The first exhibition to display a comprehensive look at Southern art over the first half of the 20th century opens to the public Saturday at the Mint Museum in uptown Charlotte.
"Southern/Modern: Rediscovering the Radical Art Below the Mason-Dixon Line" features more than 100 paintings by artists linked to the South. Some included in the exhibition are well-known, such as Charlotte native Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett and Jacob Lawrence. While most of the others’ names are not as recognizable, their works stand out.
The exhibition was a collaboration between the Mint and Georgia Museum of Art. Mint senior curator Jonathan Stuhlman, the exhibition’s co-curator, talks to WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn about some of the lesser-known artists and the importance of the show.
Jonathan Stuhlman: You know, a lot of museums have done kind of solo shows of these artists, but there's never been anything to kind of pull it together and look collectively at it. And Southern art really is kind of left out of American art history, and particularly from this period. And so we thought if we, you know, we brought together as much great work as we could, we could kind of make a case that there actually was a lot going on here that's worthy of greater recognition.
Gwendolyn Glenn: And those years are?
Stuhlman: 1913-1955 or so. So 1913, it's the year of the Armory Show in New York, which is often thought of as kind of the introduction for American audiences of modern European art. So, people saw Picasso and Matisse, and artists like that, for the first time. That was kind of the starting point for it. And 1955 gets us roughly through World War II, kind of a new era in American life and culture, I think. You start to see the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and the country becomes much more interconnected with TV and media and everything. So that was kind of a rough stopping point for us for the show.
Glenn: This particular painting was one that you weren't familiar with from the collection. Tell me about what I'm seeing here.
Stuhlman: It's a pastel actually by Will Henry Stephens. And so what we're looking at is a kind of abstraction of the natural world — swirling leaf forms and bark forms, almost like you're looking into a stream or something with all these things swirling around. And that's the kind of thing that I was seeing. This is a really wonderful work of art. And I was like, why don't I know more about what Henry Stephens and others? It happened over and over again.
Glenn: And he was from where? Just briefly tell me something about him.
Stuhlman: He’s from New Orleans. He lived and worked primarily there, but spent a lot of time in the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia.
Glenn: This one is of a former enslaved person by Marie Hull. Tell me about this.
Stuhlman: That's right. So Marie Hull was an artist who worked in Mississippi. So, what we tried to do with the show is not just to include works like Will Henry Stephens that lean more towards abstraction, but also to include artists who are focusing on modern life, life of the times. And she painted this gentleman a number of times and during his lifetime his situation radically transformed. And when she's painting him in the 1930s, (he has) full status as an American citizen.
Glenn: And tell me about these two works.
Stuhlman: So we're coming into the section on the landscape. And when we think of the South, we tend to think of the land. So this painting on the right here by Hale Woodruff, I think speaks to kind of the devastation of the land in the South during the Great Depression. And we have not just the interior land, but we have two coastal scenes. The coast was an important part of the Southern landscape as well. And so, this one is called "Where the Shrimp Pickers Live’" by Dusti Bongé, who worked down in New Orleans and Biloxi area. And then Claude Howell was an artist who worked in Wilmington and often depicted the coastal areas of North Carolina. So here's fishermen mending their nets on the dock. So this is an abstraction, it's called "River Reflections" by Marie Hull, the same painter who did the "American Citizen," the very first thing you see in the show. So it also gives you a sense of, you know, that these artists could work in many different styles.
Glenn: It’s very different from her other work. And this is Jacob Lawrence.
Stuhlman: Yes. So he had an assignment for a magazine to come and travel around the South and depict what he saw. So, this is a scene he did in Gee’s Bend, which is famous now for its quilt makers.
Glenn: And Gee’s Bend is where?
Stuhlman: Alabama.
Glenn: And Jacob Lawrence is one who is very well known.
Stuhlman: Yes, but, you know, ironically based in New York. So really, so this is an example of an artist who, you know, was well known, came to the South and made a significant body of work.
So this is the section we're coming into now called "New Urban Environment." So images of both the city and the city as a source of inspiration. William Halsey, there's a painting of his around the corner there. Let’s walk over to it. He's taking kind of a typical Charleston house here and kind of enjoying playing with the geometry and the colors of it. So he was really well known in Charleston, probably not as well known outside of the region. So I think, you know, a lot of these artists were important parts of the communities in which they lived and worked, but maybe not so much more outside of it.
Glenn: And this next section is?
Stuhlman: This is the Jim Crow era (section). You know, we felt it important to acknowledge racial and cultural issues that were going on in the region at the time. And the James Porter painting, for example, is called "When the Klan Passes By," and it shows an African American family huddled together inside of their home. The husband is glancing out the window and clutching a shotgun and outside the window you see a KKK figure marching by.
Glenn: It also looks as if they have the lights out, probably so you can't see that they are there or awake.
Stuhlman: Right. Yeah, and you have to imagine, Porter and like Lois Mailou Jones, they both taught at Howard (University) in Washington, D.C., which is a little bit more of a safe haven. But you'd have to imagine the danger these artists would feel have painted something like this. I mean these were bold paintings to be making. The painting in the middle there is of a lynched figure by Elizabeth Catlett. Catlett fled to Mexico to make the work that she wanted to make because she didn't feel the freedom to make it here in America. So, Catlett had some experience in the South. She taught in Durham, actually briefly, and in New Orleans and also in Virginia. So we have one painting of hers in the show. We can walk over to it.
It’s called "A Special Fear for My Loved Ones." So that fear that Black women would have for their loved ones, of their husbands or sons being lynched or attacked.
Glenn: It shows a man with a noose around his neck.
Stuhlman: Yeah, really heart-wrenching image.
Glenn: In my art classes in college, I did not come across a lot of these artists. And with artists from the South, spending a lot of time in New York, why do you think Southern art still was not recognized?
Stuhlman: Not only Southern artists, but works by Black artists, works by women artists. And so I mean, it really was kind of like dead white male history of art. John Biggers here, Biggers was from Gastonia, and spent most of his career in Virginia, Pennsylvania and then founded the art program at Texas Southern University.
Glenn: And I guess part of it, because you often heard that the South was looked at as backward.
Stuhlman: Right. Behind the time. Kind of a broader prejudice in a way.
Glenn: So do you hope this will elevate what people know about Southern artists?
Stuhlman: We really want it to be both a celebration of what was going on in the South for people to learn about, kind of as I did, artists they hadn't known about. You know, we want people to have an appreciation and an awareness for what was happening here to recognize that it was significant and should be kind of part of the bigger story of American art history. I'd be thrilled if there were 10 more artists that got discovered and that weren't in our show, but because of it, people were digging in a little more and were making new discoveries. So, I think it's hopefully a starting point too for future scholarship.
Jonathan Stuhlman is the Mint Museum’s senior curator of American art. He co-curated "Southern/Modern" with independent scholar and curator Dr. Martha Severens. Charlotte is the show’s final stop. It will be here through Feb 2. The Mint Museum is a WFAE sponsor.
