The Power of Blooming Late
When Mississippi’s Dusti Bongé turned to painting, she defied the limits set for women of her era, forging a path from Biloxi to the New York art world. Ellen Ann Fentress finds in Bongé’s story—and in her own—the urgency, satisfaction, and bittersweet cost of pursuing creative dreams in life’s second half.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
It’s one of the final Saturdays of a retrospective on Dusti Bongé, the Mississippi-born midcentury New York gallery regular whose work is back in attention. My sandal soles slap on the museum’s glossy linoleum, percussion over the murmurs of other exhibit goers. I wind around a corner and come to her 1943 self-portrait. My sandals, along with the rest of me, stop.
If artists’ self-portraits are strategies and posturing—they’ve been so for centuries—what does the oil say about Bongé? Her self-portrait says plenty to me. First, it chucks the standard: of a prim, proper portrait for a prim, privileged woman, a framed canvas membership card to verify a female’s spot in her time and place’s power structure. With her pick of Elphaba green for under eyes and the terra cotta juts of Cubist cheekbones, the bona fides of belonging aren’t Bongé’s message. She actually was upper crust South, born Eunice Lyle Swetman into a Biloxi banking family who envisioned her in a smaller life than the one she later built for herself as Dusti Bongé.
For me, there’s more to the portrait than the story of a woman poking the patriarchy. The second idea spills out when I stare at the painting’s eyes. The eyes don’t stare back. That’s what grabs me, how the portrait preemptively declines to meet my stare. I know that move. So does any middle-aged woman with work to do, fixated makers—painters, musicians or, like me, writers—intent on taking charge of time to do their work.
The painting is a portal. I think the self-portrait’s averted eyes signal a creator particularly skilled at fending off interruption. Dodging direct eye contact with the viewer is about an artist—a painter in this case, with a midlife woman’s vigilance over life’s practical pulls—safeguarding her train of thought so she can create. Bongé breaks with both the standard-issue portrait and standard-issue assumptions about what a middle-aged woman ought to be (that is, to be available for others’ needs and wants above all). Her priorities aren’t identical to most of daily life going on around her. Not if she is to paint. Not if her work is to be included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which happened to Bongé in 1963 when she was sixty years old.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
I have work to do too. My book came out eighteen months ago, and I’m working on another. I co-wrote a documentary film headed to public television broadcast. I run an online nonprofit that publishes first-person school accounts from the post-1970 South. I teach writing. None of this is extraordinary news, of course, but it’s background to say I’m busy.
Here’s the thing: Ahead of slogging through bad drafts and better ones, ahead of phrase-level fine tuning, a writer first has to hollow out the hours to work. I don’t know Bongé’s time-minding methods beyond the look of determination in her self-portrait’s side eyes. I do know my own ground rules: Keep weekday mornings for new writing, afternoons for paying projects. Grocery store and gym trips happen after 8 p.m. when both are deserted and quicker undertakings. Since a phone call means interruption, check off life tasks simultaneously: Start the washing machine, unload the dishwasher and locate the little vial of charcoal bits under the lavatory for the weekly face scrub while talking. Schedule classes after 5 p.m. I just heard about a northeast Mississippi painter with another tactic. The great-great-aunt of my friend, the memoirist Marion Barnwell, kept a whip beside her when she painted to scare her children off from interrupting her at the easel.
Marion is one of the women writers I know over age fifty with recent books out: Jacqueline Allen Trimble, Ethel Morgan Smith, Minrose Gwin, Di Rushing, Gerry Wilson, Teresa Nicholas, Julie Whitehead, Karen Hinton and Susan Allen Ford. Everyone I’ve named here is successful. We all also lived a foreground silence, author Tillie Olsen’s term for a comparatively long time before a writer comes to print. In her book Silences, Olsen examines the age-old cause: practicalities like jobs (many career teachers on this list) and caring for family, parameters that can affect any creator, but historically slow down women most of all.
Life comes in seasons, the chapters clearer to see in hindsight. Post-college I was a reporter, chuffed to get a paycheck to write. Through my twenties, my writing got better, and life progressively and happily more complicated. Along with late-night deadlines at the state capitol, there was marriage at twenty-five, and a daughter when I was 29. In my thirties I swapped my job as statehouse reporter for the Gulfport-Biloxi Sun Herald for freelance work. I got time at home with my three-year-old daughter as the stamp of deadlines lingered in my neurons. Every night I typed in my dreams but woke up amazed I wasn’t due a 9 a.m. in the fourth floor Mississippi Capitol press room.
Yet I worried about what was happening to me. I cranked out bank reports and short tight pieces for The Catfish Journal, writing jobs that I’d previously have considered eye-rollers. I deteriorated with the short trade gigs. At the computer, my word flow thinned and my finished prose turned choppier. Back then, I’d yet to read Olsen’s Silences, which examines the falling dominoes that can keep women writers stunted or stop them outright. Even so, I saw I was deteriorating. My brain fumbled for wording and the results lacked the crispness I’d had back in the press room. I considered myself as a kind of keyboarding Fantine of Les Miserables, on the sure downward slide. The difference between the fictional Fantine in the Paris underbelly and me, besides two centuries and a mouthful of teeth, was that I had fair odds to push back. I didn’t push back much, though.
My mother’s puzzlement over my persisting ambition was an echo of her own willing retreat inside the house as a ’50s homemaker. Post-motherhood she never worked outside the home again.
If asked—and no one did—I could have explained how in opting to write puff pieces about banks and updates on catfish antibiotics, I was choosing to be the available family member I wanted to be, slack-absorbing wife of a husband out of town frequently and home-front single parent to our by-then two elementary-age daughters. What’s more, my mother had heart failure and Jackson cardiology appointments. All these were authentic logistics.
What I didn’t notice was that all the caretaking didn’t necessarily have to be a trade-off with my capacity to write. That’s not to say that I didn’t choose to limit my writing hours myself. I did. Yet meanwhile, there was no interest from my husband or even my mother on how my writing life was wilting by the year.
My mother’s puzzlement over my persisting ambition was an echo of her own willing retreat inside the house as a ’50s homemaker. Before, she’d been a Greatest Generation college graduate who quit her 1940s Mississippi algebra teacher job to join the World War II Navy WAVEs. She collected a second college degree in accounting on the GI Bill and was an in-demand bookkeeper in our Delta town. Yet post-motherhood she never worked outside the home again. In the post-war era, for a mother to work meant her husband couldn’t support his family, she said. Hers could, and so could mine, meaning we’d both won the lottery.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
“The Lord is blessing you,” she said to me in the kitchen one day and meant it. Didn’t I have enough to do already besides figuring out how to write a novel?
My husband’s antagonism turned overt. (In my memoir his pseudonym is Gus. Let’s stick with it.) Already in his jacket and tie on the way out the door to work, Gus spotted a box of business cards I’d ordered on the kitchen counter. He took one in his fingers, waved it high and laughed at the idea: “You haven’t worked in years.” I blinked. Then and now, when I don’t like reality, my default is simply to pretend what I don’t want to hear isn’t being said. It’s been the go-to mental flex for the white Southern culture in general for centuries. Arranging facts as optimally as possible in my head made it a snug, invitation-only place to stay when I didn’t like things in the outer oxygen.
“You know, if you were supposed to write a book, you would have already,” he said. I seethed inside. In my forty-six-year-old skull, a roll of paper unfurled, clunking to the floor, a miles-long list of years of meals, carpools, and just generally giving a rip I’d handled before thinking I had spare time to write. Why didn’t I respond to Gus? Even 100-percent wimp that I was, I refused to debate if I remained a writer. The full truth extended even further. I also didn’t want to ignite a confrontation. By that, I mean I didn’t want to ignite a confrontation inside me, not when I wasn’t ready for the possible cost.
Like Dusti Bongé and her elastic gaze, anyone who chooses to look away is acknowledging there’s something she doesn’t want to see. Would Gus and I split if I thought too much about his unexpected pushback to my ambition? What did that say? The moment revealed a chasm, whether I chose to dwell on it or not. Meanwhile, it wasn’t as if anyone wanted to publish what little writing I produced. No one supports a creator like herself. It’s a doer’s first task to rally her belief in her art. My confidence wobbled without the signifying backup of an editor and paycheck. Family uplift—I mean Gus’s, of course—would have been vocational life support.
It’s your job to save yourself since the cavalry isn’t coming. It didn’t for me. A tornado did, though. That’s what happens at midlife, a surprise that really shouldn’t be one.
He had another thought. “You and writing. Why you don’t paint? You’re good at painting.” I blinked again. Dusti Bongé painted from her depths. That’s how writing felt to me. I suspected Gus liked the idea of me as a contemporary Victorian dabbler in her parlor capturing a bowl of oranges on canvas. Victorian wives were expected to engage in an “accomplishment,” either in painting or music. They tinkered at a practice, but never too seriously. The knot in my gut registered Gus’s sabotage whether my eyes lingered on the evidence or not.
I couldn’t wrap my head around Gus’s resentment. We were simpatico solid liberals. Over drinks at Jackson parties, he loved a good rumble about equality and abortion rights with any right-winger ready to spar. If I was gaslit by Gus’s attitude, I was by ’90s sexism in general. Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were the decade’s poster pair for how a man could talk women’s rights in public and expect no consequences for his actions in private. That echoed inside our house. We slogged along until we didn’t anymore.
It’s your job to save yourself since the cavalry isn’t coming. It didn’t for me. A tornado did, though. That’s what happens at midlife, a surprise that really shouldn’t be one. I’d lived the same parameters for nearly two decades. For young families, the endless stretch of days and years of routines falsely lulls fortysomethings into thinking adulthood is a fixed state. Then comes the decade’s second half and, despite the years of sameness and child rearing, new chapters arrive. For me, in a matter of months, I was forty-eight, had two nearly grown daughters, a recently deceased mother and resignation that our marriage lacked the capacity to keep going. We divorced.
My world morphed. I got a job as a rookie high school French teacher with school hours to match my younger daughter’s. Things were quieter, but, truthfully, I stepped back too. I turned less available to my teenagers. In a transparently Freudian huff, I took months to set out family photos in my new house. I gave up on the unfinished novel, but not on writing something deeper than breaking news about catfish. I typed. I thought. I thought and typed some more. I knocked the rust off my craft. At age fifty-one, I had a piece in The New York Time’ “Modern Love” section, an MFA degree at fifty-two, and a string of essays in national publications as my fifties clicked along. I got a grad-level job teaching writing at 62 and a book at 67.
Maybe Gus was right as far as he called it. Maybe if I was supposed to have written a book before fifty I would have. But what neither of us considered were the second-half years and the head reorganization that comes along with them. A room of one’s own is more than a set of walls and a door with a good lock. There’s auspicious timing and a recharged command of your gaze.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
The Southern pantheon of second-half creative doers includes Oprah Winfrey, Dolly Parton, Natasha Trethewey, Alice Walker and Parker Posey. In my personal circle are the women writer friends I shouted out earlier. With foreground silence in the timeline, there’s a particular urgency to work. Time is finite and feels sweeter. I’m mindful that I’m at a point where I have both work to do and time to do it. Even slogging through a shitty first draft or exasperated by the slow progress of a revision, somewhere in my skull I’m still thrilled, chuffed as I was at twenty-two that I get to do this. I write on the living room sofa in empty-nest silence. The room is as aspirationally Nancy Meyers as you might suspect. My aunt’s hand-me-down sofa is recovered in spill-proof white fabric. Practical since I swill Trader Joe’s black coffee all morning. To push the cliché further—easy guess—there’s a candle that costs too much and smells like mint. When the pages are going well, I can practically feel the serotonin swishing around my head and spinning down my arms to my fingertips on the keyboard. I think, think some more and clack the keys.
I root for all creatives of a certain age. During my Bennington College MFA time, the director, Liam Rector, applauded the age range of students at our ten-day June campus stay. Some were just out of college, others in their seventies, he said. He couldn’t leave the seventysomethings’ presence at that, though. “I do find that sad,” he said. I get that he meant the poignancy of being unable to get serious about a passion until later in life. But from my bench in the lecture hall, I resisted the pronouncement. One seventysomething chugged around campus on a motorized scooter. Another wore her pearls and Audrey Hepburn sheath dresses in the middle of the sweep of jeans and tattoos preferred by others. The scooter driver ended up published by The Atlantic. I think the right time to create is the right time. When you’re in gear in the present, to pity the past is a waste. Why dampen your roll when you’ve arrived at last? Especially if you’ve arrived at last.
When you’re in gear in the present, to pity the past is a waste. Why dampen your roll when you’ve arrived at last? Especially if you’ve arrived at last.
Earlier, I said I hadn’t read Silences back when I was most lost as a thirtysomething writer. But eventually in my at-home season, I did run across the book and its bleak analysis of the prospects for women caught up in domesticity. My response? I slapped my Silences shut and wedged the paperback on the shelf. I didn’t open it again until writing this. Reading that I was stunted while I was stunted was just more depressing. It’s easier to read the truth once chances improve to do something about it. The time has come. Now there’s the chance to work, the white sofa and the day’s supply of serotonin, candle whiffs, and coffee steam.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
Dusti Bongé came to the easel only after a life tornado ripped through her turf as well. It’s worth a story itself that she’d had a run as a stage and silent-screen actor in the mid-1920s. Her parents insisted she first graduate from Blue Mountain College for Young Ladies in north Mississippi. She did so in 1922 with a bachelor’s degree in Expression before heading first to Chicago, then New York. By the Great Depression, she brought her artist husband and young son back to Biloxi along with her show-business memories. What speaks to me is how she navigated the second half of her life. Her husband died in 1936, probably of ALS. She took over both his job as a rent collector for the Southern Shell Seafood Factory housing on the Biloxi Back Bay and the backyard studio he’d built. Her expectations evaporated, she decided to paint.
She saw no reason not to make a place for herself in the serious art world. “Recognition of ability” is what she sought, she said in an interview at age seventy-nine. She set out with the goal of “being recognized as a good painter and of having shows and filling out complete shows.” She made it happen. After only three years at the backyard easel, she talked her way into her first New York group exhibit at the midtown Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1939. Bongé then exhibited at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, connecting with the influential Betty Parsons. In 1956, at age fifty-three, Bongé debuted in her first solo show at Parsons’s by-then legendary gallery, where Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Ellsworth Kelly exhibited their work, too. Bongé had a string of one-woman Betty Parsons shows through 1962—Willem de Kooning attended all her openings—and another at age seventy-two in 1975. Her work entered the Museum of Modern Art in 1963. The final 1975 Parsons show focused on work with fiberglass, a medium she discovered thanks to Biloxi boatbuilders. Bongé painted and exhibited until shortly before her death at age ninety in 1993. J. Richard Gruber’s monograph Dusti Bongé, Art and Life: Biloxi, New Orleans, New York, published in 2019, painstakingly documents her work milestones.
Her paintings are back in New York representation now through the Hollis Taggart art gallery. This year the Chelsea gallery mounted Portals and Passages, a new show of her 1940s and 1950s Surrealist work. Meanwhile, the self-portrait I love has been traveling in the Southern/Modern exhibit, a groundbreaking show of work by seventy-three artists with stops in Athens, Nashville, Memphis and Charlotte over the last two years. The New York Times tapped the show as a Critic’s Choice. Along with the portrait, a second Bongé painting, Where the Shrimp Pickers Live, is the cover for the accompanying Southern/Modern book, 272 pages on the underexamined history of modern art in the South.
Bongé is a model for these chaotic times: Care and do your share in a world on fire, yet cordon off a part of your brain for yourself. Bongé made room for her work even as she and the wartime world spinned.
I revisited the self-portrait when Southern/Modern stopped at Nashville’s Frist Museum. The portrait, titled The Balcony, hung solo on a bright yellow wall. Its display came across to me as star billing. I fed on Bongé’s eyes once more with their resolve to land where it serves her best.
The year 1943, when Bongé painted The Balcony, wasn’t exactly placid. The Saturday Evening Post put Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter on its May 29 cover. That year Bonge had a war job and took in renters at her home. Bongé did her civic part but kept time to paint too. What’s more, she was in middle age with a son, aging parents, and other pulls familiar to all women, days when her work hours could have been channeled away by the pressing asks of others and daily living. Pushing back to paint was an act of resistance, a choice that moves me as much as her output of buoyant oils. Bongé is a model for these chaotic times: Care and do your share in a world on fire, yet cordon off a part of your brain for yourself. Bongé made room for her work even as she and the wartime world spinned.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
Creative ambition is a particular kind of desire. Bongé had it, as do I and the midlife women makers I know, whatever their particular drive. This is no shade on sexual desire, the most assumed and scrutinized kind of desire among all the categories. Who isn’t fascinated by the latest on who’s sexually busy in the second half of life? I am (both busy and fascinated to read about others’ second-half sex, I mean). On that score, studies edge up to the question of whether remaining sexually active contributes to longevity. As close as studies get is that there’s a tie in between longevity and being sexually active. A study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology noted that telomeres, DNA strand protectors, were longer in 129 women who’d had a child and had sex at least once a week. Shorter telomeres, in contrast, are tied to dying young and to developing a degenerative disease. The positive result held true even when adjusting for the women’s stress and relationship quality.
(1) Correlation isn’t causation, the perpetual chicken-or-the-egg tossup. But what does it hurt that in the 2011 German Aging Survey, women who reported satisfaction in their sex lives also expected to live longer? That wasn’t true for men.
(2) Adjacently, there’s no correlation necessarily between oldster desire and the necessity of marriage. That’s despite the Frequently Asked Questions page of the Social Security Administration’s website, which notes that if you marry after age sixty, you get to keep your past marriage’s survivor benefits, too. My partner Myron and I shuttle between our separate houses 168 miles apart. We’ve been together for fourteen years after meeting in June 2011 through eHarmony. We’re together on weekends, either at my house in Mississippi or his in Louisiana. Weekdays, I’m back on my Mississippi sofa. As for Bongé, she never came close to remarriage. She was by all accounts a lifelong flirt who kept a French Quarter apartment besides her Biloxi base. But that’s her. And that’s me. Whatever’s your thing.
If there are studies out there on how sex and babysitting are good for us as we age, where is the study on the survival rate and quality of life of women engaged with creative desire?
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
I’ve talked to people around Biloxi who knew Dusti Bongé during her lifetime. Everyone recalls her cheeriness and sense of fun, upbeat and self-deprecating. As a Mississippi woman, brought up to perform persistent public pleasantness, I know that persona. Yet Ligia Romer widened the local take on Bongé for me.
“I see her ambition,” said Romer, director of the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation. Romer works from the gingerbread-trimmed aqua clapboard cottage that’s the foundation headquarters, one block north of the beach. Her offhand comment is a reminder of the perpetually fraught intersection when it comes to women and big, open talk of ambition, whether in the middle twentieth century in Biloxi, inside my house in the ’90s, or in 2025. What was beneath Bongé’s insistence on time to work but big ambition?
Passion for one’s work is ambition. The capacity of onlookers to imagine that a woman, age fifty-plus, has fierce creative goals is another question. Ask J.D. Vance. Or Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote in The Second Sex that women fill so many neurotic projections in humanity’s head—madonna, sinner, or nice sexless old lady thoughtfully turning invisible with age—that we’d need to be invented if we weren’t here already.
Bongé’s major exhibit life happened away from her town. Biloxi saw what Bongé—a former actor, after all— wanted it to: a courteous good-humored aging hometowner. Her charm is on view on YouTube in the twenty-nine-minute documentary Dusti Bongé: The Life of an Artist produced by Mississippi public television in 1982. In the film she makes a show of watering the lobby plants at her family’s bank. She says that’s her weekly job, while her brother in a bow tie and suit watches from the president’s desk. What is that about? An ambitious woman, unfortunately, learns early that coming across unthreateningly can sidestep blowback. Bongé was seventy-nine in the documentary, still cagily and instinctively playing a part. It’s a two-step ambitious women mull as advisable, however unfair it is. Check out former Vice President Kamala Harris’s Cooking With Kamala YouTube series for recipes and kitchen shots.
An ambitious woman, unfortunately, learns early that coming across unthreateningly can sidestep blowback. Bongé was seventy-nine in the documentary, still cagily and instinctively playing a part.
However admiring, there’s projection in Bongé art scholarship too. Consider the Southern/Modern text displayed on the yellow wall at the Frist by her self-portrait. “…this abstracted self-portrait is from a series painted after her husband died from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Her expression seems melancholy as she glances to the side, not meeting the viewer’s gaze.” She undoubtedly grieved her husband’s death. Yet male gaze much? She produced the portrait seven years after his loss. She was both a grieving widow and a merry one. There’s exuberance in her late 1930s canvasses of Gulf boats, oyster shell piles, pickup trucks, pelicans, and studies of herself. Self-Portrait (The Artist’s Feet) from 1940 packs amusement in the whimsy of black loops and dots at the hem of her white dress before the eye moves upward to the waiting insouciance of her plump bare toes. Those toes don’t look so melancholy. She feels the serotonin, I think, because I feel a hit myself just taking in the image.
Dusti Bongé biography | Ellen Ann Fentress essay | Mississippi women artists
Before I sold my memoir, The Steps We Take, I was determined that it include a section on ambition in Southern women. I lost one publisher advocating to incorporate it, a heartbreaker for me. Since I’m not getting any younger (I think I’ve established that here) I quit fighting for the ambition section. The right publisher came along a few months later. When asked for a cover suggestion, I knew, of course. I wanted Bongé’s The Balcony with the message in her eyes. The Dusti Bongé Art Foundation greenlighted the ask, requesting that I credit the foundation and tell Bongé’s story. The honor’s mine.
Am I too sunny as I talk about my creative gusto and that of other older women? Is it delusion to go on about my big slice of satisfaction to be writing on the sofa every weekday? I tell my writing students that no reader wants to hear anyone’s sugary claim of total happiness. Readers get annoyed at the reminder because they’re not totally happy themselves. No human is. And why would I be purely happy anyway? There was a cost to those sixteen almost absent writing years in my thirties and forties, an irretrievable stamp on the present. In a more supportive world, a writer would have had those missed decades to produce work, growing and maturing as an artist with every successive project. I’ll never have that. I wish I had. I wish it for every artist who had to wait, the writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, all makers. I wish better for the centuries of would-be creators with neither a first act nor a second. The world’s the poorer for it. Yet I also believe the old verity about holding two truths at once. Despite the irretrievable authentic loss of those years in my past, why not write what’s mine to write and savor now? The present is all any of us have anyway, at twenty-five or eighty-five. The future for any of us is solely wishful thinking.
Art, whether writing, painting or music, is a two-step movement between creator and partaker. For me, Bongé’s self-portrait is both a track-stopping canvas and an ally that shows what seizing life’s second half looks like. When out in Biloxi, locals would ask Bongé for feedback on their Sunday-afternoon canvasses. Her grandson Paul Bongé said she kept two courteous stock replies for those occasions. She could never go wrong praising someone’s color choice. “I like that red,” she’d say with a thoughtful look. Her other time-tested response was to make a big show of methodically looking at every inch of someone’s canvas with a slow nod. After the right pause, she’d declare, “You’ve really got something there.”
You’ve really got something there. I think about the response. Her reply was amused diplomacy, sure. Yet the more I consider her words, the more I realize that, on another level, her reply represents the most profound support that one maker can offer another. Believing you’ve got something there is the starting point for any artist. It comes before long months to elevate your craft, before sharpening all the contents of the toolbox, before you master the side eye and before you stake out the right spot to do the work that’s yours to do. For better or worse, I’m doing mine.
Ellen Ann Fentress writes about Deep South politics and culture, and is the author of The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi Public Radio, where she was also a reporter. Threeyears ago, she launched The Admissions Project, an online forum about the impact of the South’s circa 1970 segregation academies on its past and present. Her documentary Eyes on Mississippi, a 56-minute film on the career of iconic civil rights journalist Bill Minor, has screened at universities and other venues around the country.
