Frist curator Michael J. Ewing and his father discuss John Biggers' work in SOUTHERN/MODERN

Newest Frist Art Museum curator Michael J. Ewing (@abstractavantgarde_) invited his father, Michael Ewing Sr., over for an insightful discussion about the work of John Biggers featured in our SOUTHERN/MODERN exhibition, which closes on April 28th, 2024. Michael and his father also discussed how cultivating an intentional home space and growing up in what felt like a museum ultimately led to a career in the arts.
The first comprehensive survey of paintings and works on paper created in the American South from 1913 to 1955, SOUTHERN/MODERN features more than one hundred works drawn from public and private collections across the country. The exhibition focuses on artists such as Carroll Cloar, Aaron Douglas, Caroline Durieux, Will Henry Stevens, Alma Thomas, and others who worked in states below the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as those bordering the Mississippi River. It also includes artists from outside the South, such as Josef Albers and Elaine de Kooning, who were instructors at North Carolina’s experimental Black Mountain College, as well as Thomas Hart Benton, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and others whose works reflect on Southern experiences from a distance.
Throughout the exhibition, thematic groupings weave together the region’s rich cultures, telling stories of agriculture and industry, class division and racial injustice, natural beauty, and stylistic innovation. Full of vibrant, emotionally charged works, Southern/Modern treats a subject long neglected by art historians and museums outside the region. It shows how in the South as elsewhere, modern artists linked social and aesthetic progress, hoping to change the way people saw their world.

[@nuiwai5402]

❤❤❤what a fabulous exhibition. Wish it was in Aotearoa New Zealand. Wonderful talk. Very thought provoking.❤