CHARLESTON, SC.- The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston presents the exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South October 19, 2018, to March 2, 2019, held simultaneously at both the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and the City Gallery at Waterfront Park.
Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South comprises fifty-six photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Accordingly, it offers a composite image of the region. The photographs echo stories told about the South as a bastion of tradition, as a region remade through Americanization and globalization, and as a land full of surprising realities. The project’s purpose is to investigate the senses of place in the South that congeal, however fleetingly, in the spaces between the photographers’ looking, their images, and our own preexisting ideas about the region.
Southbound is curated by Mark Sloan, director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and Mark Long, professor of political science, both of whom are on the faculty of the College of Charleston.
Southbound embraces the conundrum of its name. To be southbound is to journey to a place in flux, radically transformed over recent decades, yet also to the place where the past resonates most insistently in the United States. To be southbound is also to confront the weight of preconceived notions about this place, thick with stereotypes, encoded in the artistic, literary, and media records. Southbound engages with and unsettles assumed narratives about this contested region by providing fresh perspectives for understanding the complex admixture of history, geography, and culture that constitutes today’s New South.
Recognizing the complexity of understanding any place, let alone one as charged as the American South, the curators’ approach is transdisciplinary. The photographs will be complemented by a commissioned video, an interactive digital mapping environment, an extensive stand-alone website (SouthboundProject.org), and a comprehensive exhibition catalogue. The catalogue draws on expertise from disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Emmy-award winning filmmaker John David Reynolds has produced a documentary featuring interviews with select photographers and writers.
The history of the American South is among the most storied of any region in the world. As a result of the vitality of its culture and the diversity of its inhabitants—to say nothing about the salience of photography in the United States—the region has also come to be among the most photographed. Through the exhibition, video, remappings, website, and catalogue—separately and in tandem—the Southbound project charts new courses toward expanded imaginings for the twenty-first century South.
The Halsey Institute is producing a comprehensive catalogue to accompany the exhibition, including images by all exhibiting artists and a variety of essays offering a range of perspectives about the South. The Southbound catalogue 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, penned four new poems inspired by the exhibition’s photographs for the publication.
