BIOGRAPHY
Heidi Pitre is a Pollock Krasner Grant recipient, a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship recipient, and the awardee of many other grants and scholarships. She has participated in numerous solo and group shows in Telluride, Austin, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Kansas
City. She has also participated in multiple residencies, including Escape 2 Create, and she is an Artist INC alumni. She has created murals nationwide, including a 40-foot mural, “Suffragette,” in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This mural celebrates the 19th Amendment and is dedicated to all women who have held office over the last century. She currently resides in Kansas City, MO.
STATEMENT
The South. It’s not like anywhere else. It’s not even like itself. The heat is glorious, but overbearing. The food is delicious and deadly. Its people can be painfully lovely, or they can be painfully vicious. If you know the South well, you love it and you hate it, but you can’t shake it.
You can leave it, but it doesn’t leave you. It’s a way of life, and an odd way of living. Some might even say a peculiar way of living.
Our witchcraft starts with a pleasant accent and a seersucker suit, like milk and sugar. We find pleasure in simple things, like rocking on the porch with a glass of sweet tea. Or a martini. Call it lazy if you like, but we know we are a complex people. We can be simultaneously hurtful
towards and protective of each other. Yet, we are famously known for the sacred place we hold for grace and beauty, and our relentless commitment to manners. You may be well-liked at church, but the talk behind your back will be ruthless if you wear white shoes after Labor Day. We may stab you in the heart, but at least we are clever and polite about it. We aren’t animals, after all.
The duality of the South can be hard to make peace with. Tradition is our way of life, so we place importance on rituals long after we have forgotten what they stand for. When our dearest traditions are being threatened, we may be unapologetic about how disastrous we’ve become, using the worst of excuses for bad behavior.
To the rest of the world the South may make no sense, and that’s fine with us, we can’t raise everybody. To some, we may seem obscured behind some sort of penumbra, but it is that obscurity from the rest of the world that preserves who we are, and it is our own obscurities-
the things about us that are so hard to understand- that make us such magical, absurd creatures. Southerners frequently find ourselves in predicaments that are downright ridiculous, all in our efforts to preserve our own sense of place, of what it means to be at home in the
South.
Southern Peculiar examines the South and its people, in all their peculiar wonder. Shining a light on the parts that make us smile, and a flashlight into the dark parts that don’t. This emotional interpretation highlights both aspects in a way that will create a deeper understanding of “us” for insiders and outsiders, helping to embrace our complex absurdity, our Southern Peculiar.
