FOUND: Vernacular Art & Gee's Bend Quilts

The Gadsden Arts Center & Museum will open a major exhibition featuring seventy-eight works by twenty-five artists working within the common vein of Southern Vernacular Art. Spanning the twentieth century between the Jim Crow era and the present day, these self-taught artists laid the foundation and perpetuated the genre of what is now known as Vernacular Art—art that works outside the traditions of Western art—and beyond the earlier negative monikers of “folk” or “outsider” within the American South. The exhibit is comprised of works from the Gadsden Arts Center & Museum’s Permanent Collection and works on loan from the private collections of Calynne and Lou Hill and the Tinwood organization. Included in the show is work from world renown artist Thornton Dial, Sr. whose monumental and existential assemblage pieces represent human struggles and historic narratives; Florida native Purvis Young, whose turbulent past inspired vivid mixed-media pieces that reflect the struggles of urban life during the Civil Rights Movement; the politically charged and emotionally raw art of Ronald Lockett, who under the mentorship of Thornton Dial, Sr., used found materials and animal imagery to reflect ideas on death, enslavement, and human destruction; and many others who produced work within a variety of mediums and covering all regions of the South. Also included in the exhibit are three quilts from the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers Lucy Mingo, Lola Pettway, and Qunnie Pettway, who through their work illustrate not only the unique experience of black struggle faced by the slaves and descendants of the Pettway Plantation but also the individual personality of each independent quilter in an incomparable expression of textile art.

Interpretive programs accompanying FOUND will include a lecture by guest scholar Bradley Sumrall, Curator, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, an exhibition catalog with essays by Mr. Sumrall and William Arnett, Founder of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and guided tours.