Aldwyth, a South Carolina-based visual artist, is the recipient of the annual award bestowed by the Eben Demarest Fund, a Pittsburgh Foundation fund.

Aldwyth’s art ranges from large murals created with found images to assemblage sculptures. Her work has been recognized through solo exhibitions and prestigious awards including the 2015 South Carolina Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts. Aldwyth said she will use the $20,000 grant that comes with the award to hire workshop assistants to help finish a series of three collages that she has been unable to complete on her own, due to difficulties she now experiences when using scissors.

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She earned her first solo exhibition through Mark Sloan, the director and chief curator of the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Sloan was first exposed to Aldwyth’s work when a colleague at the South Carolina Arts Commission told him about an unusual application he received.

Nikky Finney, the John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters, was commissioned to write poems based on photographs in the “SOUTHBOUND” exhibit at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston. The result is an electrifying dialogue—powerful poetic meditations on southern visual history.

As Professor Finney describes this “once-in-a-lifetime project”:

When the organizers of SOUTHBOUND contacted me about composing one ekphrastic poem for the exhibit, I wasn’t sure I had time to do it. Then they sent me the photographs to peruse…The images hit me like a ton of bricks. The photographs rocked me, hugged me, made me sit up straight, lean forward. The southern landscape being photographed was my land and I had never seen it so naked, so revealed, so revelatory. Art does this to us. The power of revelation and candor was on every page. I ended up submitting 4 poems instead of one and I could have submitted 12.

Visiting Charleston doesn’t have to break the bank—you can get a great sense of the city while saving your vacation budget to spend on fried chicken, she-crab soup, and craft cocktails.

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Enjoy culture at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art 

The art department at the College of Charleston devotes a generous portion of its ground floor on Calhoun Street to gallery space. Rotating exhibits of art and film are mounted here, as are free lectures. Recent exhibits included a wide-ranging photography show about all aspects of life in the South. This is serious art curation—many of the Halsey’s exhibits go on to tour galleries around the country. (See what’s on right now by checking Halsey’s website.)

On our final day of posts for Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, we feature a selection of the co-curators Mark Sloan and Mark Long’s essay on emplacing the new south. I think that there is no better text to summarize the exploration of Southern identity and culture that we’ve featured throughout the week, so without further adieu…

Emplacing the New South- Mark Sloan and Mark Long

Each component of this project’s title—Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South—lends itself to scrutiny. Southbound refers to the twin ideas of heading south and the lingering effects of charged stereotypes that limit our ability to see the region clearly. Photographs refers to documentary and fine art images but, in this case, does not include constructed or fabricated photographs. New and, particularly, South are perhaps the most slippery elements of the title. South because, like all regions, it is necessarily a function of how we define the parameters—climatological, historical, cultural, and so on. New for the many instances that adjective has qualified developments in the South, often purportedly definitive in terms of change, and always to create distance from lesser and sometimes unsavory moments in the region’s history. Indeed, we considered calling the exhibition New South², then cubed, and might have settled on New Southⁿ, if it weren’t too cryptic to be clever.

In addition to an amazing curation of Southern photography and writing, Southbound also features an incredible interactive map depicting concentrations of everything from African Americans to chickens, confederate symbols to field crops, as well as an “Index of Southernness”. This index was created by fusing the other maps presented, showcasing “classic regional geographic patterns of core, domain, and sphere, where places that read as most Southern are readily identifiable.” According to the curators, “In representing places where southerness is most intense, the Index reveals the resilience of the region. By also showing how southerness transitions across space, the map weaves a rich regional tapestry.”

The maps were created by Dr. Rick Bunch at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, using publicly available datasets from the United States Census Bureau, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the United States Agricultural Census, among other sources.

Yaakov Israel wants us all to take a considered look around us. As a photographer, that should be a given for him. Then again, even he found himself not really noticing what was clearly in his unimpeded visual line of fire.

In fact, a nasty predicament was the catalyst for forcing Israel into taking a good long hard look at his surroundings, at places he had not previously consciously observed. It was in 2002, a year or so into the Second Intifada, when Israel’s car broke down on Highway 443. With Palestinian villages only a few hundred meters away, anyone driving along the road just kept going. For two long hours, Israel waited by the roadside with his stricken vehicle.

We are continuing our feature of images and text from Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South today, with an essay by author, editor, and southern food aficionado John T. Edge.

John T. Edge writes about the American South. The Penguin Press published his latest book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, Nashville selected the book as a citywide read for 2018. He is also writer and host for the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SECNetwork.

Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years he wrote the monthly “United Taste” column for the New York Times. His magazine and newspaper work has been featured in eleven editions of the Best Food Writing compilation. He has won three James Beard Foundation awards. In 2012, he won Beard’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.

For the fourth day of our weeklong feature of images and text from Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, the photographs are accompanied by an essay by historian, author, film-maker, and all around expert on the South, William Ferris.

William R. Ferris is a professor of history at UNC–Chapel Hill and an adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Folklore. He is associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and is widely recognized as a leader in Southern studies, African-American music and folklore. He is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prior to his role at NEH, Ferris served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he was a faculty member for 18 years.

Ferris has written and edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. He co-edited the Pulitzer Prize nominee Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (UNC Press, 1989), which contains entries on every aspect of Southern culture and is widely recognized as a major reference work linking popular, folk, and academic cultures.

A couple dozen people look at a photograph of seven women sitting at a table. Some see the women as tired. Some see them as apathetic. Some think that they’re offended their picture is being taken. Some look at a woman with her arms crossed and the hood of her sweatshirt up and think it must be cold, but others see her posture as mentally closed off. (See the photo lower in this story.)

The differing responses are the point of the exercise. A group of MUSC College of Medicine students, residents and faculty members, as well as community members who are part of the Charleston Clemente Course at Trident Technical College, have gathered at the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art to talk about an art exhibit. They all bring their own personal experiences, their own histories, their own biases.  

On the third day of our weeklong feature of Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, the images are accompanied by an essay authored by Eleanor Heartney. Eleanor is a contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other publications as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and The New York Times. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992. Her books include: Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (Midmarch Arts Press, 2004); Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Hard Press Editions, 2006) and Art and Today (Phaidon Press Inc., 2008), a survey of contemporary art of the last 25 years from Phaidon. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art(Prestel Publishing, 2007), which won the Susan Koppelman Award. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.