Culture of The Southern United States - Art

Art

Collections of Southern art can be found at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta. Southern expressionism and folk art are types of art generally considered to be part of Southern art. The Southern Arts Federation maintains a registry of contemporary Southern artists (including visual artists, performing artists, media artists and writers) who have been recognized by their state arts councils based on the outstanding quality of their work.

Some famous folk artists from the American South include Clementine Hunter (Natchitoches, Louisiana) and Howard Finster (Summerville, Georgia) who mixed southern spirituality and traditional religious motifs with surrealism and dream-like post-modernism. Finster's work was featured on album covers by bands such as Talking Heads (Little Creatures, 1985) and R.E.M. (Reckoning, 1984). He has a permanent display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and his Paradise Gardens is still open to the public almost ten years after his death.

Chris Flesher (Tennessee) has sold folk art as pieces and as concepts all over the world and has a collection at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City as well as in Carmel, California. The influence of his art is mainly centered around the enchanting and beautiful landscape of the Great Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina.

Walter Inglis Anderson and his art is forever associated with the natural beauty of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and many of his family members continue as artists there still today.

Pop artist Jasper Johns and African-American modernist Romare Bearden are two other prominent artists from the South: Johns was a native of Augusta, Georgia, while Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A major center of American modernism was located at the Black Mountain College in the town of Black Mountain, North Carolina. The history of the college – which attracted John Cage, Walter Gropius, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning and other pioneers of varied mid-20th century arts – has been extensively detailed in several books and studies (notably, Mary Emma Harris' Arts At Black Mountain College and Vincent Katz' Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art). The school, which operated as an interdisciplinary, progressive institution for 23 years, was a key incubator for the American artistic avant-garde of the 1960s and beyond.