Advisor: Ann Reynolds
Committee: Sabine Hake, Jacqueline Jones, Cherise Smith, and Roberto Tejada
• Working Bibliography, October 2008 (.pdf)
Summary
In my dissertation I will examine three Southern artistic communities which provide a new framework for understanding the role of the arts in constructions of Southern regional, political, and intellectual identities during the 1930s and early 1940s. I ask how artists, through their writing, speeches, exhibitions, and artistic production expressed feelings about Southern distinctiveness, modernism, and regional identity, in order to understand some of the nuances of Southern artistic production during the Great Depression. New Deal programs, including the Farm Security Administration’s photography division, defined the South for the nation through a wide range of cultural products such as film, oral history, photography, and radio. Active at the same time, however, Southern art communities were engaged with questions of Southern identity, memory, history, and culture. The fluidity of feeling Southern, as evidenced in the works of the Southern artists I will consider and in their constructions of local and regional arts communities, destabilizes historical constructions of Regional art of the period (as exemplified by artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood). By exploring these three communities, I seek to explore the ways in which memory, mythmaking, and nostalgia affect regional and national understandings of the ideas of “Southernness” and its implications for American art and visual culture of the Great Depression.
The first community I will study centers around a married couple, Edwin and Elise Harleston, from Charleston, S.C. who ran a portrait studio and were active participants in a number of African American political, intellectual, and community networks in the South. Edwin Harleston worked with Aaron Douglas on his murals at Fisk University and served as president of Charleston’s branch of the NAACP. Elise Harleston studied photography at the Tuskegee Institute. Considering black artists in Charleston and their local and institutional affiliations allows me to contextualize black Southern historical and political contexts for artistic discourse about regional identity.
My second case study focuses on the Montgomery, Alabama New South Gallery and Art School, an interdisciplinary arts space, open 24 hours a day. The New South’s founders (many of whom had trained at the Art Students League) hoped to create an arts school in Alabama as vibrant as any in New York. The school therefore suggests ways in which artists outside New York related to the modern New York art scene.
The third group I am researching is the Southern States Art League, the largest organization promoting the work of Southern artists throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In their paintings, the artists of the SSAL developed a visual vocabulary premised on Southern identity and nostalgia for a Southern antebellum past. This identity was closely linked to work done by conservative Southern intellectuals such as the Vanderbilt Agrarians and so provides an important case study for considering how elite white Southern artists defined and used regionalism in their art and how this use related to political and intellectual thought of the period.
My project relies upon extensive archival research in Atlanta, Birmingham, Charleston, Columbia, Montgomery, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. The Southern States Art League archives, housed in the Special Collections Library at Tulane University include 22 cubic feet of correspondence, meeting minutes, organization newsletters, artist files with images of works by the organization’s members, financial statements and accounting books, as well as collected exhibition pamphlets and catalogues mailed to the SSAL by museums and art centers around the country. The SSAL president, Ellsworth Woodward, also left substantial materials related to the SSAL in his personal archives at Tulane as did Ethel Hutson, Woodward’s long-time secretary and an organizer for women’s suffrage in Louisiana. The Alabama State Council on the Arts houses the archives of The New South Gallery and Art School, though several of the artists involved with The New South have archives in Alabama museums, at Auburn University at Montgomery, or in private hands. In Charleston, I will be working with the Carolina Arts Association archives, housed at The Gibbes Museum and the Edwin A. Harleston Papers at the South Carolina Historical Society, as well as a variety of resources at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, located at the College of Charleston. Lastly, the Farm Security Administration photographs and associated materials are housed in the Office of War Information Collection at The Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division in Washington, D.C. and are an important resource for my work.
