LITTLE ROCK — More than 50 works by Arkansas native and Harmony Grove High School alumnus Dwight “Kuimeaux” Drennan will be featured in a solo exhibition opening Nov. 14 at the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock.
The show, titled Kuimeaux’s World, reflects Drennan’s deep connection to the land, culture and history of the South. Presented by the museum in partnership with the Kuimeaux Project, the exhibition will debut during “2nd Friday Art Night,” a monthly downtown after-hours art event, from 5 to 8 p.m. It will remain on display for 18 months, through May 2027.
The opening will include live music by Central Arkansas native Brian Nahlen.
Drennan’s art captures landscapes and daily life across the Delta regions of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, portraying vivid scenes of bayous, farmlands and small towns.
“I have an intense feeling for this land and its people,” Drennan (pronounced KEY-moe) wrote in 2000, while living near a cypress-fringed lake in the Arkansas Delta. “When I think of, and as I live, the human experience — both joyous and tragic — in the Deep South, my expression of these overwhelming emotions is through art.”
After Drennan’s death in 2022, five longtime friends and one of his sisters formed the Kuimeaux Project to preserve and share his legacy. The group includes Benny Turner of Bronx, New York; Ed Eaves of Warrenton, Virginia; Sonny Gault of Wabasha, Minnesota; Chris Maxwell of Woodstock, New York; Melissa Woods of Little Rock; and Drennan’s sister, Linda McInturff of Sherwood.
Turner, Eaves and Gault first met Drennan in the late 1960s when they attended Harmony Grove High School together, forming a lifelong friendship that inspired the continuation of his artistic legacy.