Sambo worked in architectural practice for many years prior to founding the Rural Studio. In 1977, immediately after completing his internship, he founded Mockbee Goodman Architects with friend and classmate Thomas Goodman. The firm quickly built a regional reputation for utilizing local materials in its exceptional designs, winning more than 25 state and regional awards in four years.

Architect Samuel Mockbee was convinced that "everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul" and that architects should lead in procuring social and environmental change. But he believed they had lost their moral compass. The profession needed reform, he believed, and education was the place to start. "If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession's responsibilities," he said. He wanted to get students away from the academic classroom into what he called the classroom of the community.

Architecture students enrolled in the Rural Studio actually live in and become a part of the community in which they are working. This "context based learning" format teaches them critical architecture skills with an eye towards social responsibility. It is said that to his students, Mockbee presented architecture as a principle that must be committed to environmental, social, political and aesthetic issues.

Samuel Mockbee was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2000 shortly before he died at the age of 57. He was post-humously awarded the 2004 AIA Gold Medal by the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects.

I considered Sambo to be a friend, an inspiration, a humanitarian and a consummate artist.

2. Walter Inglis Anderson - "Walter Inglis Anderson: Everything I See is New and Strange" at the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building.

"I am continually arriving from some strange place and everything I see is new and strange." - Walter Inglis Anderson

Southern museum goers and art collectors have known of Walter Anderson for more than 50 years. They were introduced to him in 1948, when Memphians John and Louise Lehman persuaded Louise Bennett Clark, director of what was then the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, to mount the first show ever of Anderson's work. Art critic Guy Northrop, writing in The Commercial Appeal, instantly declared him a "genius." Memphians saw that genius at work again in 1950, when the Brooks focused on Anderson's block prints, watercolors, and ink drawings, and again in 1967, when the museum put together a major retrospective.

Southern artists knew of Anderson too. Burton Callicott, painter and instructor at what would become the Memphis College of Art, traveled to Ocean Springs in 1948 for a crash course in pottery under Peter Anderson, the artist's brother and head of the family's business, Shearwater Pottery. (Walter's "gift" to Callicott? A mound of clay, no note attached, one morning at Callicott's door.) MCA students still camp every summer on Horn Island, Anderson's Gulf Coast retreat 10 miles offshore from Ocean Springs, and the work they do there is still exhibited at the start of every school year.