May 31, 2022

Portal

by Southern Cultures

Listen, Consider, Evolve

by Southern Cultures

A conversation exploring Jones's passion for photography and science, and the points of connection between two men raised proximate to islands and landscapes that continue to inspire us.

Preserving Black Crafts and Legacies

by Southern Cultures

This short essay is about Simiyha's research as a visiting curator at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, where she developed an exhibit, Southern Foodways: The African American Experience, that focused on foodways and Black crafts in Moravian communities. This exhibition serves as a resource and tool to educate and enlighten those who do not know about African American influence on the Moravian diets and the artifacts they used and created during this time period. This exhibition incorporates archival documents, collections housed at Old Salem Museum, and historic research to articulate once-hidden African American food stories.

Art & Alchemy

by Southern Cultures

This set of twenty interviews, conducted between September 2020 and July 2021, opens the workshop door and steps behind the customer counter to reveal the artistry, satisfaction, and expressions of care behind repair.
Feature article Art & Alchemy

Natural Born Subversive

by Southern Cultures

This article examines the life and craft practices of dyer Dede Styles. Styles's knowledge of place, advocacy for her community, and deep life of care add important context to the history of environmental defense and struggles in the Swannanoa region of Appalachia. This article is the result of a series of oral history interviews conducted in 2020-21 and is an effort to represent Styles in her own words and in the context of scholarship on the complex history of crafts in the region. A member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild like her grandmother, Styles demonstrates and sells through the guild, continuing the complex and dynamic tradition of hybridized and ever-evolving regional craft in Appalachia. A lifelong resident of Lytle Cove, Styles is also a fierce advocate for her community and bioregion, and this article demonstrates how her craft practice is both a vehicle for and expression of that relationship and advocacy.

How the Sausage Is Made

by Southern Cultures

Working harder to understand exactly how this sausage is made compels us to consider the intersections of tacit knowledge, physical dexterity, social savvy, and sensory power, as well as how the appellation craft can bolster hierarchies framed in terms of gender, class, and race.

Quilts, Social Engineering, and Black Power in the Tennessee Valley

by Southern Cultures

Drawing on a group of quilts created by African American women who lived in the construction villages associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority during the New Deal era, this essay asserts that these quiltmakers created modernist quilts as "home beautification," as a potential source of empowerment to the Black TVA staff and their families, and as a signal to white TVA administrators that Black workers had much to offer the community and nation, deserving better treatment than the federal program was providing. These women attempted to disrupt the customs and traditions of the rural South by crafting quilts with equally radical aesthetics and messages, in contrast to the typical quilts of this era, which reflect the colonial revival and popular consumer culture. By giving these quilts to white TVA higher-ups, African Americans associated with the TVA claimed their power and potential in the face of a segregated system funded by the federal government.