Vicksburg artist H.C. Porter has been named the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters’ 2009 winner of the visual arts category for her most recent body of work, Backyards and Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories.

Porter and partner and executive director Karole Sessums spent a year capturing and documenting life in Mississippi after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

With more than 9,000 photographs taken, Porter featured 81 of those photographs and audio clips recorded by Sessums to tell the stories of the lives of Mississippians  after Katrina.

Backyards and Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories is an in-depth series of vivid paintings translated from photographs taken from the Gulf that premiered in the spring of 2008 at the Mississippi Arts Center and has been a historic traveling exhibit since.

“The exhibit is amazing and it has a powerful story to tell of the Gulf,” said Lauchlin Fields, director of H.C. Porter Gallery. “Not only do you have the visuals, but you have the audio of the story as well.”

Porter’s photography captured the stories of people of all ages, races and religions.

“Hurricane Katrina changed forever the coastline of my home state and the lives of its people,” Porter said. “I saw shoulders with burdens I wanted to carry. With my work I try to free hands from the basket — do justice with color and image — show the riches and the joy,” Porter has said.

A Jackson native, Porter opened her gallery on Washington Street in April 2006.

The gallery features paintings with a technique that uses photography, print-making and painting to create portraits from Mississippi communities.

Porter will show about eight pieces from her recent exhibit along with other works in her 20 years as an artist in a show in Houston this weekend.

Backyards and Beyond exhibit will travel to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock in 2010 for the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

The MIAL was created 30 years ago to celebrate Mississippi’s artists, writers and musicians.

Porter and other winners from the eight categories of the MIAL will be honored at an Awards Gala at 6:30 p.m. June 13 at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel.

Previous MIAL winners have included Walter Anderson, Eudora Welty and William Dunlap.

*

Contact Manivanh Chanprasith at mchanprasith@vicksburgpost.com..