This exhibition features 74 of the artist's works and spans the latter half of the 20th century. Paintings, sculptures, and wall objects are included. With the exception of approximately six objects from the collections of Roger Ogden and Arthur Roger of the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, all works in the exhibition have been loaned by collectors from the Shreveport area. Many of the works have never before been on public display, and are known only to the individuals who own the works and their friends and relatives. The opportunity to view the works as a unit, beginning with the 1950's up to the present, provides viewers with an accurate overview of the development of the artist's lifetime of work.

Clyde Connell was the very essence of Louisiana, a true daughter of the brooding and mysterious swamps and bayous which wend their way through this unique state. She was born in 1901 and spent most of the first half of her long life at the Woods Place, the family plantation in Belcher, Bossier Parish. The plantation had been in her mother's family for some 70 years, but was lost in the late 1940's. Clyde's husband was superintendent at the nearby Caddo Penal Farm, where they lived for the next ten years. It was here that the artist established her first studio. In 1959, she moved to Lake Bistineau, a half hour's drive east of Shreveport, and this was her home until her death in 1998.

The lake was formed by a natural dam flooding Bayou Dorcheat, creating a teeming habitat of animals, birds, and insects in a tangle of cypress and Spanish moss. At Lake Bistineau, the artist recalled, "I began to think about people as being part of nature, part of an overall scheme of things. I began to think about everything, including my art." Representational in her early years, her art evolved over time into a unique abstract language of forms. Created in simple materials of her environment—sticks, stones, moss, red river mud, and discarded machine parts—her work evokes the beauty and power of this primeval swampland. The art deftly blends nature and culture, deeply touching both the physical and spiritual senses.

After settling at the lake, Connell painted landscapes for the first time in her life. Three years later, she began to feel that the place needed sculpture, although she had never made three-dimensional work. The sculptural impulse may have emerged from a need to people the spaces in which she felt so alone. She began to make collages in relief, or assemblages. Often colored by the distinctive red of Louisiana clay, these works, executed from the early 1970's on, seem made in collaboration with the place, and with the artist's past. Having acquired a large amount of colored construction paper, she also made abstract collages of vertical torn strips that echoed the trees and their shadows and reflections in the water. These led to a series of accomplished abstract paintings called Verticals or Lake Verticals. The verticality that was a component of all Connell's best work first manifested itself in Sunpath, a free-hanging abstract painting/sculpture of glowing circles suggested by the ephemeral trails made by the sun on the water. Pierced in their centers, they opened significantly to the landscape. The Sunpath series represents quite literally a breakthrough, a break through the wall of isolation into the environment and into an art of her own that could hold its own anywhere.

The Tyler Museum of Art is located on the east side of the Tyler Junior College campus at 1300 South Mahon. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The Museum is closed Mondays. A voluntary admission charge of $3.50 for adults and $1.50 for senior citizens and children helps support Museum programs and is greatly appreciated.