Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South is a newly debuted exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, that showcases the unique creativity of African American artists concentrated around the 'Black Belt', the geopolitical region which stretches from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, areas once deeply affected by slavery.
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The 34 artists presented in this exhibition are now well-known in America, but many are exhibited for the first time in Europe. They come mainly from the second half of the 21st century, working in dialogue with the South's legacy of enslavement, segregationist policies of the Jim Crow laws, and institutionalised racism. At once engaging with their harrowing history and depicting the everyday realities of racial inequality, these artists carved out a visual language and tradition of their own, reflected in their subjects and materials used. The stories told through these artworks recount hardship, but also vitality, joy and resilience.
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A central theme of the exhibition is the idea of reclamation: of materials, history, land, creative agency, and perspective. The other main theme is the idea of scarcity of materials, and why selected objects were reclaimed, reformed, reimagined, and exalted.
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The exhibition is organised around four rooms and themes. 'Friendships and Family Ties' showcases artists connected by close familial relations in the American South, including Lonnie Holley and Thornton Dial, who both worked with discarded and salvaged objects to transform them into sculptures full of symbolisms. 'Personal Stories, Local Sources' presents works by local artists working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, drawing on daily life for artistic inspiration.
'The Yard Show' displays a distinctively Southern phenomenon – that of the yard shows: large-scale, site-specific art installations made from thousands of found objects. Drone footage of Joe Minter's African Village in America parades one of the last great yard shows still standing.
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The final gallery, 'The Quiltmakers of Gee's Bend', is entirely dedicated to quilts from Boykin, a settlement on the Alabama River whose residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the Pettway cotton plantation established there in 1816. Multiple generations from the community continued the tradition of quiltmaking in the area, and the ones featured here range in date from the 1930s to 2021. This last gallery exemplifies in the most powerful way the dialogue between past and present among these southern communities, through the multigenerational transmission of knowledge and tradition.
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All the works are lent by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta, Georgia. The foundation works to advocate the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of art history, and was founded in 2010 by Atlanta collector William S. Arnet. The Foundation's curator Raina Lampkins-Fielder and Royal Academy's Secretary and Chief Execute Axel Rüger have co-curated the exhibition.
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Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South is open daily from 17 March to 18 June 2023 at the Royal Academy, London.
