Rediscovering Southern Art From the First Half of the 20th Century at North Carolina’s Mint Museum

The Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte feels like the perfect location for a retrospective honoring early 20th-century artists from the American South—the institution, North Carolina’s first art museum, was established in 1936 and today boasts one of the largest art collections in the Southeast. “Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art From the First Half of the Twentieth Century” doesn’t pull exclusively from that collection, however. It’s a collaborative traveling exhibition that kicked off at the Georgia Museum of Art before moving to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville and then Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Arkansas before landing in Charlotte this past October.

“Southern/Modern” is an ode to those American artists who worked in states below the Mason-Dixon line, to the Mississippi River in the west and even artists who worked outside of the South but made art inspired by their visits to the region. Curators Jonathan Stuhlman and Martha Severens have taken an expansive approach and key themes in the exhibition of more than 100 paintings and works on paper include time and place, race, family ties and social struggles.

Its art history writ broadly and designed, according to museum materials, to “provide a fuller, richer, and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the American South.” One particular goal, Todd Herman, president and CEO of the Mint Museum, said in a statement, was “to open the door for honest conversation about Southern culture during this period of time.” Works by artists including John Biggers, Dusti Bongé, Marie Hull, Jacob Lawrence and Blanche Lazzell, who worked in the South from the early 1900s through 1950, are here, with pieces by Romare Bearden and Carroll Cloar.

Many of the paintings on view delve into the heart of rural life, highlighting the labor and spirit of cotton workers. Among them are Thomas Hart Benton’s evocative depictions of farmers and horses, as well as Bongé’s Where the Shrimp Pickers Live (1940), a vivid scene of laundry strung between buildings. Renowned American-Mexican artist Elizabeth Catlett, celebrated for her sculptures and recently honored with a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, is represented here, too, with War Worker (1943). This powerful portrait captures the resilience and anguish etched into the face of a Black man, evoking the struggles of his journey. Equally moving is Carroll Cloar’s A Story Told By My Mother (1955), a surreal yet poignant depiction of a woman in a black dress standing alone in the snow.

The exhibition also makes room for abstract works, which provide a compelling counterpoint to the figurative pieces in the show. Highlights include Elaine de Kooning’s Black Mountain #6 (1948), a striking example of her leadership in the Abstract Expressionist movement, a role she shared with her husband Willem de Kooning. Will Henry Stevens’ Untitled (1944) offers another abstract gem, its layers of color and form inviting interpretation. Adding a geometric edge to the collection, Charles H. Walther’s Reversible Image (1937) stands out with its hard-edge abstraction. Walther, a key figure in Baltimore’s avant-garde scene, introduced European modernism to early American abstraction after studying in Paris from 1906 to 1908, and his work encapsulates the cross-cultural influences shaping the region’s—and the era’s—art.

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“Southern/Modern” also shines a long-overdue spotlight on the women artists who were overshadowed by their male counterparts during their time. Many of their names will probably not be familiar, but this is the kind of show that leaves you with a deeper understanding of American art history and the perseverance of those who had to fight to make a living as artists.

The exhibition also underscores the ways in which modern art was born in the South, evolving in tandem with movements across the globe. It traces how abstraction emerged as a vital force, even during a time when it was dismissed—evidenced by Walther losing his teaching position for advocating abstraction to his students. Seemingly mundane depictions of rural life, from cotton fields to front porches, gain new resonance and perhaps relatability when viewed through the lens of time, revealing layers of meaning once likely overlooked. One can only hope that similar exhibitions will be mounted in the Northeast and West, telling even more untold stories and filling in the gaps in our collective understanding of American art.

“Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art From the First Half of the Twentieth Century” is at the Mint Museum in North Carolina through February 2, 2025.