Below is a press release from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History:
On April 07, 2021, Maddie Codling presented “The Horn Island Logs of Walter Anderson.” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
The celebrated Ocean Springs artist Walter Anderson (1903-1965) is famous for the array of prints, pottery, drawings, and paintings he produced over the course of his life. During his last decades Anderson spent more and more time exploring, observing, and making art about a small barrier island—Horn Island—off the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Anderson recorded his experiences in a vast collection of journals over the last fifteen years of his life. In the 1980s Redding Sugg Jr. drew from the most complete of those diaries to create the book The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson, which has just been republished by the University Press of Mississippi.
“Walter Anderson had a complex relationship with Horn Island,” said Mattie Codling, director of collections and exhibitions at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. “Ultimately the spiritual connections he found there were what kept him coming back.”
Mattie Codling graduated from the University of Mississippi with a BA in art history and a BA in anthropology. She holds an MA in art history from Florida State University. Codling has worked in the museum field for a decade, and has been at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art since 2016.
