The Halsey Institute has produced a comprehensive catalogue to accompany the exhibition, including additional images by all exhibiting artists and a variety of essays offering a range of perspectives about the South. Southbound draws on the expertise of leading intellectuals and scholars of the Southern experience. Essayists include William R. Ferris, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, now Senior Associate Director for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina; Eleanor Heartney, a contributing editor for Art in America, distinguished art critic, and author of several seminal volumes on contemporary art; and John T. Edge, author and director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Nikky Finney, Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and 2011 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, contributeed original content inspired by the exhibition’s photographs to the volume.
The Southbound catalogue was awarded the 2019 Alice Award by Furthermore grants in publishing, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
Filmmaker John David Reynolds was commissioned to produce a thirteen-minute documentary featuring interviews with select photographers and writers from the exhibition catalogue. He also produced video interviews with select photographers. Reynolds is an award -winning videographer who specializes in films about artists and the creative process.
The Halsey Institute commissioned Dr. Rick Bunch, a geographic information science (GIS) and spatial cognition specialist, to design an interactive map of the South, representing everything from place names to data collected on chicken sales and churchgoers, among other topics. Available on interactive technology inside the exhibition space, this Index of Southerness allows viewers to move between data sets to arrive at a new understanding of the cultural geography of the South.
A stand-alone micro-website, southboundproject.org, connected to the Halsey Institute’s website was produced in conjunction with the exhibition. This site contains many more images by each photographer, links to essays, and additional information about the photographers and subjects of the images.
A trifold brochure has been produced for the public to provide information about the exhibition, the artists, and excerpts from some of the essays. This free brochure will be given to each museum visitor.
The Halsey Institute produced multiple symposia and panel discussions on the topics raised by Southbound to coincide with the exhibition. Topics have include documentary studies, literature, geography, history, religion, music, race and ethnicity, and globalization and identity. We are happy to provide assistance when planning a programming structure for venues hosting the exhibition.
Mark Sloan has been the director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston since 1994. Prior to his appointment to the Halsey Institute, Sloan was the associate director of San Francisco Camerawork and executive director of the Light Factory in Charlotte, N.C. He is also a practicing photographer whose works have been exhibited at many international venues, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the American Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.; and the Grand Palais, in Paris. He has curated dozens of photography exhibitions in his thirty- three year career, including No Man’s Land: Contemporary Photographers and Fragile Ecologies, featuring Edward Burtynsky, Emmet Gowin, and David Maisel.
Trained in Ireland, Spain, and the U.S., Mark Long has been professor of political science and geography at the College of Charleston since 2002. His research concerns itself with how we see political and cultural geographies; recent publications have explored street art and editorial cartoons. He has guest-curated several exhibitions for the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, including Simon Norfolk’s Et in Arcadia Ego, Pedro Lobo’s architecture of survival, and Stuart Klipper’s Antarctica.
