We relish the literature, we sing along to the jazz, blues and country music, but have we ever considered southern art? Referred to by scholars as the last frontier of American art, Southern art embodies a rich visual heritage. From the coast of the Gul

American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap’s extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by Southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present. The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap’s painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner’s fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward. In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.

Flashes of a Southern Spirit explores meanings of the spirit in the American South, including religious ecstasy and celebrations of regional character and distinctiveness. Charles Reagan Wilson sees ideas of the spirit as central to understanding southern identity. The South nurtured a patriotic spirit expressed in the high emotions of Confederates going off to war, but the region also was the setting for a spiritual outpouring of prayer and song during the civil rights movement. Arguing for a spiritual grounding to southern identity, Wilson shows how identifications of the spirit are crucial to understanding what makes southerners invest so much meaning in their regional identity. From the late nineteenth-century invention of southern tradition to early twenty-first-century folk artistic creativity, Wilson examines a wide range of cultural expression, including music, literature, folk art, media representations, and religious imagery. He finds new meanings in the works of such creative giants as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Elvis Presley, while at the same time closely examining little-studied figures such as the artist/revivalist McKendree Long. Wilson proposes that southern spirituality is a neglected category of analysis in the recent flourishing of interdisciplinary studies on the South--one that opens up the cultural interaction of blacks and whites in the region.

Inspired by a companion exhibition, Southern/Modern is the first book to survey progressive art created in the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. Featuring twelve essays, this lavishly illustrated volume includes all the works from the exhibition and assesses a broader body of contextual pieces to offer a fascinating, multipronged look at modernism's thriving presence in the South—until now, something largely overlooked in histories of American art. Contributors take a broad view of the region, considering artists working in the states below the Mason-Dixon Line and those bordering the Mississippi River. It examines the central roles played by women and artists of color, providing a fuller, richer, and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the region than has been previously presented. The book is structured around key themes, including the embrace of "high" modernism, the importance of emerging university programs and artist colonies, the depiction of rural and urban modern life, and the role of artists from the South who left and artists from outside the region who came to the South seeking new subjects. Contributors are Daniel Belasco, Katelyn D. Crawford, William Underwood Eiland, William R. Ferris, Shawnya Harris, Todd A. Herman, Karen Towers Klacsmann, Leo G. Mazow, Christopher C. Oliver, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Martha R. Severens, Jonathan Stuhlman, Rebecca VanDiver, and Jonathan Frederick Walz.

"Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott is a celebration of this renowned artist's work in printmaking, sculpture, collage, and painting produced over the course of a nearly forty-year career. Published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Circle Dance features 100 color photographs of Scott's art, from his earliest productions in cast bronze, welded steel, and printmaking, to his most recent forays into site-specific public art and mammoth works on paper."--Jacket.

Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson’s early life in New Orleans, where he discovered his passion for painting, photography, and the Dixie Bohemian life of the French Quarter. A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans features more than one hundred photographs taken by the artist, accompanied by detailed commentary about Robinson’s life in New Orleans and excerpts from interviews with the people who knew him when he lived there. Robinson’s photographs of New Orleans reveal the genesis of two unique and fascinating facets of the city’s history and culture: the creation of the first gay Carnival krewes who would make their own unique contribution to the rich cultural history of the city and the formation of the Orleans Gallery, one of the earliest centers of the contemporary art movement blossoming in 1950s America. This detailed study of Jack Robinson’s early life and photography illustrates the contributions of a gifted, gay artist whose quiet spirit and constant interior struggle found refuge in New Orleans, the city where he was able to find himself, for a time, free from society’s grip and open to exploring life on his own terms.

Expressions of Place embarks on a journey across the rural and urban landscapes of Louisiana via the talents of thirty-seven artists located all around the state. Many are acclaimed professionals whose paintings are included in major private and public collections regionally and nationally. Others have found their followings closer to home. All, however, strive to express impressions of the land with artistic styles that range from traditional to the symbolic and almost totally abstract. Such a variety of interpretation becomes possible in a landscape that changes from dark cypress-shrouded bayous, trembling earth, grassy prairies, the gritty streets of inner city New Orleans to vast wind-swept coastal marshes and the piney hills of north and central Louisiana. Rather than stand as an encyclopedia, catalog, or history of the visual arts in Louisiana, Kemp's book is instead a celebration of the state's evocative landscape in the work of accomplished contemporary artists. It includes an introductory essay, which places these creators and their works in historical context. Expressions of Place provides readers with individual essays and biographical sketches in which the artists, in their own words, give insight as to what they paint, how they paint, where they paint, and why they are drawn to the Louisiana landscape. Particularly inspiring, the artists discuss their interpretations of that landscape directly with the viewing audience. Expressions of Place remains as much about the landscape of the artists' imaginations as it is about the land itself. With each painting, they have created visual poetry of a land and environment that has become a defining part of their lives.