HMA has just learned of the passing of the Appalachian folk artist Arlee Trivett Main. In 2016, HMA was honored to host an exhibition of her many memory paintings. The Museum mourns her passing while also being reminded of the continuing importance of discovering and preserving folk art..

Trumpeter Spencer Wright announces another event at the Light Up the Night Gala celebrating HMA’s 75th birthday. An amazing evening remembered in mostly pictures.

My art has been blessed and sent all over, and I’ve been seen on television, and all of this is just to say that God is God, and there is no other. ... The art is his, and I’m blessed to be the one to do it, and in it there is no evil, because in him there is no evil. He lives in me, and I in him, so

The Lenoir-Rhyne students were asked how they might figure out the authenticity of HMA’s unsigned work attributed to Willem de Kooning. There is in fact no doubt that the work is by de Kooning, but the students did not know this prior to their own explorations.

Though a 1905 graduate of the The Music Conservatory of Chicago College of Performing Arts who toured the United States and Canada as lead baritone for the Chicago Grand Opera Company, Berthelsen was best known as a painter who

Life-long North Carolina resident Jerry Goodnight credited Mickey Whitener Coe, HMA's second director, with encouraging him to continue with his art, beginning in college. “Mickey Coe is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me” he once said.

"There's not anybody now, I don't think, who paints that saw what I saw, like cutting wheat and picking cotton and making molasses and all that stuff.” She showed all the hard work it took to provide for yourself and your family on a small farm.  

Maud Gatewood once said, “[Art] is like people: If you meet a person that's absolutely pleasant, they tend to be innocuous. Nothing's worse than being pleasant.” Another time she said, “I think you learn that life isn't always straightforward. Ambiguity might be the heart of life as well as art.”

Louisiana native Herbert Singleton’s brightly painted woodcarvings are often autobiographica. However, he also carved biblical stories, Voodoo icons, and scenes of local African-American cultural traditions. He had his own voice, a very strong

A most unusual sunset… the sky along the horizon was as red as a pigeon-blood ruby; it was as though the sun shone through a stained glass window. … Slowly the color faded from the sky and the distant