Art
“By gilding her passport, Page renders its emblematic privileges into an explicit ‘golden ticket.’” Artist Susan Harbage Page uses her US passport (collaged here) to explore her relationship to citizenship, mobility, and access. This self-reflexive art piece figures gold leaf as a signifier of treasured possession and links notions of worth and wealth with inclusion in »
Art
“What does it mean to be (categorically) ‘undesirable’?” When I first saw Tommy Kha’s “Return to Sender” series, I couldn’t help but think of an article I’d read some years ago about online dating apps in the United States. The article revealed how self-identified Asian men and women occupied opposite ends of a desirability spectrum, »
Art
Diego Camposeco’s Utopian Vision “The quinceañera is smiling, framed in the center, a standard sort of portrait for the occasion, but she is pointedly out-of-context.” “There is a South in every North,”I wrote Diego Camposeco, whose brilliant career as an artist and filmmaker was cut short by his death in 2019. His art and writing »
Photo Essay
“The following portraits show a few of the new faces of tradition in North Carolina, revealing the range of who they are, what they do, and how they commit to their artistic practice.” Since 1977, the Folklife Program of the North Carolina Arts Council has identified and documented traditional artists and their communities in order »
Art
In a moment when we’re encouraged to stay home and shelter-in-place, we’ve asked many of our illustrator friends to document what home now means to them. Print them out, color them in, and create your own to share with us online using the hashtag #SCatHome. You can also download a full printable PDF at the »
Art
Art
“Appalachia and Wales share many folk tales and traditions, such as those of the granny women. These sisters made tinctures and potions and had remedies for every kind of ailment, though not of the hubble-bubble kind.” In May 2019, a group of illustrators, filmmakers, photographers, book artists, and folk artists from West Wales exhibited their »
Essay
In January 1941, literati tastemaker Carl van Vechten wrote in mock reproach to Gertrude Stein in Paris—whom he addressed as “Baby Woojums”—chastising her and her partner Alice B. Toklas for their absence when simply everyone else who mattered was there in Manhattan. To further pique the envy of author and art aficionado Stein, he noted »
Photo Essay
In the late 1890s, self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum (1877–1922) began riding the rails as an itinerant portraitist, traveling primarily in North Carolina and Virginia. Mangum worked during the rise of the segregationist laws of the Jim Crow era. Despite this, his portraits reveal a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse, and show lives »
Interview
In 2017, the Center for the Study of the American South hosted Philip Freelon & Pierce Freelon in conversation for the Charleston Lecture in Southern Affairs. We were grateful to have witnessed Philip Freelon’s generosity and deep humanity as he and his son discussed creativity, community, and the artistry of architecture (among other topics) in »
Art
In late spring 2016, Louisiana artist Monique Verdin arrived in the Netherlands for the annual shareholders’ meeting of Royal Dutch Shell armed with an impassioned message and a collection of her black-and-white photographs. The images, displayed as individual large-scale banners, revealed petrochemical plants looming over the wasted landscape, seasonal floods inundating impoverished neighborhoods, and denuded »
Photo Essay
This series of over-sized tintypes is a rumination upon a relationship with a person and a city. Using metaphor, allegory, and the re-interpretation of a few facts, these images re-stage events and themes, and recreate certain atmospheres from a period of sixteen years. They are an idealized record of my relationship with my partner Brian »