A native of rural Lunenburg County in South Central Virginia, Eldridge Bagley, a third-generation tobacco farmer, began painting more than fifty years ago, when he was still living with his parents and working on their farm.

Although he insists that he doesn’t live in the past, he has often stated his belief that there are traditions, convictions, and values that never change and are worth preserving. This belief is central to his work.

His paintings evoke a time when relationships among family members and friends, as well as a life rooted in agrarian values, religion, and patriotism, merited celebration. Traditions that spring from a shared sense of community and a sense of connectedness are all aspects of his art. His work captures a lifestyle widely thought to be vanishing. Self-taught, he was inspired to make art by his chance discovery of the work of Grandma Moses in Reader’s Digest. From that moment, a lengthy career creating art that is as instantly recognizable for its style—detailed, colorful, layered—as for its subject matter steadily evolved.

His own experience of the backbreaking manual labor that farms demand has informed and enriched his paintings. Farm life itself, church meetings, outdoor Sunday suppers, tobacco markets, the rhythm of the year, and the change of seasons have provided him with subject matter and his life with meaning. He has achieved renown as a storyteller’s storyteller.

The dozens of paintings by Eldridge Bagley in the Morris’s collection came to the museum through his longtime patron and staunch supporter Julia J. Norrell.

The Long View: From Conservation to Sustainability: Works from the Bank of America Collection examines the evolution of the modern environmental movement and our relationship with the earth and all its inhabitants through eighty-eight works of art, including photographs, paintings, works on paper, and sculpture, that are categorized in four sections.

The Beginnings of Conservation features nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists who influenced the nascent environmental movement, including John James Audubon, whose impact on our understanding of nature was profound, and Carleton Watkins, whose photographs of Yosemite Valley swayed the politicians who were debating its preservation. His photographs were a major factor in Abraham Lincoln’s signing the Yosemite Grant Act, which led directly to the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890 and the U.S. National Park Service in 1916.

Push and Pull—Industry and Environment highlights work from the first half of the twentieth century, including iconic images by photojournalist Arthur Rothstein, whose Farm Security Administration photographs directed public attention to the plight of the displaced, poor, largely overlooked farming families and migrant workers. The FSA photographers documented the worst of the Great Depression and the environmental disaster that resulted from years of unsustainable farming practices and extreme drought.

The Emergence of Conservation Activism focuses on postwar works and the ecology movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. When the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, millions celebrated a new commitment to protect our world. Robert Rauschenberg honored the event with his Earth Day poster from the same year. Michael Heizer’s dialogue with the earth is seen in his Scrap Metal series (1978), composed of metal waste recycled from California’s aeronautical industry.

Working Towards a Sustainable Vision includes the work of contemporary artists who focus our attention on how humanity has radically transformed the planet and how we must protect it.

Artists have played an important role in shaping the conversation about the environment that goes well beyond the merely illustrational. Originally created to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, The Long View affirms Bank of America’s dedication to the environment. The exhibition’s appearance at the Morris is made possible by the generous support of Bank of America.

A native of Crystal Springs, Mississippi, O. W. “Pappy” Kitchens (1901–1986) didn’t begin painting until his retirement at age sixty-seven. A self-taught artist, his vivid imagination and love for a good story well told led him to take up art. The narrative quality of his work emanates from the traditions of parables and storytelling with which he grew up. Pappy declared himself to be a folk artist, claiming, “I paint about folks, what folks see and what folks do.”

The Saga of Red Eye the Rooster, his magnum opus, was by far his most ambitious work. The paintings that make up the series, created between 1973 and 1976, constitute a homespun version of The Pilgrim’s Progress that takes a form recognizable to any Southerner, a beast fable. The sixty panels in the series, each fifteen inches square, are composed of mixed media on paper and executed in three groups of twenty. The tale follows Red Eye the Rooster from foundling to funeral, exploring every facet of the life of this extraordinary bird. Red Eye’s adventurous quest leads him to overcome a string of antagonists, but, unlike the classic protagonist of yore, he does not benefit in the end from the knowledge and experience gained in the struggle. Instead, he succumbs to his own fatal flaw and bad judgment.

Pappy Kitchens: The Saga of Red Eye the Rooster is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. It is available through the Morris Museum of Art store