News & Events

In the art of the late Southern painter Thornton Dial, the notion of “relief” leads in several directions. Along one path, it was the word used in his lifetime (he died in 2016 at the age of eighty-seven) to describe his wild assemblages on canvas and wood, which were so heavily piled with found objects, oils, paints, enamels, and other compounds that they reach out several inches from the wall. In another sense—for an artist who was dealing with some of the more abject horrors of the world and described his approach to history in terms of tilling the soil—“relief” also suggests a kind of reprieve. Dial busied his hands to find, for himself and his viewers, a way to be freed from violence, cruelty, injustice, and tragedy. His way was to give those things shape, color, texture, and depth.

On a computer, the reset button clears the computer's memory and causes it to reboot—to shut down and restart. Lynne Cooke, the curator of Outliers and American Vanguard Art, has developed a different button, one that merges history (and memory), offering a more seamless approach to thinking about outsider art. Head on, she challenges conventional definition and attacks “The relentless ‘term warfare’ between imbricated [overlapping] concepts such as folk, naïve, and outsider . . . [and a] preoccupation with definition.”

Gee’s Bend quilt lovers young and old, near and far, newly converted and veteran, take note: the Souls Grown Deep Foundation has given 15 of those abstract wonders—by key figures like Mary Lee Bendolph, Delia Bennett, and Annie E. Pettway—to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of a gift of 24 pieces that also includes works by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and Bessie Harvey.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced today that it has acquired twenty-four works of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. The donation comprises works by African American artists from the southeastern United States, including three major works by Thornton Dial, an iron and steelworker, carpenter, and painter; two assemblages by Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett; and fifteen quilts by several generations of women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama that date from 1930 to 2005. 

FEBRUARY: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco announce the acquisition of more than 60 works by 22 African American artists from the South from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation through a gift/purchase arrangement. The foundation is collaborating with museums to broaden the representation of Southern contemporary artists such as Thornton Dial, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Jessie T. Pettway, Mose Tolliver, and Purvis Young, in their collections. The news follows a similar acquisition from the foundation by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later transactions with the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and New Orleans Museum of Art.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: African-American Art of the Deep South

The Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which promotes self-taught African-American artists from the Deep South, distributed works from its collection across the US. In February, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquired 62 works by 22 artists, including Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and Bessie Harvey, in a combined gift and purchase. Other works went to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Ackland Art Museum in North Carolina and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Best Permanent Collection Addition: Revelations

Anyone who’s visited the de Young in recent months has likely basked in the glory that is Revelations: Art from the African American South, an exciting and very necessary addition to the Fine Arts Museum’s permanent collection of American art. Among the paintings, root and branch sculptures, yard show metal works and Gee’s Bend quilts is my personal favorite: Ronald Lockett’s painted tin and wood wall piece, England’s Rose. Made in 1997, the assemblage remembers Princess Diana, who broke through boundaries of fear and misunderstanding in 1987 when she shook the hands of HIV/AIDS patients in a London hospital. Lockett himself died from complications of HIV/AIDS a year after the work was completed.

A black-and-white photo by Jack R. Thornell in the first room of the de Young’s Revelations: Art from the African American South is forever burned in my mind’s eye. A black man lies bleeding on the side of a dusty road. A carefully typewritten note affixed to the print reads: “James Meredith lies wounded beside Mississippi highway 51 after he was shot in an ambush. There is no stone marker showing the spot where Meredith was cut down during his march, but every Negro in Hernando knows where it is."

Will — or should — the United States’ current climate of potentially explosive racial tension affect the ways in which critics, curators, researchers, teachers, and other specialists in the world of art and culture think about and discuss their respective subject areas? In the visual arts, that’s a question that, in their own ways, art museums in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Atlanta, as well as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are now effectively exploring as they make room in their collections for numerous works by self-taught American artists of African descent from the Deep South.

The Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the only university art museum selected to acquire 12 significant works of art in the first round of giving from the Atlanta, Georgia-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which holds the largest and foremost collection of contemporary art from the African-American South.