| Julia J.Norrell, a Reconstructed
Southerner of several years standing, has amassed a sizeable personal collection
of Southern art. A women born of some privilege in a small town in Arkansas
to a U.S. Congressman and his wife, his elected successor, Norrell belongs
to that irascible select group of Southern progressives who are taught
to love the Southern sinner but hate the sins of racism and discrimination.
Growing up between the worlds of Monticello, Arkansas and Washington, D.C.,
the town JFK described as combining Northern charm with Southern efficiency,
Norrell learned at an early age that racism could exact an emotional toll.
She writes in the essay accompanying her collection about the personal
effects of segregation: “I grew up in a segregated South both in Arkansas
and Washington and a part of me was depressed. Little did I know this issue
would impact my entire life and become a tattoo on my very soul.”
Collecting then for her has essentially become an act of redemption.
She writes, “This collection is about the struggle to reconcile the South
with my own values; it is about the search for meaning in a changing South;
it is about belief and the loss of belief and the piecing together of something
like belief again; and it is about love of place, family and friends.”
Her art collection now on display at the McKissick Museum under the
title Myth, Memory and Imagination breaks so many rules that it’s subversive.
The sheer size of the collection--topping out at well over two hundred
pieces and filling both wings of the second floor--shuns the traditional
role of curatorial editorship in favor of an open door policy. The spirit
is akin to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, who, after years of rule
by the powdered wig elite, invited everyone to attend, except, of course,
the dethroned Federalists and their disdain of the new democratic culture.
In the case of the Norrell collection, the privileged Southern gentry
with their Ivanhoes and magnolias and moonlight,
their Taras and their golf clubs, are kept locked out well beyond the
doors of their own plantations and this museum. Reminders of their presence
are represented in the hallowed WPA halls of the McKissick only in echoes--in
images of their decadent and decaying classical architecture hovering in
the background of several images and in their role as the founding fathers
of institutional racism.
Besides torching the myths of the Old South in favor of a more personal
and progressive counter-mythology, the Norrell collection, as a corollary,
integrates the artistic vision of the South. Not just African-American
and white artists live side by side here but Northern artists, too, the
ones that came a visitin’ thanks largely to the WPA. The more familiar
and famous parts of the collection are the documentary photos of the South
in its direst straight, taken during the Great Depression and 1940’s. The
collection includes an impressive sampling of the Farm Security Administration’s
documentary project as well as Roy Stryker’s Standard Oil Company photography
project (Esther Bubley’s documentation of Tomball, Texas). If it were not
for big government and Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Russell Lee,
Gordon Parks, and others, this era of the South’s history would have gone
largely unrecorded.
The collection does not force a division between professional and amateur
or between academically trained artists and those who are self-taught.
By way of comparison, the South Carolina State Fair Art Show does make
the distinction between professional and amateur, but it is one based solely
on the artist’s self-definition. This results in the presence at the fair
of experienced and schooled artists in the amateur category and some schlock,
painting-by-numbers types in the professional category--amateurs in the
pejorative sense, there only because they’ve found a way to plow their
lucrative trade in tourist traps. The distinction between professional
and amateur has largely eroded anyway, thanks in part to the growing market
for self-taught artists, many of whom have become rather dependent upon
the market for their livelihood, and the never-ending struggles artists
encounter in making ends meet.
Though the State Museum has given legitimacy to self-taught artists
in two prominent shows, this exhibit takes the next logical step. The Norrell
collection, as it is displayed at the McKissick, levels the playing field
even more, intermingling images by famous photographers with ones by lesser-known
artists or with work by self-taught artists and craftspeople. In this way,
the viewer is forced to think less about the "legitimacy" or fame of the
artists and more about the thematic implications of the collection.
What then is the South of Myth, Memory, and Imagination? It's the cotton
pickin', superstitious, Jesus haunted South, and it's the South of Jonathan
Green's dressed up Congregation. It's the South of the decorated shot-gun
shack and the picture of the pick-up gun rack, the decorated graves and
the land of Faulkner and Welty's reality and imagination. It's the famous
black and white South of the New Deal documentary and the world of color
in the painted roadside motels of Eldridge Bagley's South. It's the South
that's literally disappearing in Thomas Harding's photo of an abandoned
church at the roadside "Y", in the rural practices of midwifery and in
the homespun crafts of building birdhouses in the shape of a church.
The exhibit is also about the South that endures, one not tied to fad
or fashion, but one that runs home to mama. Many images evoke the transformative
rituals and reassuring habits of family and religion. It explores what
historian Fernand Braudel would describe as the world of material life,
one that slowly changes like the waves on the bottom of the ocean as opposed
to the faster and more transient waves on the ocean's surface.
The exhibition goes back and forth between what's real and what's imagined
such as in the tragedy evoked in Keith Carter's Lost Chicken and in the
promise of Jonathan Green's painting Daughters of the South. It's also
very much about the southern identity of the collector and the South she
sees even in places outside the region's conventional boundaries--in Laura
Gilpin's Well of Sacrifice in the Yucatan, in images of the Ganges or in
the New Mexican landscape in Ansel Adams' Penitente Morada in O'Keefe's
Abiquiu.
What draws these images into Norrell's construction of the South is
their explicit religiosity. The most powerful images of Myth, Memory and
Imagination concern death, dying, and faith, and the personal imprint and
inventiveness that southerners have brought to the passing of their loved
ones. Shelby Lee Adams' The Home Funeral depicts the crowded household
of a poor white southern family, one that seems fatalistically at ease
with the body of the deceased. There's Jonathan Green's personal recollections
of a family funeral in his The Passing of Eloise, and Shelby Lee Adams
again lends dignity to two brothers who are shown in supplication on their
knees while sharing the same chair for their hands folded in prayer.
Myth, Memory, and Imagination may not represent everyone's South, and
some viewers may resist its implications. The exhibit undermines the dominant
mythology of the South, and in its stead, invents a broader and more inclusive
culture that is wholly unpretentious. It also declares open season on Art
as the privilege of the leisure class and then redistributes it to those
who'll make their own new meanings.
Hallelujah.
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