2000 List

Adrian Brewer Studio

Adrian Brewer, his children, and his father have been termed by the director of the Arkansas Arts Center as the “First Family of Arkansas Art”. Brewer’s illustrious career included exhibits of his landscape paintings in major American museums and portraits of prominent political and social leaders including U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner. He established an early professional art school and produced a painting, “Sentinel of Freedom”, which was liberally reproduced and hung in most American schools. Late in his career, he accomplished through his own labor, a highly functional architecturally unique working artist’s studio in the garden of his home, aided by the skills of two prominent Arkansas architects. The design of the studio recalls features of the Arts and Crafts movement as it also blends Post-War modernism and technology. The studio not only provided a livelihood for Mr. Brewer and his family, but it also served as the backdrop for gatherings of nationally artists and writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, John Gould Fletcher. This unique site remains a living record of a master southern artist, the mid-twentieth century studio he hand-built to further his professional career and a rich coterie of artists and writers who shaped the urban culture of a small southern state during that period.