Oxford Treehouse Gallery, 328 County Road 418, will hold a reception Friday from 5-8 p.m. for their featured artist this month.

Martha Ferris was named the recipient of the 2016 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Visual Arts for her 2015 exhibit, Foreign and Familiar Places, at Fischer Galleries. She is a mixed media artist whose paintings, murals, and large scale public works have been exhibited in galleries, museums, schools, parks and other public spaces across the country.

Ferris grew up on her family farm on the banks of the Big Black River in western Mississippi, and her early work reflects the rich variety and vivid colors of the flowers, trees and abundant wildlife that flourishes in the Big Black River Basin.

Martha continues to experiment across a growing range of media. In the past few years she has focused on a series of paintings, Cityscapes, that extends her sense of place far beyond her family farm.

All of her work, without exception, is deeply rooted in her sense of place.

Her exhibit, “Paintings and Drawings: Black and White in Color,” will be on display at OTG through Nov. 30.