In 1949, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote, “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” Despite the growth in scholarship since then, the emergence of museums and collections in the South focused on its art, and numerous exhibitions and publications about individual artists from the region, there have been relatively few efforts to address southern art in a comprehensive fashion. The traveling exhibition “Southern/Modern,” organized by the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, in collaboration with the Georgia Museum of Art tells this important story that has been largely absent from American art history.
“Southern/Modern” considers artists working in the states below the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as those bordering the Mississippi River. Featuring works created between 1913 and 1955, the exhibition is structured around themes like “ritual, religion and community” and the impact of Jim Crow laws. It also takes a broad view of artists working in the South, examining the central role played by women artists and artists of color. It provides a fuller, richer and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the region than has been presented previously.
Artists in the exhibition include Romare Bearden, Dusti Bonge, Carroll Cloar, Jacob Lawrence and Hale Woodruff, as well as many others, both well-known and awaiting further discovery. You can catch it at the Georgia Museum of Art June 17 – December 10, before it travels to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Arkansas and the Mint.
