Events
Artist at work, Greenfield Farm Plein Air Invitational, 2023
PLEIN AIR INVITATIONAL 2025
For the last time before we begin construction, Greenfield Farm opens its gate to the public to watch artists work, snag a bite, and toast the winner with a cocktail.
October 19, 2025
4:00 - 5:30 pm
Organizers
-
Brooke P. Alexander is a painter living and working in north Mississippi. Her work is painted extensively from life, inspired by literature, while intermingling elements of memory. She has participated in regional and national exhibitions, and was awarded the 2024 Mississippi Fellow for South Arts. She is an Instructional Assistant Professor at The University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.
-
Caroline Hatfield’s practice utilizes sculpture, installation, and mixed media to engage with materiality and environment. After completing a Sculpture BFA at The University of Tennessee, she earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from Towson University. Hatfield’s work has been reviewed or included in numerous publications, such as The Washington Post and Alluvian Environmental Journal. She has exhibited artwork nationally and internationally at venues such as The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, DE, and the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea. Recent solo exhibitions include "Foresights and Futures" at VisArts in Rockville, MD and “Impart” at Lincoln Memorial University in Cumberland Gap, TN. Among her awards and honors, she is a recipient of the Trawick Contemporary Art Prize (2018), a South Arts Cross-Sector Impact Grant (2020), and a Mississippi Arts Commission Visual Artist Fellowship Grant (2023). As Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Sculpture at Mississippi State University, she lives and works in Starkville, MS.
Photograph by Megan Bean.
Poet
-
Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) which was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Her seventh book, The Irish Goodbye, is forthcoming from Norton in 2026. A contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and other outlets, she lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS.
Artists
-
Aubrey Pohl (he/him) is a designer, professor, printmaker, pseudo-digital artist, observer, and design researcher. Accessibility of design and material, social awareness, exposure of structure and process, data abstraction, ephemera, change, and research-informed, goal-oriented design are at the center of his practice (among other things), etc, etc, etc. Aubrey currently works as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the Mississippi State University College of Art, Architecture, and Design.
Designer’s Statement
Design as a practice is (and should be) humanitarian. It is the duty of the designer, whoever they may be, and whatever tools they find at their hands, to utilize critical thinking and creative problem solving for the betterment of our human and natural world. Our toolboxes are infinite and undefined. Our communities are just as vital as our tools (if not more so). We should be humans first, visual communicators second, both with love, patience, care, and kindness.
-
My paintings and works on paper are about awareness of the natural world— becoming progressively, cyclically more present to its rhythms, gaining deeper understanding of its design, and acquiring direct experiential knowledge of its mysterious beauty.
Since 2001, I have been making contour line drawings of plants. From the drawings, I isolate silhouette shapes that I cut out of paper and use as stencils to make oil paintings and works on paper – or cut out of metal to make sculptures.
My work is cumulative in nature – gradually marking time and seasonal change, unity and variety, individual and collective beauty.
-
Through process and materiality, my work explores a sense of place. I find inspiration everywhere: from an artist residency in Morocco to observing the Mississippi landscape. My studio practice is varied; sometimes I work on years-long research-based projects. To counterbalance the longer-term, larger scale projects, I make small observational still-life and plein air landscape paintings. These observational paintings become meditations on light, art history, time and change.
-
Professor Critz Campbell is Head of the Department of Art at Mississippi State University. Professor Campbell earned a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A two-year CORE Fellowship followed his undergraduate degree at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina, and another two years studying furniture design at Parnham College in the United Kingdom. Campbell maintains a studio practice in sculptural woodworking. His exhibition record includes the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York; the De Cordoba Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; and Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. Campbell has received numerous awards and fellowships throughout his career. In 2020, he was awarded a federal Art in Architecture commission through the General Services Administration. Professor Campbell is a member of the National Association of Arts Administrators and currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Penland School of Craft and the Mississippi Museum of Art.
-
with Cary Norton
Jared Ragland (MFA, Tulane University) is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. His collaborative, socially conscious visual practice combines a range of photographic tactics with social science, historical, and literary research methodologies to critically examine identities and histories of place.
-
Jingshuo Yang is a multimedia artist working in silk paintings and paper drawings. Her work functions as a diary, reflecting on human emotions and psychological struggles while questioning unseen habits, moral codes, and inherited customs that shape daily life. Through careful observation and empathy, she explores others’ experiences without judgment. Her artworks, including Butterfly Woman and Struggle, call attention to subtle yet powerful forces that influence both personal growth and collective existence.
-
Joshua Brinlee holds the position of Assistant Professor Foundations Coordinator in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Mississippi. He received his MFA in Studio Art form Memphis College of Art, in Memphis, TN, where he currently resides. He is a multidisciplinary artist, employing digital and analog technologies to construct his images. His research interests are varied but often focuses on concepts of gender, identity, originality, and authenticity through self-portraiture.
-
Kaleena Stasiak is an interdisciplinary artist who uses an assortment of haptic media to explore collective mythmaking, and its relevance to the present day. Digging through a lexicon of symbols and imagery evoking American colonial times, folk art, and quilts, she reframes the dominant ideologies surrounding early history and domestic labor. Her graphic cyphers denote the power and breadth of traditional women’s work, functional handicraft, and the impulse to create.
-
Creating things by hand with textiles or creating textiles themselves is the best kind of “making” for me. Textiles are a translator between myself and the viewer as they are in a functional setting between the owner/wearer and the outside observer. Through my work, I explore the meaning we give textiles, but also the meaning they give us. They can add to our sense of personality and style. They comfort us with their feel, their drape. They remind us of the past. They speak to memory –often specific memories, but also that tactile memory that makes us want to touch. They count the hours and minutes in their stitches.
-
Stacey Rathert is an artist originally from the way outs of Kansas, also known as the small farming community of Lancaster. She received her MFA in Art in 2015 from the University of Mississippi, where she is currently an Instructional Associate Professor in Sculpture. Working in a variety of scale and materials, Stacey’s work tells stories of personal and place identity, as well as her upbringing on a farm.
Presented by Visit Oxford, Mississippi Arts Commission, Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, and Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, a project of the Mississippi Lab at the University of Mississippi. Cocktails courtesy of Wonderbird Spirits.
Directions: Greenfield Farm is located between Oxford and New Albany, MS. To get there from Oxford, drive 13 miles east on Hwy 30, turn at the Country Bumpkin onto County Road 249 and drive approximately 8/10 of a mile. Just over a bridge, and to the left, will be an opening in the trees. Look for cars parked on the shoulder.
Coordinates for Greenfield Farm: 34°26'59.0"N 89°18'33.9"W
Google Maps Search Location: Greenfield Farm, CMXR+V6, Cornersville, MS 38655
PLEIN AIR INVITATIONAL 2024
On a rainy afternoon in September, eight Mississippi Artists converged on Greenfield Farm.
See the 2024 Plein Air Invitational Event Report here.