A native of Augusta, artist Mildred Nix Huie (1906–2000) had an affinity for art, history, and literature her entire life. (Her maternal grandfather was John Michael Weigle, a managing editor of the Augusta Chronicle, and she lived next door to Johnny Mercer in Savannah, Georgia.) Huie attended Shorter College (now University) in Rome, Georgia, and graduated from Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University) with a degree in classical education. Rather than pursuing a career in education, she managed WALB radio and TV stations in Albany, where she was named Woman of the Year in 1950, before settling on Saint Simons Island in the early 1960s. She lived there for the remainder of her long and active life. 

In the mid-1960s Huie, along with a group of artists, established the Left Bank Art Gallery, which quickly became the foremost purveyor of art in coastal Georgia. In the final phase of her life and career, she became a renowned and successful artist—an impressionist painter and a sculptor—as well as a respected historian of and writer about the Golden Isles.  

Huie’s depictions of Saint Simons Island, especially its historic structures, became an integral part of the island’s visual culture. Her daughter, Mildred Huie Wilcox—like her mother, an accomplished artist—maintained the Huie home as a museum for nearly twenty years after her mother’s death, when it was purchased by the St. Simons Land Trust in 2018. At that time, Mrs. Wilcox donated the Mildred Huie Museum’s contents to the Morris Museum of Art. The present exhibition is just a small sampling of the Morris Museum’s holdings, a chronicle of island life and a record of its houses, great and small.