Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, on view at the Mint Museum, offers a compelling account of the flourishing artistic environment in the Southern United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Historically, modernist art has largely been tied to the major centers of the United States and Europe. In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly acknowledged the multiplicity of modernist impulses in the visual arts, emphasizing the powerful cross-currents of modernist practices that emerged concurrently across the globe, including within previously ignored geographies like the Global South. Yet, despite the welcome recognition of such artistic developments, the American South remains largely absent from these histories. Southern/Modern, along with its accompanying catalog, stands as a corrective to this omission, shedding light on modernist experimentation outside conventional artistic hubs. It foregrounds the expansive creative output and experimental ethos of Southern culture, while simultaneously grounding the work in the region’s social and political realities. 

The subtitle’s emphasis on “Rediscovering” insists that the American South always knew the importance of the work taking place within its cultural sphere. With Southern/Modern, curators Jonathan Stuhlman and Martha R. Severens increase the visibility of Southern American art within the broader context of modernisms in the United States, picking up an important legacy of scholarship by Southern arts institutions that have made impactful, though intermittent and, at times, superficial, contributions to the subject. For example, Stuhlman cites the Corcoran Gallery’s 1960 American Painters of the South and the 1983 exhibition Painting in the South 1564–1980 organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as critical landmark shows, while lamenting the lacunae of scholarship and exhibitions dedicated to the region in surveys of American art in the years following (12). His catalog essay notes significant solo exhibitions and scholarship have been dedicated to the big names—Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence, among others—but argues that few projects have sought to incorporate these artists, and their perspectives as southerners, into a broader narrative of American or modernist art history (9–13).

The scope of an exhibition under the umbrella of modernism in the American South—as both a temporal period and a set of formal experiments—could very easily become so large as to lose any critical capacity. The curators mitigated the problem by narrowing the media solely to painting and works on paper. The South was defined geographically as states located below the Mason-Dixon line, as well as those along the border of the Mississippi River. The final limiting criteria was a date range from 1913 to 1955, critically marking modernism in the United States as originating with the premier of the Armory Show. The results of these constraints are a tightly focused attention on the tension between abstraction and realism in two dimensions, and the ways artists blurred hard distinctions between the two across subject matter.

The dialogue between these two aesthetic approaches is a through-line across the exhibition’s thematic sections. These sections are organized along fairly conventional lines, including The Enduring Landscape, New Urban Environments, Planting New Seeds: Colonies and Schools, Southerners, Many Modernisms, Ritual and Religion, and The Jim Crow Era. The largest thematic section, Many Modernisms, is the one most clearly devoted to the region’s expression of a modernist aesthetic, highlighting the movement of southern artists around the nation and the world as they sought training and exposure in international artistic centers. On returning, these artists, ranging from Claude Howell to Helen Jay Lotterhos to Eugene Thomason, wed their newly informed visions to their Southern-based practices. However, even in familiar categories like The Enduring Landscape, the curatorial narrative moves beyond the formal, illustrating the complex relationship among community, industry, and land in the region as well as its connections to artmaking. Labor, agrarian traditions, and the devastation of the landscape by exploitative industries are heavily featured, as in Hale Woodruff’s Southland (1936). Woodruff’s apocalyptic view departs from romanticized Southern landscapes, speaking explicitly to what we now call environmental racism and its outsized effects on African American communities. The inclusion of paintings exploring this aspect of the Southern environment is part of what makes the exhibition so noteworthy. If landscapes show the effects of extraction, manufacturing, and poverty, so, too, do urban scenes, which lean into depictions of heavy industry and the impacts of related changes on residents as they explore the dramatic geometry of cityscapes.

Southerners, Ritual and Religion, and The Jim Crow Era all more directly engage significant sociopolitical concerns of the period while maintaining sensitive attention to artistic experimentation. For some white southerners, the era of modernism in the American South represented a fracturing of their economic and political power, which found expression both in aesthetic form and the broader social sphere. These three sections dig into the clashing pressures of the intense sociopolitical transformations taking place in the region at the time. Ritual and Religion weaves together works that reflect Christian practices and the simultaneous continuity of Gullah culture and popular folk spirituals. The section devoted to the Jim Crow era probes how artists responded to the racist environment with depictions of explicit violence and segregation alongside visual metaphors speaking to the complex psychic stakes of oppression. George Biddle’s Folly Beach Pavilion, for example, illustrates the separation of Charleston’s Black and white residents, both in terms of public space and labor. Others, such as Caroline Wogan Durieux’s Persuasion (1947) and Frank Hartley Anderson’s Destiny (undated), both rely on symbolism and surrealist exaggerations to express the psychological toll of fear and violence experienced by African American residents.

Some of the most promising content in the exhibition emerges from tracing nodes of contact. Stuhlman and Severens include a multitude of artists who were faculty at universities and colleges across the South, illuminating the networks established among students and teachers that formed the basis of important artistic exchange in the region and beyond. Inquiries into the history of exhibition in the South likewise valuably reveal meaningful dialogue amongst artists, scholars, and institutions. The history of Benjamin Wigfall’s Chimneys is an excellent example. Wigfall’s work was selected by juror and early American modernist Stuart Davis for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s 1951 exhibition of Virginia artists. Wigfall, a native of Richmond who had been taking art classes at the museum, was only twenty years old at the time and became the first Black artist to have a work acquired by the VMFA.

As a whole, the exhibition leans into the significance of Black American life and artistic output, and rightly so. Yet, there is a stark lack of representation of the contributions of other communities, such as those made by Indigenous American artists. An exhibition like Southern/Modern cannot do everything, but the lack is conspicuous considering how recent exhibitions like Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art (2024) and Art For a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950–Now (2018) demonstrate the extent to which Indigenous American artists across the nation were participating in the American art discourse around mid-century.

The curators offer a brief nod to Black Mountain College, the storied liberal arts school located in Western North Carolina, whose experimental modality drew faculty and students from across the world, including such well-known figures as John Cage, Jacob Lawrence, and Anni and Josef Albers, among many others. Discussions of the College have rarely centered on its southern grounding, in part because of certain cultural and racial prejudices associated with the region. And, indeed, a central question posed by the curators throughout the exhibition was how best to situate modernism within an area that is often romanticized and stereotyped as a cultural backwater. While acknowledging the influence of Black Mountain, Southern/Modern critically expands beyond its contribution to demonstrate the ways that the South as a whole metamorphosed during the relevant temporal period, much like the rest of the country.

As a final point, I want to note the thoughtfulness with which the exhibition incorporated interactive elements. An open room, centered in the exhibition galleries, was dedicated to active visitor engagement with interactive programs, books, and a seating area. During my visit alone, I watched a large volume of visitors engaging enthusiastically with a set of monitors that allowed them to respond to a variety of prompts with digital drawings or text, which would immediately be queued into a rotation screened on a large wall in the space. Another set of large touchscreens offered visitors the opportunity to learn more deeply about the lives and work of the many featured artists.

Ultimately, Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half the Twentieth Century makes significant inroads into how modernist ideas influenced artists in the South, but also, critically, how these artists contributed to American modernism more broadly. The exhibition also emphasizes the expansiveness of contributions by Southern artists, especially Black American artists, who have yet to be fully recognized in scholarship. The exhibition provides fertile grounds for further exploration. Scholars have only to meet the challenge.