Church Goin Mule (or Marshall Blevins) is August's Artist of the Month at the Greenhouse and we cannot be more delighted. Join us to celebrate her work and get to know a little about this Lousiana Artist.

Church Goin Mule is a southern artist who was born and raised across the south, her kinfolk came from the mountains, though she lives in the swamp of Louisiana now.

"The paintings I make deal with personal mythology, religion, and the importance of place. I draw on my own memories growing up in the land of the pines, the memories of authors like Faulkner and Hurston, and the vivid works of numerous folk artists." -- CHURCH GOIN MULE

Church Goin Mule's work is a memory jug, a death-vase mash of the collective southern past, pearls and rusted nails, song and story, lore and loss. The mule is our common ground, the creature that every man, woman and child of all origin knew, in a time before t-models and tractors. In a time of remarkable and perhaps increasing polarity, the mule is our grounding rod, pointing to not a better past, but a different one. Every person who worked, worked alongside a mule. The blues was born behind a plowing mule. Stories and poems, jokes and songs were prolific about the south's four legged machine. Like much of our history, it's been forgotten and framed to tell a different tale. That story is a well known one, of glory and triumph. Our true story, our true flag is the white one of surrender, and of hard work, poverty and loss. The mule was the first hybrid and he was always there, able to work harder, live longer, eat less. He stood beside moonshiners, levee builders, cotton farmers, timber-haulers, oil drillers, sugar cane men. He worked six days and brought his folks to church and town on the seventh.