Catalog Entry from If These Walls Could Talk Exhibit, Neill-Cochran House 2020:

This one is packed with art history puns, all to suggest that art has always drawn upon its own past. Here Correggio sketched Eve handing an apple to Mary. On the back of the pastel box is Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, by Degas. There’s a Duchamp modification of the Mona Lisa on the sketchpad… and it goes on from there. It is in this parlor of the Neill-Cochran House Museum as a pun also: after a fine antebellum dinner, the men would depart to one room (or out on the porch to smoke), while the ladies “withdrew” to another room, dubbed the “Drawing Room.” Pastels are a drawing/painting medium perfected in 18th-century Europe, here celebrated in a riot of color and art supplies. They are still used today, reminding me of William Faulkner’s statement, “The past is never dead. It‘s not even past.”