Kuimeaux was born Dwight Wilson Drennan in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 21, 1950, the youngest of seven children of James and Marie Drennan. For most of the years raising their family, James and Marie worked as floor attendants at the Arkansas State Hospital, the state's only public psychiatric hospital, located in Little Rock. In 1963, the Drennan family moved to the small town of Haskell in Saline County, Arkansas. Only the two youngest children remained at home—Dwight, in the eighth grade, and his brother Jimmy, in the ninth grade.
In 1968, Dwight graduated from nearby Harmony Grove School, a rural school with an enrollment (at that time) of 300 students, serving grades 1 through 12. He then moved to Little Rock to attend the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he completed a BA in Political Science with a minor in History.
His heart was set on entering politics when he started college, but that changed in his senior year when he decided to pursue his other great passion, art. He took some art courses and, encouraged by one of his art instructors, embarked on a career as an artist.
In the early 1970s, Dwight worked at a tourist court in Little Rock to support himself and save money for something he had been dreaming about: exploring other parts of the South. In 1975, he hit the road with his dog Mojo and a sketchpad. They began hitchhiking southward, bound for New Orleans, but stopped for a few days in Monroe, a small city in the Delta region of northeast Louisiana. He loved the country and land, so he decided to stay. He was 25 years old. He would live there for the next 10 years.
Dwight’s work continued to bear his signature, D. Drennan, but he became known to friends and family as "Kuimeaux," a name given to him by friends in New Iberia, Louisiana. Spelled in the Cajun-French patois and pronounced KEY-moe, the name is a shortened form of kemo sabe, from The Lone Ranger TV series of the 1950s. It's what the Lone Ranger’s Native American companion Tonto called him and is commonly interpreted to mean "faithful friend" or "trusted scout."
Monroe proved to be fertile ground for Kuimeaux’s art. It was there that he first painted what would become one of his favorite subjects – Delta landscapes. Monroe is also where he cultivated his first garden of exotic plants, creating a veritable jungle in his front yard. He would make similar wild, jungle-like gardens at every place he lived for the rest of his life. These gardens became subjects of many of his paintings and drawings.
Kuimeaux’s time in Monroe came to a tragic and abrupt end in 1984 when a fire at his home destroyed much of his work. The fire also took the lives of his two beloved dogs, and he narrowly escaped with his own life. Needing the support of his family to regain his footing and start over, Kuimeaux moved back to Little Rock, where he lived for nine years until taking the job of caretaker at an old lakeside estate at Bearskin Lake, a cypress-lined oxbow lake in the Arkansas Delta southeast of Little Rock.
He lived in the guest house on the estate and loved the solitude and natural beauty of the lake and surrounding land. An Artist Statement, which he wrote in 2000, eloquently describes how life there inspired him and his art.
The Bearskin Lake estate was sold in the early 2000s, forcing him to relocate. In 2003, he settled in Sherwood, Arkansas, outside Little Rock, where he lived the rest of his life. He died in 2022 from a progressive lung condition at the age of 72.
Though commercial success eluded him, Kuimeaux enjoyed significant recognition of his work early in his career. He was selected three times for the annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center (now Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts), and his work was exhibited at numerous art fairs and festivals in Louisiana and Arkansas. He had solo exhibitions at Rountree Gallery in Monroe, Louisiana, and the Arkansas Arts Council in Little Rock in the early 1980s. In 2006, the final exhibition of his work during his lifetime was held at the Arkansas Art Gallery in North Little Rock.
In 2024, The Kuimeaux Project began collaborating with the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock to exhibit his work the following year. “Kuimeaux’s World” opened at the Museum in November 2025 and will be on view for 18 months. Featuring 59 pieces, it is the largest exhibition of Kuimeaux’s art to date.