"A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time"

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR. February 19 – September 6, 2026.

Full Calendar of Events related to this exhibition: https://arkmfa.org/series/a-month-of-sundays/

A Month of Sundays installed at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, AR.

Divided into five themes: Slow Time, For the Durations, Aging and Erosion, Marking Time, and A Sense of Pause, A Month of Sundays explores the intersection between art and time. Special care has been made in the signage and labels for this show, guiding new visitors through considerations of artistic choices such as subject matter, composition, and history. This provides a soft landing place for more novice museum-goers to consider what art can do.

In Arkansas, we are familiar with the slow movement of “Sunday time”: the painful lag before Monday’s work, languishing in the unbearably hot summer afternoons, the dread of a quickly fading weekend. Walking into the exhibition, I was moved by evocative Southern scenes: The front porch as a congregating site. Families scrambling in their best clothes to church. The corner store. The old family car.

Richard Yarde, "The Stoop," 1969-70, Acrylic on Canvas [Left] and "Pugh City" [Right].

Painting The Stoop (1969-70) by Richard Yarde, displayed next to Pugh City, January 30, 1986, by Birney Imes, sets the tone. Both pieces feature men sitting on stoops, talking in the heat of the day. The intense sunshine is a character in itself in these scenes as the individuals pass their time together.

Birney Imes, "Pugh City, January 30, 1986," 1986, Chromogenic Print.

Across the room, one photograph in a trio stands out. Before Sunday Evening Service, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, June 1980, by Roland Freeman, depicts a familiar scene of women talking outside of a church. The dynamic composition of this black-and-white photograph draws a visual line between the main woman in white and the prominent church steeple.

Roland Freeman, "Before Sunday Evening Service, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, June 1980, Gelatin Silver Print.

One of the few 3D pieces in the show sits around the corner. Cannon’s Grocery (1976) by William Christenberry freezes the quintessential neighborhood store in time. What is usually a hub of the community is presented silently, in miniature form, emphasizing the abstracted nature of the concrete building. Driving around Little Rock and North Little Rock, one can see dozens of similar stores come to life.

William Christenberry, "Cannon's Grocery," 1976, Wood, red oil, metal, plexiglass, illustration board, and various paints.

The South, as a region, has historically grappled with - or perhaps should I say - fought with the passage of time. There are many groups here that reenact moments from the Antebellum South and the Civil War, and that are invested in returning to a specific time and societal order. While the AMFA does not explicitly discuss this more problematic Southern time, the exhibition does include works that hint at it.

A Month of Sundys installed at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, AR.

Two photographs by Southern writer Eudora Welty show the degradation of time. Ruins of Windsor (1936) and Ghost River-town (1936) were part of a larger body of images commissioned by the WPA during the Great Depression. These photographs show the once-thriving cotton port town of Rodney, MS, abandoned and overgrown with vines. The ghost town was left behind by shifts in agriculture and commerce, and by the impact of the Civil War.

Eudora Welty, "Ruins of Winsor" [Left] and "Ghost River-town, Rodney," both taken in 1936, Gelatin Silver Print.

Photographer William Ferris has two sets of writers’ portraits in the show: one set of Alex Haley and the other of Alice Walker. The first photos were taken in the 1970s and the second in the 1990s. Created over 10 years apart, the images pose the authors as still in action, continuing their important Civil Rights work.

William Ferris, "Alice Walker, New Haven Conn." (1977) [Left] and "Alice Walker, Rowan Oak, Miss. (1994) [ Right], both archival pigment print.

Lastly, the most moving piece in the exhibition to me was a video entitled Sean (Mercy Seat) (2006) by Jefferson Pinder. This four-and-a-half-minute-long digital video shows an African American inmate in a white t-shirt, lip-syncing to Johnny Cash’s cover of The Mercy Seat. The “Mercy Seat” references an electric chair. There is a palpable power and grief in this piece as the singer moves through the song. A very relevant piece considering that Arkansas has the 3rd highest incarceration rate in the country.

Jefferson Pinder, "Sean (Mercy Seat), from the "Juke Series," 2006, Digital Video.

This exhibition was sponsored by Art Bridges, Inc. and curated by the AMFA as part of their participation in the Mid-South Cohort, a collection of five Southern museums. It is set to travel to Nashville next, then onto Memphis.

A Month of Sundays installed at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, AR.

Hear me out while I put on my curatorial hat for a moment - considering the AMFA audience and the future travels of the show, I argue this exhibition would be stronger if it were edited down to include only the Southern scenes and artists.

Yes, there are some great works that would be excluded. But, I cannot praise the Southern works in this exhibition enough - how they deeply resonated with me and reminded me of my childhood, people I love, and familiar places. This shift would tailor the exhibition to current and future regional audiences.

A Month of Sundays is on view until Sept. 6th. The AMFA has a hearty schedule of related programming, which I have linked at the top of this page.

Go - see it for yourself and let me know your thoughts.

A Month of Sundays homepage on the AMFA Website.