1949–

Five years before being honored as the 2017 Arkansas Living Treasure by the Arkansas Arts Council, fiber artist Louise Halsey was gaining national recognition. In 2012, she was chosen to exhibit her work as part of the Women to Watch program at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

“I had been a member of NMWA since its inception, as my mother was a woman artist who faced so much discrimination in her time,” said Halsey. “I joined to support the goal of opening NMWA in honor of her struggle. To have my work chosen to be exhibited there was a moment of honor for me as well as my mother.”

The Women to Watch program features artists nominated by NMWA’s outreach committees. For the 2012 cycle, the Arkansas Committee selected Caroline S. Brown to curate Women to Watch: High Fiber, an exhibition of Arkansas fiber artists. Halsey was selected to represent the state in the national exhibition.

“I was elated to learn I was chosen to represent Arkansas,” said Halsey. “I was even more excited to have my work shown at NMWA. Despite travel difficulties caused by Hurricane Sandy, it was an amazing experience. I can recall it even now.

“An artist from the UK and another from Paris were in the exhibit, so it was a dream come true to have my work alongside theirs and all the other works from states far and wide,” she said. “This felt like a validation of the series about houses I was doing.”

On display at the museum from November 2, 2012, to January 6, 2013, were Crackhouse, Dream Façade, House/Moon and Supersize My House, pieces she created between 2005 and 2011.

“The most recent piece in this exhibit is Supersize My House, based on an article I read in the magazine Sierra about the consequences to the planet of building large homes,” said Halsey.

“There was an illustration of a large home sitting atop a small one that caught my attention. This is my interpretation of the image. The piece at the top from which the weaving hangs has a row of houses from Monopoly, a game created to demonstrate the impoverishment of renters by landlords and other aspects of capitalism. These wooden houses seemed a fitting way to finish this image.

“Weaving is a meditative practice for me,” she said. “At times I explore my concerns around environmental and social crises I see facing the earth. In this series of house tapestries, I look back to the style of my childhood home in Charleston, S.C. Both my parents did paintings of these multistory buildings, often in disrepair. Their influence, along with my friendship with the artist Susan Chambers, led me to create a series of house tapestries. This iconic image came to represent both the safety that a home can provide as well as unsettling forces at work, either from within or without.”

Following the NMWA exhibition, works by Halsey and four other women toured Arkansas in 2013 and early 2014.

Halsey lives in a rural area near Ozark and said, “My biggest challenge has been feeling isolated. I would be more engaged with other artists and attend openings except for the amount of time I would spend driving. I was part of an all-woman artist collective, Culture Shock, where we met for critiques and showed our work together. That was a wonderful experience until the pandemic and other factors led to its demise.”

She is currently working on a series of small abstract tapestries using a Navajo technique called wedge weave.

For the 2023-25 Arkansas Committee Artist Registry, Halsey wrote, “As the reality of climate change becomes evident with huge amounts of rainfall, more tornadoes and a variety of disruptions to daily life, I find shelter in my studio. It is there that I can consider my need to calm the chaos or to reflect what is happening around me. Working with yarns, my loom and designs of my own imagining, I weave tapestries. Some are small abstractions, while others are slightly larger and use the simplified image of a house as the center amidst catastrophes. For the span of time when I am weaving, life slows, my focus is narrowed and my anxiety is momentarily placed on the back burner.

“I think it is so much easier now for women artists, especially with all the great work the NMWA committee has done here in Arkansas,” she said. “It’s helpful to gather with other women and form groups to show work together. I also think the emergence of older women artists who were underappreciated creates a path for others.”