social history of the region and its people and an integral part of the nation’s identity. Two centuries after statehood, cotton still looms large in collective memory and common experience and remains largely unnegotiated in its complexities, most importantly with regard to slavery.

Recognizing that visitors bring their own experiences and memories of cotton, the Museum is presenting White Gold (2016) as a space for personal connection, reflection, and conversation. Accompanying programs and engagement spaces offer opportunities for further reflection and community conversation about cotton and the social frameworks and economic systems that built the economy of Mississippi and other states while creating and continuing a legacy of racial inequity.

First installed at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, White Gold is composed of four large-scale works occupying 2,000 square feet of gallery space. Tracks 1‒18 features Sayre’s signature earth-casting process in which he pours concrete into molds created in the land itself. The tracks reveal human contact and labor. The other three works, Thicket 1‒14, Row 1‒10, and Barn 1‒3, evoking a cotton field are two-dimensional renditions achieved with earth, tar, paint, and the artist’s labor; the physical act of smearing, scraping, and rubbing surfaces.

The NC-based artist has always made work that dances between human intention and the resistance of materials. His process of making allows the life of the work to spring from the world’s serendipitous offerings when the human hand intersects with nature. The earth-casts Tracks are an expression of this intersection and a physical recording of the act of “touching” the earth. Thicket depicts a cotton field from an intimate vantage point, as if the viewer were crouched down, peering through the brambles. Row provides a compelling, slightly elevated perspective of rows of cotton hurdling toward their vanishing point. Barn juxtaposes the crop’s nature-made organic growth with the overtly person-made barn structures that line the field.

“I’ve looked back through my notebooks to find decades of references about the way light finds its way through chinks in an old barn wall, or how to express the feeling of otherworldliness induced by a row of cotton in a long, flat field,” said Sayre. “I’ve searched for materials and techniques to capture the stark whiteness of a cotton boll in the sharp thickets of the field. I’ve wrestled with the hard history embedded in the red clay and what I could add to this very complex and potent story.”

“With White Gold: Thomas Sayre, the Museum is mounting an experiential and immersive installation the likes of which we have not previously attempted,” said Betsy Bradley, Director of the Mississippi Museum of Art. “It is installed as the concluding gallery of our state bicentennial exhibition to give visitors an opportunity for personal and quiet reflection and to approach contemporary art in a meaningful way.”

Thomas Sayre is a Raleigh, NC-based artist best known for his large-scale earth-cast sculptures. He has created public installations across the U.S. and around the world. Sayre’s work has been exhibited at the Fayetteville Museum of Art in Fayetteville, NC (1988 and 2002) and the Gregg Museum of Art and Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh (2009). Sayre’s commissioned public works are included in various collections with projects in Tampa, FL; Denver, CO; Portland, OR; Nashville and Chattanooga, TN; San Jose, CA; Phoenix and Tucson, AZ; Baltimore, MD; Washington DC; and Raleigh, NC. Internationally, he has commissioned projects in Istanbul, Turkey; Phuket, Thailand; Hong Kong; and Calgary and Ontario, Canada.

Thomas Sayre grew up in Washington, DC. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar, majoring in English and Studio Art. He graduated in 1973, summa cum laude. He was awarded a Michigan Fellowship with a three-year grant from the Ford Foundation to create sculpture at the University of Michigan. In 1975, he attended the Master of Fine Arts program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Sayre received the North Carolina Award for Fine Arts and an honorary doctorate from North Carolina State University in 2014.