Photo Essay
Part of our Shutter series on southern photography, Grace Hale examines Sally Mann’s current exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, “A Thousand Crossings,” on view March 4–May 28, 2018. Beauty is everywhere in photographer Sally Mann’s exhibition A Thousand Crossings at the National Gallery of Art. In the first room of the show, her »
Art
This feature is part of a series collaboration with the “50 for 50” project, an initiative of the North Carolina Arts Council in celebration of their 50th anniversary. Beverly McIver is an acclaimed contemporary visual artist from Greensboro, North Carolina. She received the Rome Prize Fellowship in 2017, and is currently on sabbatical from her »
Art
This feature is part of a series collaboration with the “50 for 50” project, an initiative of the North Carolina Arts Council in celebration of their 50th anniversary. Debra Austin was nine years old when her first ballet instructor told her she didn’t have talent. Seven years later, she became the first African American woman »
Art
This is the first installment of a new collaboration with the “50 for 50” project, an initiative of the North Carolina Arts Council in celebration of their 50th anniversary. You could say there’s something lost about William Ivey Long. Not because he wandered away from his native Seaboard, North Carolina, for a studio in New »
Art
Emmet Gowin, “Here on Earth Now: Notes from the Field,” Pace/MacGill Gallery, September 28, 2017–January 27, 2018. Before cable television, video games, Netflix, and smartphones, insects filled the summers of southern childhoods. Remembering the pain of past stings, kids learned to watch for wasps’ nests in the poles of swing sets and chain link fences. »
Art
Photo Essay
Manifest is an ongoing project, a portfolio of nearly one hundred photographs of African American material culture held in public and private collections throughout the United States. These repositories have accumulated diaries, receipts for the purchase of humans, hair, a drum, a door, photographs, figurines, and other artifacts—some with great historical significance, some the commonplace, »
Art
Loy Bowlin’s bejeweled dentures—a different color rhinestone on each tooth, two front teeth framed in gold—were a prelude to his creative output. Born on a cattle ranch in Franklin County, Mississippi, in 1909, Bowlin was a shade-tree mechanic and former used car salesman, who, upon retiring, took on a persona as McComb, Mississippi’s “Original Rhinestone »
Art
On May 1, 1886, Jefferson Davis visited Atlanta for the last time. He had agreed to speak at the unveiling of a statue of the late Georgia senator Benjamin Harvey Hill. The former president of the Confederacy looked gaunt and frail. He sat on stage during the ceremony, and one might imagine that the crowd »
Food
Saltville lies in two counties—Smyth and Washington—in southwest Virginia about thirty minutes east, then north, of Abingdon. The fossil record and artifacts found in the region, now displayed in the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, indicate that Saltville was a prehistoric salt lick attracting large mammals (like the wooly mammoth skeleton in the museum’s center) »
“Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art” was co-curated by Trevor Schoonmaker (Nasher Museum of Art) and Miranda Lash (Speed Art Museum). Before the show opened in September 2017, we sat down with Schoonmaker and artists Stacy Lynn Waddell and Jeff Whetstone, both featured in the exhibition. “We have no idea what it »
Art
Excerpts from Perrow’s essay in Southern Cultures, Vol. 19, No. 4: Winter 2013, appear below. Access the full essay via Project Muse or purchase the issue in our store. Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, was an icon of progressive education during its short life, from 1933 to 1956. When I was there, from 1946 »