After a nearly 20-year career as an artist documenting the lives of Mississippians, H.C. Porter is set to release her first book, a companion piece to her traveling exhibit, Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories — The First Year After Katrina.

Three years in the making, Porter’s exhibit is her most in-depth project to date and the book, set for release in early November, helps tell the story of what happened in her home state the first 12 months after Hurricane Katrina. 

If you go

Artist H.C. Porter will sign copies of her book, “Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories,” at 7 p.m. Nov. 15 at her gallery at 1216 Washington St. The book is $45 plus shipping and may be purchased in advance by calling 601-661-9444 or by visiting www.backyardsandbeyond.org or www.hcporter.com. Also available online, at www.backyardsandbeyond.org/voices, are audio recordings of Hurricane Katrina victims that are featured in Backyards & Beyond, Porter’s traveling exhibit.

“It’s like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon,” said Porter, a Jackson native who moved to Vicksburg in 2006. “It is surreal that this book has finally come together. I tried to capture the human emotion trapped inside a historic tragedy. The painting technique allows viewers to see beyond the destruction. It goes beyond the documentary aspect and goes into the character of the person. The act of painting is a language that expresses emotions that are too subtle for words.”

On Nov. 15, Porter will sign copies of the book, “Backyards & Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories,” at her Washington Street gallery in a special event celebrating its release.

Backyards & Beyond was born Sept. 18, 2005, just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The project ended on the storm’s first anniversary, Aug. 29, 2006. Porter spent a year documenting life in the aftermath of one of the country’s most devastating storms.

About 9,000 photographs were taken for the exhibit. While Porter took pictures, Karole Sessums, collaborator and Backyards & Beyond executive director, collected live field recordings of the people they met. The completed project, the exhibit, is comprised of environmental portrait paintings by Porter and the audio compiled by Sessums.

The book, which features the 81 mixed media original paintings that make up the exhibit and a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, “celebrates who we are as Mississippians, and that’s what I want people to see,” said Porter.

“I love calling Mississippi home. I want people to be introduced to Mississippi through the book,” she continued. “I want people to see Mississippians, even if they’ve never been there. After Katrina, people recognized that we pulled people up by a bootstrap — it’s our character, faith and resilience. No one else is going to take care of us, but us. We are supported by family and friends.”

The book includes excerpts from the audio Sessums collected from the people in the paintings.

“This book is celebrating what was left after the water receded. Hope, faith and love were what remained,” said Porter.

The exhibit can be seen through the end of November at the Katrina Research Center at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Park campus in Long Beach. In 2010, it will travel to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock for the fifth anniversary of Katrina.

*

Contact Elizabeth Jones at ejones@vicksburgpost.com.