Barkley L. Hendricks. Down Home Taste, 1971; oil and linen on acrylic; 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Office of the Dean of Students, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).

Caricatures of the South as backwards, unsophisticated, and inherently conservative are dismantled and put to rest by the vast richness and diversity of work on display, with the list of included artists forming a “who’s who” of American contemporary art—from Kara Walker and Amy Sherald to Theaster Gates and Kerry James Marshall. Southern Accent avoids many of the tired and problematic themes that tend to romanticize the South and dilute the heterogeneity of its citizens by including works that expand our visual field of who, what, and where the South actually is.[2] Barkley L. Hendricks’s life-size portrait Down Home Taste (1971)—a confident celebration of the Black urban experience, style, and everyday life—affirms a more fluid, expansive understanding of Southern-ness. Hendricks’s paintings (including this one) are often portraits of the friends and strangers who populated his life in various cities across the 1960s and ’70s. Down Home Taste presents a fashionable man lighting a cigarette with matches from R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the North Carolina corporation of Winston-Salem fame. Taste—whether sensory, aesthetic, or nostalgic—is something that defies and crosses borders, mixing and marking people, places, and their histories in overt and subtle ways.

The exhibition does not shy away from the legacies of slavery, segregation, and racism in the South, and their impact on regional and national politics and culture. Commissioned for the bicentennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase, Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic series The Louisiana Project (2003) provides a powerful account of the ways in which slavery and racism continue to hide in plain sight across the South, like so many ruins. Clad in a softly patterned white dress, Weems bears witness to the spaces and sites where Black people were made to work, suffer, live, and die—sites that now act as monuments, cleansed of their dark histories, for tourist consumption and pleasure. The image of the cemetery emphasizes this liminal space, where the past, present, and future of racial politics and history live above and below the surface of everyday life.

Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Woman Standing in Cemetery) from The Louisiana Project, 2003; gelatin silver print; 20 ¾ x 20 ¾ in framed. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City, NY).

In addition, the exhibition includes work dedicated to exploring and recognizing more recent changes to urban and rural demographics due to growing populations of Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, and other immigrant communities, while creating space for Native American, LGBTQ+, and women artists. Diego Camposeco’s Tabaco (Tabacco), from the 2015 series Diego Saves the World, articulates the ethical spectrum of human rights, environmental, and labor issues in the growing communities working in agricultural industries across the region, specifically in the tobacco fields of his hometown of North Carolina.[3] Overwhelmed and surrounded by green tobacco plants, the male figure of a worker stands in the landscape with his face masked by the children’s cartoon animal-rescuer, Diego, as a way to articulate the emancipatory power and growing presence of this marginalized community under attack by the current political administration.

Diego Camposeco. Tabaco (Tobacco), from the series Diego Saves the World, 2015 (printed 2016); inkjet print. Courtesy of the Artist.

Our notions of how we think about the region, its culture, and American identity overall are put to the test in this exhibition—timely in the wake of one of the nastiest presidential elections in recent American history, and one that was shaped in part by a long-term rift between urban and rural regions. As the removal of monuments to the Confederacy across the South unearths deep-seated rage on both sides of the political spectrum, violence toward Black bodies continues to rage on, and attacks on immigrant communities escalate, how will we begin to address these issues in an era of national division? Leaving the exhibition, I realized that Southern Accent is not just a presentation of the long-ignored complexity of the South and its culture, but a resistance to a long history of geographical stereotypes that reproduce social divisions in American culture. The South is many things, and it is in “the many” that its richness is to be found.

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, through October 14, 2017.

[1] See Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” (1960), in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: The Library of America), 1988, 814–815.

[2] The Historic New Orleans Collection’s current presentation of rare guidebooks to houses of prostitution and directories for sex workers operating in the bayous of southern Louisiana, Storyville: Madams and Music, articulates the ways in which images of the Deep South have been mishandled by institutions of art and culture, often romanticizing and/or domesticating racial, gender, and class-based inequalities rather than critique them. See Pamela D. Arceneaux and Emily Epstein Landau’s accompanying text for this exhibition, Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville, New Orleans (New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection), 2017.

[3] Diego Camposeco was featured in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article on testifying on behalf of undocumented immigrant rights in “My Family’s Papers” for the New York Times, February 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/my-familys-papers.html

Wangechi Mutu. Your Story My Curse, 2006; mixed-media collage on Mylar; overall: 101.5 x 109 in. Collection of Susan Hancock, New York.

At the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University, the year ends with a major exhibition by Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu titled Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. With works spanning the last twenty years of Mutu’s career, the mini-retrospective includes her iconic collages that feature sexualized composite creatures in fantasy landscapes, as well as several early line drawings with collage elements. The drawings are seeds that exploded into tour-de-force images on Mylar; they demonstrate that the artist’s formal concerns and subject matter—exploring themes of identity, gender, racism, caricature, fable, exploitation, colonialism, and ethnographic history—were established early in her career.

Mutu’s collages have strong graphic features that come through in reproduction, yet they still can’t match the experience of seeing them in person. The textures and qualities of her materials reward close viewing; bits of glitter, collections of beads, and rough textures are all part of the lusciousness of the visual experience. And because the collages are packed with surface details, more information reveals itself to the patient viewer.

Hummingbird (2010) exemplifies her imagery. The collage features a female figure in a foggy thicket, contemplating the partial form of at least one other body, as well as a pink flower, out of which Medusa-like tendrils and a giant hybrid serpent/bird/cicada monster emerges. She appears passive in her looking even as the voluptuousness of her body—constructed out of animal prints, paint, glitter, and other nude bodies—draws the viewer’s focus. The bright pink flower spews forth life and death, supported by a knobby stock that transforms into the belly, hips, thighs, and soil-caked undercarriage of a dismembered figure. In this glitter-and-dirt clod lies the attitude of dualism between attraction and repulsion that is always part of the artist’s craft.

Wangechi Mutu. Hummingbird, 2010; mixed media, ink, paint, glitter, fake pearls, and collage on Mylar; 94 x 70 in. Bert Kreuk Collection, the Netherlands.

The figures in Hummingbird exist in a mysterious landscape like actors on a stage; only the bare essentials of place are suggested. This background as gesture is one device that Mutu often repeats in works such as Riding Death in My Sleep (2002) and Your Story My Curse (2006), lending the images a storybook feel–more a fantasy space than a tangible environment. The fantastical nature of the lush setting also conjures thoughts of that racially charged no-place, the jungle, which postcolonial critics like Chinua Achebe have identified as the primordial hellscape of the 19th-century European literary imagination.

Mutu takes dead aim at the legacy of representing the jungle as nightmare in Fallen Heads (2010). Here, severed heads dance around the picture, strung together by wispy blades of grass that also might be tentacles. Fleshy pinks and purples bruise the brown and yellow heads. Eyes and mouths are large and confrontational, cut from photographs that suggest violence in every expression. Histories of lynching and genocide–the true flowers of incivility in the forest–haunt the picture.

Wangechi Mutu. Suspended Playtime, 2008/2013; packing blankets, twine, garbage bags, and gold string; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Suspended Play Time (2008/2013) similarly suggests a gruesome collection of severed heads. In what might be the most effective piece in the show, dozens of head-sized spheres constructed out of garbage bags and twine are suspended just a foot or two off the floor. Similar in kind to the makeshift soccer balls used by destitute children across the world, the objects are emblematic of the myriad conflicts, diseases, and conditions that threaten the lives and futures of the young and impoverished. The sparse elegance of the display carries a palpable weight. In Mutu’s work, nothing is just one thing; each element serves a dual purpose.

Despite the beauty of the work on display, the show includes some distracting display choices. The use of felt to selectively cover certain gallery walls or evoke tree bark feels like an incomplete thought, neither immersive enough to fully alter the space nor a necessary addition for the contemplation of the rest of the art in the room. Warm Tree is billed as an installation, and on one hand the limited use of the felt in the gallery is consistent with the sparse forest backgrounds of Mutu’s pictures, but it also feels overdetermined[2], like there might be some question as to whether or not the work on display is experience enough.

Another questionable aspect of the show is the framing of the collages. Each is encapsulated by a white frame with glass, which makes for an elegant presentation, but it also creates problematic reflections over the images. Viewers can see themselves mirrored in the glass, which could be read either as an intentional provocation—implicating viewers into the postcolonial quagmire—or an ironic update on the gilded expositions of ethnographic fairs and 18th-century aristocratic art collections. More likely, it’s an unintended consequence of institutional display. It may seem to be a nitpicky gripe, but the glass reflections do affect the visibility of the images, and with pictures as rich as these, you really want nothing standing in the way.

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art. The show is on view at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University until December 7, 2014.

[1] The Block Museum is the final leg of the show’s traveling schedule. Last year, it opened at Duke University’s Nasher Museum. It then made its way to the Brooklyn Museum followed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.

[2] This isn’t the first time mostly pictorial art has been displayed in a staged environment at a museum in/around Chicago in recent days. Last year, organizers of the Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago laid down kitschy AstroTurf in a gallery dedicated to paintings of picnic scenes and luncheon dresses. Is that a coincidence or a new trend in how artists and museums are thinking about displaying image-based artwork? Do viewers need to experience partial replicas of the pictures they are seeing in order to feel the art?