Visitors still have a month to see the exhibition of Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble and Resilience in the American South, open now through Nov. 5 at the State Historical Society of Missouri Art Gallery. The free exhibition is sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities and curated by Berkley Hudson, an associate professor emeritus of the Missouri School of Journalism. Seventy-five of the exhibition’s photos are on display in the State Historical Society’s Art Gallery, while another 25 images can be viewed at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on the MU campus.
A curator talk and book signing with Hudson will be held Thursday, Oct. 13, 11, a.m., at the SHSMO Art Gallery, Center for Missouri Studies, 605 Elm St., Columbia. Following the talk and tour of the exhibit, Hudson will be signing his recent book O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South, available at the bookstore inside the Center for Missouri Studies.
The main exhibition focuses on photographs produced during the lengthy career of photographer Otis N. Pruitt, who spent his professional life in the small, segregated town of Columbus, Mississippi. Hudson and several of his childhood friends, who grew up in Columbus, acquired the collection. In recent years, with the help from journalism school students and faculty, Hudson has researched some 88,000 negatives that Pruitt made from the 1920s through the 1950s.