Come Walk with Me: The Art of Dorris Curtis has enormous appeal both as a memoir and as a collection of wonderful paintings. Dorris Curtis, like Grandma Moses, began painting at a late age. She worked as a school teacher for over forty years and upon retirement at the age of sixty-five, began to study art. Curtis looked up to Grandma Moses and was heavily influenced by her achievements.
This book includes 103 images of Curtis’s artwork, each with an extended caption, as well as an introduction by Robert Cochran which places Curtis’s art into the larger context of both Arkansas art and American folk art as a whole.
Dorris Curtis began painting at the age of sixty-five. Since her start in 1973, Curtis’s work has been exhibited in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and she has appeared as a guest on the PBS series American Art Forum. Curtis recently donated her entire collection to the University of Central Arkansas.
“Don’t be fooled by the similarity to Grandma Moses. Arkansas’s own Dorris Curtis is not a true ‘primitive’ painter, nor is there anything primitive about her delightful memoir of her life and her own descriptions of her paintings. Everyone should heed the invitation to come walk with her.”
—Donald Harington, Arkansas novelist and art historian
“Dorris Curtis’s paintings capture the spirit of rural life in Arkansas and the natural beauty of our state with remarkable skill and grace, and I display her work proudly in my Washington, D.C., office. Dorris is an Arkansas treasure.”
—Blanche Lincoln, U.S. senator from Arkansas
“This collection of sophisticated paintings will appeal to anyone interested in painting or the history and culture of Oklahoma and Arkansas.”
—Margaret Bolsterli, professor emerita of English at the University of Arkansas and author of Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility and Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread: A Woman’s Diary of Life in the Rural South
