Carroll Cloar, "Family in the Cotton"

Signed Offset Lithograph of people wearing hats in a cotton field with trees in the background. The piece is mostly in blues, greens, and white.

This is a signed offset lithograph from 1992. Carroll Cloar is a 1934 graduate of Rhodes College.
Cloar envisions a stereotypically traditional image of Southern life in this print that was inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas in the early 20th century. The vivid color palette is a trademark of Cloar's work that emphasizes its dreamlike quality, as he often cited his memories as his primary sources. For example, the figures stand amongst a field of white cotton that contrasts with the blue sky, green and yellow flora, and the red barn in the background.
It is also possible that this is his artistic recreation of a photograph. Cloar collected these images from family members and flea markets and reimagined them into his own scenes. He often disregarded the original context of the photographs -- he cut them into pieces and reassembled the fragments into new images, usually combining pieces from multiple sources. His creative liberty with real photographs has at times been called into question in conversations concerning appropriation, as Cloar used his collaged photographs to recreate his fantasies of the South which may not reflect the experiences of the people in the photos he collected.