News & Events

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South, an exhibition including paintings, sculptures, and quilts that celebrates the recent acquisition of 24 works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Among them are outstanding examples of large-scale sculptures and reliefs by Thornton Dial, assemblages by Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Hawkins Bolden, and Bessie Harvey, and an impressive selection of multi-colored quilts made by several generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and the nearby towns of Rehoboth and Alberta. Many of these pieces were composed of found and salvaged materials and are deeply rooted in personal history of their makers.

A group of Alabama’s historic treasures has a new home in Montgomery. Five pieces by African-American artists from the state are joining the permanent collection of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and are currently on display in the gallery. They were acquired through a partnership with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a group dedicated to documenting, preserving and promoting African-American artists of the South. Angie Dodson, MMFA’s new director, called this one of the most significant acquisitions in the museum’s history—which is saying a lot since MMFA was founded in 1930. She said these pieces thrust the museum forward, “toward a broader American art history narrative, a deeper Alabama cultural history.”

This release brings us music from the isolated African-American community of Gee’s Bend in the heartland of Alabama State: a collection of 19 traditional sacred spirituals sung by a close-knit group of four quilters (all bearing the surname Pettway, which implies a sibling connection). The tradition of quilting in that region goes back to the 19th century, and the singing that accompanies this activity is regarded as a healing for the soul; as one member of the quartet, China Pettway, also puts it: “while quilting, I sing because it’s a sound of whistling humming God gave me”.

This week’s episode spotlights two strikingly different approaches to addressing gaps in our understanding of American art history by more fully including African-American artists in our national narrative. First, Souls Grown Deep Foundation president Maxwell Anderson discusses his organization’s project to document, preserve and promote the work of artists from the African-American South and to more fully include their cultural traditions within American art. Then, Kellie Jones, an art history professor at Columbia University, discusses the Getty Research Institute’s new African American art history initiative. 

In the US, authors, musicians, actors, and others in the creative industries have royalties and residuals that reward their enduring stake in the redistribution of their intellectual property, when properly enforced. Yet while visual artists are entitled to royalties on commercial reproduction, there is currently little to no legal recourse for them to benefit from the resale of their work.

An assemblage with political overtones and undertones of history—a show that reaffirms the truth that black lives matter. This exhibition presented thirty paintings, sculptures, drawings and quilts by self-taught contemporary African-American artists to celebrate the 2014 gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art of works of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The artists represented by this generous donation all hail from the American South.