The Dirty South Exhibition Catalogue

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse
Valerie Cassel Oliver
Pages: 288
Illustrations: 175 illustrations, including 140 color

This exhibition catalogue to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse chronicles the pervasive visual and sonic parallels in the work of Black artists from the southern United States. It looks to contemporary southern hip-hop as a portal into the roots and aesthetic legacies that have shaped contemporary art from the 1920s to the present. It features multiple generations of both academically trained and “outsider” artists working in a variety of genres and disciplines, including Thornton Dial, Allison Janae Hamilton, Arthur Jafa, Jason Moran, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Sun Ra, Kara Walker, and William Edmondson. Creating a capacious understanding of southern expression in visual art, material culture, and music, this richly illustrated volume documents the exhibition’s artworks and includes critical essays, poems, artist biographies, and an extended bibliography.