About Us
In 2004, Tim Gordon and Ali Colleen Neff moved from their San Francisco home to Clarksdale, Mississippi to document the Delta blues. Their research quickly grew to include projects involving a variety of expressive genres in the Delta, from the visual arts to freestyle hip-hop. Gordon used his experience as a photographer to visually document regional styles while Neff began to conduct oral histories and ethnographic interviews.
Since her 2005 enrollment in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate school (first as a Folklore master’s student and now as a Communication Studies Ph.D. student), Neff has made two documentaries concerning the creative life of the Mississippi Delta: Let the World Listen Right and Home of the Double-Headed Eagle. She is currently working on a manuscript about freestyle hip-hop in the Mississippi Delta.
Gordon received his M.F.A. in photography from the California College of the Arts and Crafts in 2001. He has worked as a photographer for Neff’s documentaries as well as a photographer for print media and exhibitions.
The team uses a collaborative ethnographic technique, in which the documentary subjects also act as consultants to the final project. Each artist featured on Material Mississippi has been asked how he or she would like to be represented to the world at large. Participants are also given the opportunity to shape the interview process by helping to choose the setting, style and content of the interviews. Artists are given the opportunity to withdraw from the project at any time and retain the copyrights to their own artwork.
Neff and Gordon met the artists featured on this site through a series of personal connections as well as through the reputations of the artists themselves. They encountered the Dennis family after making a wrong turn from Highway 61, sought Ronnie Vaughn through the recommendations of his loyal customers and asked their friend Bill Abel to participate. They believe that these artistic connections are part of what makes the region unique; creativity abounds in the Mississippi Delta and its surrounding areas. They hope to create a series of short documentary films about the artists featured on this site in 2008 to be available for free download at www.folkstreams.net.
This project is made possible through a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council. The statements herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the MHC. The project is also managed fiscally by Delta State University. Dr. Luther Brown of Delta State’s Delta Center for Culture and Learning and Dr. Marcie Cohen Ferris of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill serve as advisors to this project, and Dr. William R. Ferris, Maie Smith, Jennifer Stolle and the featured artists serve as consultants to Material Mississippi.
Tim and Ali can be reached at (919) 969-8023 or e-mailed at: tim [at] materialmississippi.org