A Center of Culture in Catfish Country, Thanks to Miss Mara

One day this fall, flags at offices and businesses throughout Mississippi’s capital were solemnly lowered as a sign of mourning and respect. Thalia Mara, 92, had died after a month in declining health.

The city gave its leading devotee of dance a close approximation of a state funeral. For an afternoon, Mara’s shiny, closed wooden casket was put on view in the performing arts hall that bears her name, flanked by honor guards from the city’s police and fire departments. The governor sent a wreath.

Known as Miss Mara in her adopted city, the transplanted Chicagoan and former ballerina and choreographer had been a passionate advocate for the arts, as well as a leading figure on Jackson’s surprisingly active and rich cultural scene.

In juxtaposition, the words “Mississippi” and “culture” may conjure up immediate thoughts of the blues, Elvis Presley, late Nobel laureate William Faulkner ... or seem like odd companions. In droll self-deprecation, after all, some Mississippians do enjoy ordering iced tea by asking for a glass of “Southern chardonnay.”

Yet a number of determined residents -- Mara often led the way -- managed in recent years to turn this city of fewer than 200,000 people into a center for the arts, even as Jackson struggles with widespread poverty, an increase in crime, middle-class flight and an economic downturn.

Among its fine arts credits, Jackson is home to an international ballet competition, has hosted Russian, French and Spanish art exhibits, and next year is to be visited by some of the Old Masters. This year, in a cheerful, low-brow vein, it was the backdrop for what was described as the largest display of outdoor art in Mississippi history, featuring 7-foot-long likenesses of catfish, a living symbol of the state.

Bringing the arts to the fore has not been easy.

“It’s difficult for a city this size to continue to help the arts, all of them,” said Maxine Dilday, acting manager of the 2,362-seat Thalia Mara Hall auditorium. Because of mounting debt, the Jackson Ballet suspended operations in 1994, though the city boasts another professional troupe that performs dance programs with Christian themes, as well as two ballet schools. The Mississippi Symphony has also has experienced financial woes and now holds some concerts in smaller venues to save on rent.

The daughter of Russian immigrants, Mara moved here in 1975 to build a ballet school and professional company. In doing so, she helped secure an international competition of aspiring dancers for Jackson. Starting in 1979, and every four years since 1982, what is now Thalia Mara Hall has played host to the USA International Ballet Competition, bringing dancers from as far as Mongolia to the Old South to perform plies and entrechats for a blue-ribbon jury.

“For two weeks, this is an international city, and that energy and vitality, it just revitalizes the place,” said state Treasurer Peyton D. Prospere.

What Mara wanted to do was build an appreciative following for dance, said David Keary, the first dancer she hired here. In Mississippi, he said, she sensed that people would come to see ballet if it were presented like football or baseball, with winners and losers.

“When she got here, she realized what a sports environment we had,” said Keary, artistic director of Ballet Mississippi, the dance school that Jackson Ballet morphed into. “She tried to tap into that competitive element.”

The same week in October that Mara died, another Jackson resident, Jack Kyle, was in Dresden, Germany, working on what he says would be the first exhibition of Dresden’s artistic treasures to journey abroad in almost a generation.

For six months starting in March, Jackson would become temporary home to 26 paintings by Old Masters including Rembrandt, Rubens and Vermeer, and other cultural riches including the 41-carat Dresden Green diamond, said to be the largest of its kind.

When he seeks the loan of artworks from collections abroad, Kyle said in a phone interview from Germany, “the first thing out of their mouths is, ‘Why Mississippi?’ ”

“I’ve gotten immune to that,” he said. “My first reaction is, ‘Why not?’ ”

Meanwhile, the Mississippi Museum of Art, which has a permanent collection of 4,000 works, is preparing to receive a traveling exhibit from the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris of interior reproductions of affluent Parisian homes of the 1920s and ‘30s. “Paris Moderne,” to open in March, will include paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani.

The museum lending the works “has never sent a collection to the U.S. before,” said Betsy Bradley, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art.

Since 1996, the Mississippi Commission for International Cultural Exchange, where Kyle works as executive director, has brought three major foreign exhibitions to Jackson, from the czarist palaces of St. Petersburg, the French royal palace at Versailles and Spanish royal collections including the Prado museum of Madrid. The king and queen of Spain came to inaugurate the display of more than 600 artworks from their country, including a 55-foot gilded gondola.

“I and the other volunteers see almost all of the visitors, and their first question often is, ‘How did Mississippi do this?’ ” said Ellen Gully, director of volunteers for the exchange commission, a nonprofit organization funded by the state and city governments.

One reason for the cultural activism in Jackson is to promote education, a weighty consideration in a state whose public school funding per pupil ranks near the bottom nationally, and where only 64% of high school students graduate.

“If we don’t get kids when they are young, I don’t think they will ever have an appreciation for art,” Gully said. For “The Glory of Baroque Dresden,” every schoolchild in Mississippi is to be given a free printed guide, and teachers are being encouraged to bring their classes.

In Jackson’s poor black neighborhoods, Ballet Mississippi operates a special outreach program attended by about 80 children. Keary, who danced in New York City under George Ballanchine and Jerome Robbins, believes the arts can serve as a bridge between white and black populations.

“I think the arts are the way out of the race problem we have in this city,” Keary said.

Another powerful argument for culture can be made in dollars and cents. The presence of Russian, French and Spanish artworks in Mississippi’s capital is credited with attracting 1.1 million visitors, including 350,000 schoolchildren, and with pumping $140 million to $150 million into the local economy, Kyle said.

“Culture is the catalyst for so many other benefits to our society,” he said.

Jackson has a trove of permanent museums and exhibits, including the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame & Museum, the new International Museum of Muslim Cultures and sites linked to the civil rights movement.

For the catfish display, organized by the exchange commission, local businesses were asked to pay $2,000 to sponsor one of the fiberglass fish, and to find an artist to decorate it.

The resulting oeuvres, including fish resembling Cleopatra, Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Elvis, arguably the most famous of all of Mississippi’s native sons, were positioned on central Jackson streets.

“We thought this would bring visitors to the downtown, which we desperately need,” said Gully, who was project coordinator of “Catfish on Parade.”

“We also wanted to showcase local talent and what they could do,” Gully said.

One Jackson employee whose job takes him through the downtown said that, judging from his experience, the catfish extravaganza was a rousing success.

Said Tom Kaelin, security supervisor for the city: “When I’ve been making my rounds, I’ve seen people from out of state who’ve stopped to take pictures.”