Mythology, Americana, and Personal Folklore Inspire Artist Neal Harrington’s Work
It happened in slow motion. Neal Harrington, then a tween, was changing for basketball practice in the locker room at school. He pushed his hand through the sleeve of his shirt and felt something slide out with it—a pair of his older sister’s underwear.
“It gets worse,” he warns, reliving the mortification.
In a rush to make it to practice, Harrington had let his mother pack his bag to save time. She apparently had not seen the stowaway underwear clinging by static to her son’s gym clothes.
“These panties fly out and float down,” he continues. He saw the other boys in the locker room, all of whom crushed on Harrington’s older sister, watch the contraband descend. “They all go to grab them. A fight ensues. We’re all punching each other. I finally get them back and I throw them in the locker.”
After practice, he recounts walking home in the South Dakota snow, hot with embarrassment. “I was steamed,” he says. “I get back, and I see through the sliding glass doors my mom and sister talking at the dinner table. I came in hot. I slammed the door open…and I tell them what happened. They just bust up laughing. And I said, ‘What’s so funny?’ And my mom goes, ‘I was just telling your sister that the same thing happened to your dad the other week at racquetball. He played a whole match with my panties on his back.’”
Moments like that—awkward, funny, and rooted in family and place—are the same kinds of stories Neal Harrington returns to again and again in his work, transforming personal memory into visual folklore. It’s just one of “millions” of stories from growing up in South Dakota that Harrington plans to immortalize in an autobiographical graphic novel, something he is working on during a sabbatical from teaching art at Arkansas Tech University. He plans to call it Welcome to North Rapid, after the town where he grew up, eventually adding to the series Welcome to Wichita and Welcome to Arkansas, two more places that shaped his career and perspective.
At the University of South Dakota, where he received his BFA in painting, he fell in love with fellow South Dakotan Tammy, now his wife of twenty-eight years. Then, at Wichita State University in Kansas, he fell in love with printmaking. “I was sick of painting. I was over it,” he recalls. “I didn’t really jive with the painting faculty, and I was going to quit school, and Tammy said, ‘Well, you should try printmaking.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but that’s what you do.’ She goes, ‘I don’t care.’ And so, I moved over into printmaking.”
The two earned MFAs in printmaking, acting as each other’s strongest champions and critics. “I’m fortunate—and she is, too—that we both are really honest, but it comes from when she succeeds, I succeed, and vice versa,” he explains. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am without Tammy. She’s contributed 100 times—100,000 times—to everything I’ve ever done with a comment or observation.”
He was also motivated to take the leap to printmaking when he learned the medium’s history. “I mean, it was the internet of its day. It really created the middle class and gave people a chance to experience how to read, and to own art,” he expounds. “I still really enjoy that printmaking is a lot about disseminating information and letting a lot of different social groups enjoy art and be in on the joke.”
In 2001, the couple landed in Russellville, Arkansas, where Neal got a one-year visiting position at Arkansas Tech University. Tammy teaches art at nearby University of the Ozarks in Clarksville. The pair have since exhibited their art individually across the United States and won numerous awards for their work. The Annual Delta Exhibition has awarded Neal multiple times, and in 2023, he won a competition that came with a cash prize and the honor of having one of his works on permanent display at the Clinton National Airport in Little Rock. The piece, dedicated in October of 2025 and titled “Arkansas As Home,” is a triptych of carved woodcuts that tells a story of the state in three parts.
“I thought, I’m going to separate the state into these three different regions,” he explained. “And the first panel will be the mountainous region. The middle panel will be the wetlands/waterways region, and then the third will be like the Delta city regions. And then I just kind of made little lists and tried to make my own icons of what would fit into those [places], just like what I’m interested in. You know, that Americana kind of feel.”
The three 3.5-by-4-foot birch panels carve a portrait of Arkansas: apple-picking and the dense loblolly pine forests of the Ozarks and Ouachita regions; rich wetlands teeming with wildlife, from great blue herons to armadillos; the storied culture of music along the banks of the muddy Mississippi. Harrington’s distinct style and perspective don’t get lost in his ode to the Natural State. The panels are packed with movement, drawing the viewer in to leap with a white-tailed deer, take flight with an egret, chase kite strings with running children. Everywhere you look, there is something to see, and the more you look at it, the more you discover. It is illustrative, incredibly detailed, and Harrington’s comic book influence shines through.
He says that studying classic mythology, Americana, and regional lore lead him right back to where he started as a young artist, reading and drawing comics. “You know, the tropes of comics are also kind of like modern day myths and legends, these heroes that we look up to,” he articulates. “And I would say I really am drawn to Americana and those tales of feats of overcoming great odds like John Henry, or even just the myths from Sasquatch to Paul Bunyan, all that kind of stuff.”
Harrington’s works are what he calls “visual ballads.” The story may be carved into birchwood or inked onto comic book cells, but it isn’t set in stone.
“I lay out a pretty illustrative situation. And, you know, people are going to bring whatever they want to it. Some people think it’s dark, some people think it’s just weird, or some people think it’s funny, and it really is all of those things. It’s what the viewer brings to it,” he says. “It tells a story, and what that story is, is up to anyone but me.”
Keep track of Neal Harrington’s progress on “Welcome to North Rapid” via on Instagram. View his works at nealharrington.com, at M2 Gallery in Little Rock, and at Clinton National Airport.
