The Windgate Museum of Art at Hendrix College is pleased to host The South’s Most Elusive Artist: Walter Inglis Anderson, an exhibition of more than 40 works by American artist, Walter Inglis Anderson. The exhibition is organized by the Walter Anderson Museum of Art (WAMA) in Ocean Springs, MS, and draws from WAMA’s Permanent Collection and that of the Estate of Walter Anderson. The exhibition includes rarely seen watercolors, block prints, ceramics, and sketches alongside some of Anderson’s most recognizable and iconic works. This exhibition will be on view at the WMA from January 21 through April 5, 2025.

“Walter Anderson was a wholly unique and prodigious creator who does not fit neatly into any one category of art,” said Julian Rankin, Executive Director of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. “He was as talented in watercolor as he was in print making, as deft an illustrator as he was a muralist.”

Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) was born in New Orleans, LA but spent the majority of his life in the small seaside town of Ocean Springs, MS. He was classically trained as an artist at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before returning to the Gulf Coast. Anderson’s artwork did not receive much acclaim his lifetime, with notable exceptions of exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery in Memphis, TN. Often shunning the spotlight, the intrepid artist preferred the solitude of nature – especially that found on Horn Island, a barrier island located twelve miles offshore of Ocean Springs. Today, Walter Anderson is recognized as one of the seminal figures of Southeastern American art. In 2003, a retrospective of Anderson’s work was shown at the Smithsonian Institution and more than a dozen volumes of story and scholarship have been published in the years following his death by the University Press of Mississippi.