Inherent to this discourse is the rise of southern hip-hop. Among those featured in the exhibition are Thornton Dial, Allison Janae Hamilton, Arthur Jafa, Jason Moran, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Kara Walker, William Edmondson, and many others. This exhibition looks to the contributions of artists, academically trained as well as those who were relegated to the margins as “outsiders,” to uncover the foundational aesthetics that gave rise to the shaping of our contemporary expression.Ĭurated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the groundbreaking exhibition explores the legacies of traditional southern aesthetics in contemporary culture and features multiple generations of artists working in a variety of genres. The visual expression of the African American South along with the Black sonic culture are overlooked tributaries to the development of art in the United States and serve as interlocutors of American modernism. Within the visual expression, assemblage, collage, appropriation, and sonic transference are explored as deeply connected to music tradition. The exhibition chronicles the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape, and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body-deep meditative repositories of thought and expression. The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, investigates the aesthetic impulses of early 20th-century Black culture that have proved ubiquitous to the southern region of the United States.
Photo by Sandra Sellars © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art. Valerie Cassel Oliver stands before Caspera, the 2019 inkjet print mounted on dibond by RaMell Ross (American, born 1982).
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