The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC - December 29, 2024
Benjamin Wigfall 1930 - 2017
Chimneys - 1951
___________________________________________
Southern / Modern - Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century - October 26, 2024 - February 2, 2025
The first exhibition to present a comprehensive survey of works by artists working in the American South in the first half of the 20th century
Created in collaboration with Georgia Museum of Art, the exhibition 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.
Curated by the Mint’s Senior Curator of American Art Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD, and independent scholar Martha Severens, Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art From the First Half of the Twentieth Century takes a broad view of the South and is structured around key themes that traverse geographic regions, including time and place, race, family ties, and social struggles. It also takes a broad, inclusive view of the art of the region, incorporating the creativity and talent of women artists and artists of color across its various thematic sections to provide a fuller, richer, and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the American South at the time.
"The names Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko flash to mind when thinking about the U.S. as the modern art epicenter at mid-20th century. What do Zelda Fitzgerald of Montgomery, Alabama or Dusti Bongé of Biloxi have to do with that history? More than any art narrative has said until now. A rich book published in conjunction with the exhibit “Southern/Modern” makes the case that modernism flourished in the South despite less recognition then and systemic exclusion since. The volume’s cover is Bongé’s “Where the Shrimp Pickers Live,” a 1940 oil fed by Bongé’s rent-collecting job on the Biloxi Back Bay.
The South’s painting legacy is hardly the most crucial part of southern history now under hard examination. Our era is retelling—make that telling for the first time—the truth of slavery, white supremacy and labor exploitation in the region’s DNA. Yet who paints and what is painted are questions overlapping the general reckoning. The Southern/Modern project attempts and delivers answers.
Do I, a lifelong Mississippian, sound thin-skinned that southern artists were shortchanged? Well, I am, but it’s also true. Consider the famous 1949 proclamation by the American Wing curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” Southern/Modern counters that verdict.
True, there have been shows on individual modernist southern artists, but Southern/Modern is the first to examine the region’s strand as part of the national modern fabric. The exhibit of about 100 paintings and prints centers on southern works between 1913 and 1955.
This kind of project is not just a real-time event, although “The New York Times” named the “daring and revisionist” show a Critic’s Choice. The ambition of Southern/Modern is to establish a basis for future art scholarship. Shows, after all, formulate our understanding of art movements. The understanding of Impressionism coalesced with the 1863 Paris Salon des Refusés. Participation in the 1951 9th Street Art Exhibition qualified a painter for the New York School abstract expressionist canon.
The essays in “Southern/Modern” define modern with a big M and small one, according to Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina and co-editor of the book. As an art term, modern means presenting artists who are “moving away from realism and toward abstraction,” he writes. But this project also includes painters modern in the sense that they frankly depict life around them. Regionalism versus modern is a false choice."
msbookspage.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/southern-modern-redi...
..
The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC - December 29, 2024
Benjamin Wigfall 1930 - 2017
Chimneys - 1951
___________________________________________
Southern / Modern - Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century - October 26, 2024 - February 2, 2025
The first exhibition to present a comprehensive survey of works by artists working in the American South in the first half of the 20th century
Created in collaboration with Georgia Museum of Art, the exhibition 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.
Curated by the Mint’s Senior Curator of American Art Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD, and independent scholar Martha Severens, Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art From the First Half of the Twentieth Century takes a broad view of the South and is structured around key themes that traverse geographic regions, including time and place, race, family ties, and social struggles. It also takes a broad, inclusive view of the art of the region, incorporating the creativity and talent of women artists and artists of color across its various thematic sections to provide a fuller, richer, and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the American South at the time.
"The names Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko flash to mind when thinking about the U.S. as the modern art epicenter at mid-20th century. What do Zelda Fitzgerald of Montgomery, Alabama or Dusti Bongé of Biloxi have to do with that history? More than any art narrative has said until now. A rich book published in conjunction with the exhibit “Southern/Modern” makes the case that modernism flourished in the South despite less recognition then and systemic exclusion since. The volume’s cover is Bongé’s “Where the Shrimp Pickers Live,” a 1940 oil fed by Bongé’s rent-collecting job on the Biloxi Back Bay.
The South’s painting legacy is hardly the most crucial part of southern history now under hard examination. Our era is retelling—make that telling for the first time—the truth of slavery, white supremacy and labor exploitation in the region’s DNA. Yet who paints and what is painted are questions overlapping the general reckoning. The Southern/Modern project attempts and delivers answers.
Do I, a lifelong Mississippian, sound thin-skinned that southern artists were shortchanged? Well, I am, but it’s also true. Consider the famous 1949 proclamation by the American Wing curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” Southern/Modern counters that verdict.
True, there have been shows on individual modernist southern artists, but Southern/Modern is the first to examine the region’s strand as part of the national modern fabric. The exhibit of about 100 paintings and prints centers on southern works between 1913 and 1955.
This kind of project is not just a real-time event, although “The New York Times” named the “daring and revisionist” show a Critic’s Choice. The ambition of Southern/Modern is to establish a basis for future art scholarship. Shows, after all, formulate our understanding of art movements. The understanding of Impressionism coalesced with the 1863 Paris Salon des Refusés. Participation in the 1951 9th Street Art Exhibition qualified a painter for the New York School abstract expressionist canon.
The essays in “Southern/Modern” define modern with a big M and small one, according to Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina and co-editor of the book. As an art term, modern means presenting artists who are “moving away from realism and toward abstraction,” he writes. But this project also includes painters modern in the sense that they frankly depict life around them. Regionalism versus modern is a false choice."
msbookspage.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/southern-modern-redi...
..