Works by the late Starkville artist Carole McReynolds Davis are now open to the public, courtesy of Mississippi State University’s Visual Arts Center Gallery.
 The exhibit, titled “Figures and Faces Not Far From Home: Portraits by Carole McReynolds Davis” runs until Nov. 18 and showcases many local people whom Carole painted from Starkville and the surrounding areas.
The collection of portraits features a small sampling of the estimated 800 to 1,000 paintings Carole painted over the course of her career. All of the paintings featured in the exhibit are on loan from the Davis family. 
Besides painting, visitors will learn about Carole’s talent as a writer and photographer, as well as her time at MSU where she earned a degree in English, which she later used in writing documentation to accompany her paintings, and as a columnist for the Starkville Daily News.
 Many people in the Starkville community who knew Carole have fond memories of her. Bo Summerford, a manager at Reed’s, said he remembers Carole always coming into his store.
    “She was a character that’s for sure,” Summerford said. “We all loved her.” 
  Whenever Carole came into his store, Summerford said it always put him and his employees in a better mood.
   “Every person she came in contact with was a friend,” Summerford said. “It was contagious.”
 What Summerford remembers about Carole are her delightfully funny answering machine messages, which she frequently changed. When she came in the store, she would remind him and his co-workers to call her phone number and listen to her answering machine greeting. If her husband answered she said to just hang up and call the number back.
  One message he recalls hearing around Easter time was, “it’s a hip, hip hoppity day.”
 Summerford also had many mementos in his office to show, which Carole had given him over the years. 
 
Among these were a newspaper article hanging on his wall showing him working at Reed’s that she had laminated. However, the most prized of all the things he was given was a framed miniature painting of a purple iris.
    He said the purple iris symbolized a pair of purple UGG boots she wanted to buy but which his store had run out of stock. Somehow he was able to track them down for her online. When he told her what he had done, she just about broke down. The next time she came in the store, Davis gave him the iris painting along with a thank you note telling him how every time she wore the boots she would think of him.
   When asked to describe her personality Summerford did not know where to begin. He named her house as being an excellent example though it no longer resembles the one he remembers with yard art, bottle trees, wind chimes and mannequins
   Summerford said Davis’ artistry could be called that of a, “true artistic mind.”
   Lori Neuenfeldt, the MSU visual arts center gallery director, came up with the idea for the exhibit along with Davis’ daughter, Elizabeth Williams. Neuenfeldt says that after Davis’ death, Williams was left wondering what to do with all her mother’s work.
   Neuenfeldt and Williams discussed the best way to showcase her mother’s work, so people could see it. Davis originally planned on publishing her work in a book called, “Not Far From Home,” but plans never came to fruition. However, the title of the unpublished book became the    exhibit’s title.
     None of Davis’ paintings were sold in her lifetime because she thought of her paintings as children. Any paintings she did give away were gifted, but since Davis’ death, some paintings have been sold– most recently at an auction this past April with the Greater Starkville Development Project.
   Neuenfeldt said the importance of Davis work is significant to not only Starkville but the South as a whole.
    “She documented basically the history of Starkville during the transitional period of what we think of as the South,” Neuenfeldt said.
   One of the things visitors will hopefully notice as they walk through the gallery is the diversity in Davis’ work Neuenfeldt said. The people she painted in her work come from a wide variety of economic and racial backgrounds.
  “It didn’t matter if you were poor or wealthy, known, unknown. [Neither] did the color of your skin or religion,” Neuenfeldt said. 
  Another thing visitors will also see in the exhibit are the changes in Davis’ style. In Davis’ early work the color palette is very brown and neutral without much color. Later works of Davis have bolder colors, less emphasis on the background and more emphasis on the person which Neuenfeldt called, “selfies.”
  Frank Davis, Carole’s husband, has been busy trying to get in contact with many of the people who his wife painted in her portraits now hanging in the exhibit. In addition, Frank still works at MSU in the entomology department. Seeing the exhibit complete, he expressed many compliments to Neuenfeldt on all the work she has done in bringing the exhibit to life. 
 Although Neuenfeldt said praises for bringing the project to light are very much appreciated, the credit does not rest solely with her but her students. 
   This spring students in Neuenfeldt’s history of art class were each given a research project about a painting in the exhibit with information from Davis’ own documentation about her paintings. Information they gathered from the project eventually became panels which now hang on the gallery’s walls. As a result, many of Neuenfeldt’s students who contributed to the exhibit developed a new appreciation for the city of Starkville.
     As Davis’ husband walked through the gallery, he began telling the inspiration as well as the stories behind many of his wife portraits. Two women in a portrait called, “Ella and Suzy,” who she compared to the Biblical women Ruth and Naomi because of the devotion the one woman had in walking two miles a day to care for the other. 
  Another painting titled “Ned Gandy,” considered maybe Davis’ best, received a letter from President Obama who would like it to hang in his Presidential Library one day after it is built.
  When asked what Davis hopes those coming to see the exhibit get from it he says pleasure and familiarity.
  “They will have to be very, very pleased. These are [hometown] people she painted. These are people from Oktibbeha County,” Davis said.
  When Neuenfeldt was asked what she hopes people get from the exhibit, she said she wanted them to feel pride in their own stories. She hopes people will also see the importance and historical value artists give to their communities through the exhibit.
   “I think that we need to respect our artists because they preserve the history and tell a story,” Neuenfeldt said.