Overlooked Voices Of Southern Visual Art On View At Frist Art Museum

“The South got something to say.”

So said André 3000 at the 1995 Source Awards. His Atlanta-based Hip Hop group OutKast had just been awarded best new artist to the chagrin of the Theater at Madison Square Garden crowd.

It was a declaration. A demand for acknowledgement.

Y’all best recognize that Hip Hop doesn’t only come from New York and L.A.

The South has always had something to say.

Jazz started there. So did the Blues and Bluegrass and Country music. Rock and roll. What would American cuisine be without creole cooking, or barbecue, or Soul Food. Shrimp and grits. Same goes for literature. Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston.

Excepting Hip Hop in the 1990s, the South’s musicians have long gotten their due as American essentials. Hank Williams, Elvis, James Brown.

Same for its chefs and writers.

If any category of Southern artists could empathize with André 3000, it would be the region’s visual artists. It’s painters and sculptors. For most of the previous century, Southern visual artists were an afterthought when thought of at all.

“Southern/Modern,” the first exhibition providing a comprehensive survey of progressive art created in the American South during the first half of the 20^th century, hopes to change that. The exhibition can be seen at the Frist Museum in Nashville through April 28, 2024, before wrapping up at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens in Memphis later this year.

The presentation is a collaboration between the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens and the Mint Museum in Charlotte.

“As I explored the collection, I discovered a number of artists whose work I found fascinating, but with whom I was not familiar,” Mint Museum Senior Curator of American Art and exhibition co-curator Jonathan Stuhlman told Forbes.com.

What does it say that a museum professional working in the region was unfamiliar with many of the artists in a prominent regional collection of Southern art?

“As I spent more time in the South and visited museums and collections in the region and came to know some of my colleagues and their work, this became a recurring phenomenon,” Stuhlman continued. “Having worked previously at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, I was familiar with its groundbreaking exhibition from the 1980s, ‘Painting in the South: 1564-1980,’ and I began to think about putting together a project that would bring together much of the scholarship that had occurred since that time, focusing in particular on my own period of interest, the late 19th- mid-20th century, to take a holistic look at what was happening in the region during the period. I had come to believe that if seen collectively, what was being produced in the South during that time was worthy of greater visibility and recognition.”

Stuhlman realized the South got something to say.

“Southern/Modern” includes more than 100 paintings and works on paper by artists working in states below the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as those bordering the Mississippi River, as well as some artists living outside of the region who made significant bodies of work during visits. It takes a broad view of the South and is structured around key themes traversing geographic regions, including time and place, race, family ties, and social struggles.

Southern Artists

As is the case today, Southern artists from 80 and 100 years ago routinely travelled to New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and overseas to study and train. What they found in those art capitals was new to them, but they proved fast learners.

“While Southerners may not have been at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of aesthetic and conceptual practice, many quickly absorbed the principles of high modernism into their practice: simplification of form, bold colors, flattened space, an increasing sense of subjectivity, etc.,” Stuhlman explained.

Dusti Bongé (1903–1993) from Biloxi, MS serves as a perfect example.

“She was from the South, came of age in Chicago and New York, yet decided to return to the South,” Stuhlman said. “She familiarized herself with Expressionist, post-Cubist, and Surrealist styles before processing Abstract Expressionism. Like many Southern artists of the time, her work vacillated between representation and abstraction.”

Bongé left New York for home not because she couldn’t cut it in the Big Apple. She went back with her husband in the early 1930s to raise their son. As her proficiency as an artist grew, she would acquire representation with Betty Parsons gallery in New York. Parsons also showed Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Bongé became the first artist in Mississippi working exclusively in a Modernist style. Sadly, she was mostly forgotten by the Modern art world being so far removed from Manhattan. Instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, or Pollock and Rothko, she’s little known.

Bongé exemplifies an artist who had she/he/they lived and worked in New York throughout their entire career would have been canonized long ago for the quality of product, but who has instead been left out because of their remove from the art scene there.

“I do think a number of artists suffered this fate; look at someone like Carroll Cloar, whose painting we borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the show,” Stuhlman said. “We also have to acknowledge that the South was also not always a welcoming environment for new or progressive ideas during this time, and many artists (particularly Black artists, who suffered the additional burden of racism) simply left the region. Think of Beauford Delaney, for example.”

Good point.

The South

“Southern/Modern” covers the years 1913 through 1955. Across the South, this was a period of racial terror. Lynchings. The height of Jim Crow segregation. Pre-Civil Rights Act. The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South leaving for the manufacturing capitals of the North.

What most people know of the South, think of the South, comes from this poisoned wellspring.

The region also lagged in supporting women’s rights. And culture broadly, a fact echoing through the present with its scourge of book bans from Florida to Texas. Historic Southern resistance to high culture and progressive thinking of any kind from the visual arts to literature played as heavy a role in the suppression of the “Southern/Modern” artists as Northern elitism.

Thankfully, the exhibition puts women and African American artists at the forefront where they belong. As it relates to Modernism, their work proves vastly superior to the Southern white guys.

“Conditions were extremely challenging (in the South) for artists of color. That makes the presence of artists like Hale Woodruff or Aaron Douglas all the more remarkable. They, among others, were instrumental in creating havens for Black creativity at the region’s HBCUs,” Stuhlman said. “However, for the most part, imagery of the violence and prejudice experienced by the region’s African American population was created by those on the fringes of the South or by white artists here. For example, some of the most powerful paintings in the show are by Lois Mailou Jones and James Porter, which take as their subjects lynching and the Klan, respectively; both worked on the edge of the South in Washington D.C.”

A print of a lynched figure by Elizabeth Catlett who had lived in the region, but left for Mexico, can be seen, as can Eldzier Cortor’s Southern Souvenir, No. 2 referencing the violence experienced by Black women. She was born in the South, but resided primarily in Chicago, returning only on fellowships for his studies.

Throughout the show, audiences will discover a fuller, richer, and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the American South from the early 20^th century. Listen up. It’s not too late to hear the something these Southern artists had to say.