“Against the brutal backdrop of its own history Angola now poses itself as a progressive prison.” When I entered the grounds of Louisiana State Penitentiary, I saw a maze of rawhide belts and purses, paintings reminiscent of a back aisle thrift store, and elaborate wooden objects that evoked the country crafts of my southern childhood. »
“In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passerby.” The Gibraltar of the Confederacy erupts gloriously from the southern tip-edge of the flat Delta flood plain to guard the lush »
“‘On a shelf behind the speaker’s desk, was a marble bust, on the base of which in relief were the words “John C. Calhoun.” Poised on its crown, was an inverted inkstand, whose contents had descended in copious streams over the face . . . Under the name, in pencil, was written this explanatory clause. »
“Simmons, Aycock, and Daniels used their influence, oratorial skills, and the press to create a rape scare, demonize and humiliate black men and women, spread a violent white supremacist ideology, and reclaim the North Carolina Legislature for the Democratic Party.” In the 1890s, the economic fortunes of farmers were dashed when the cotton market collapsed. »
“I drilled until the book was lace.” The gaps between experience and history are filled with unauthorized cosmologies. Worldview. Origins of myth. While artifacts of war are found in pawnshops, artifacts of survival are found in cosmology. Through my work, I chart the southern imaginary—from the Culture Wars back to Reconstruction, from a Food Lion »
“At every turn in this country, there was a branch, a slough, a poquoson, a swamp, and most of us sensed that we did not simply live near swamp—we belonged to it.” Gaither’s Lagoon, a small, dark backwater off the Pasquotank River in northeastern North Carolina, was less than two blocks from my childhood home »
The art works represented here are housed in the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. William Arnett, the Foundation’s founder, assembled the collection over a thirty-year period, during which he travelled throughout the South and interviewed the artists. Arnett selected the artworks illustrated here, offering a commentary on each one in a recorded conversation in 2013. In »
“Pearl spiked her drink. And then I made a painting about it.” Pearl spiked her drink. And then I made a painting about it. I like to think of my paintings as portraits, each one a document of a specific moment in someone’s life. But the people are strangers, and their stories are told in »
“Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial.” Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial, citizens in a remarkable graphic menagerie that speak, sometimes forcefully, sometimes joyfully, to what he termed “hard truths.” Tigers, signifying the artist as well as »
Westview Press, 1997 In 1995 the highly publicized First International Conference on Elvis Presley sent a clear message: Elvis was entering the academy with all the eclectic fanfare that had made him King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Though controversial, academic status for Elvis seemed appropriate, since his presence had long been felt everywhere else. But »
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1998 The cultural life of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was largely the creation of southern expatriates. Think only of the writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson; the musicians Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Eubie Blake; and the painters William H. Johnson, Marvin Gray Johnson, and »
1996 Olympic Arts Festival In William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! Shreve McCannon implored his southern-born roommate to “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”