Art Insights: “True Grit”
March 19, 2026 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Explore the enduring legacy of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit with artist Tim Youd and writer Jay Jennings while A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time is on view at AMFA.
Youd’s 100 Novels Project has taken him around the country in his practice of retyping 100 works of American literature, a durational project rooted in the love of reading and reflection.
As he prepares to retype True Grit at AMFA, Youd joins Jennings to reflect on the life and wit of Charles Portis, the humor and humanity that define his writing, the significance of True Grit, and the deep connection between the novel, the author, and Little Rock.
ARTWORK: Cover of True Grit (detail), 1968, cover design by Paul Davis.
The Mid-South Cohort, a multi-year, multi-institutional exhibition partnership formed by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Fisk University Art Gallery, and the Mississippi Museum of Art, is made possible by the Art Bridges Cohort Program. This exhibition was organized by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
Tim Youd (b. 1967, Worcester, MA) is a performance and visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and video. To date, he has retyped 84 novels at various locations in the United States and Europe. Residencies at historic writers’ homes have included William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with the University of Mississippi Art Museum (Oxford, MS), Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia with SCAD (Milledgeville and Savannah, GA), Carson McCullers’ Childhood Home (Columbus, GA) and Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House (Rodmell, Sussex).
Jay Jennings is a writer, editor, author, and screenwriter. In 2023, he was awarded the Porter Fund Literary Prize, “presented annually to an Arkansas writer who has accomplished a substantial and impressive body of work that merits enhanced recognition.” He met Charles Portis in 1985, and the two remained friends until the latter’s death in 2020.
