My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South

Finley, Cheryl, Randall R. Griffey, Amelia Peck, and Darryl Pinckney (2018)

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Read an interview with author Amelia Peck on Now at the Met.

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Description

My Soul Has Grown Deep considers the art-historical significance of contemporary Black artists and quilters working throughout the southeastern United States and Alabama in particular. Their paintings, drawings, mixed-media compositions, sculptures, and textiles include pieces ranging from the profoundly moving assemblages of Thornton Dial to the renowned quilts of Gee’s Bend. Nearly sixty remarkable examples—originally collected by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art—are illustrated alongside insightful texts that situate them in the history of modernism and the context of the African American experience in the twentieth-century South. This remarkable study simultaneously considers these works on their own merits while making connections to mainstream contemporary art.

Art historians Cheryl Finley, Randall R. Griffey, and Amelia Peck illuminate shared artistic practices, including the novel use of found or salvaged materials and the artists’ interest in improvisational approaches across media. Novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney provides a thoughtful consideration of the cultural and political history of the American South, during and after the Civil Rights era. These diverse works, described and beautifully illustrated, tell the compelling stories of artists who overcame enormous obstacles to create distinctive and culturally resonant art.

Table of contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Troubling the Waters
Cheryl Finley

Self-Taught and Modern
Randall R. Griffey

Quilt/Art: Deconstructing the Gee’s Bend Quilt Phenomenon
Amelia Peck

The Old Country
Darryl Pinckney

Notes

List of Figures

Works in The Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift

Selected Readings

Index

Photograph Credits

About the authors

Cheryl Finley is Associate Professor and Director of Visual Studies in the Department of the History of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Randall R. Griffey is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Amelia Peck is Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Decorative Arts and Manager of The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Darryl Pinckney is a novelist and essayist.

Press reviews

Wall Street Journal

"An excellent catalog essay by Ms. Peck rehearses the vexed history of the Gee’s Bend quilts, their reception and reputation. (There are also informative essays by Mr. Griffey, Cornell University Prof. Cheryl Finley, and the writer Darryl Pinckney.)"

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American Art (General)

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Cheryl Finley

Randall Griffey

Amelia Peck

Darryl Pinckney

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The Materials and Techniques of American Quilts and Coverlets

Nineteenth-Century American Folk Art

Timelines (1)

The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present

Exhibition

History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift

May 22–September 23, 2018

This exhibition will present 30 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by self-taught contemporary African American artists to celebrate the 2014 gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art of works of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The artists represented by this generous donation all hail from the American South.

History Refused to Die will feature the mixed-media art of Thornton Dial (1928–2016)—whose monumental assemblage from 2004 provides the exhibition's title—and a selection of the renowned quilts from Gee's Bend, Alabama, by quilters such as Annie Mae Young (1928–2012), Lucy Mingo (born 1931), Loretta Pettway (born 1942), and additional members of the extended Pettway family. Among other accomplished artists to be featured are Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982), Lonnie Holley (born 1950), and Ronald Lockett (1965–1988).

Remarkably diverse in media and technique, the works in this exhibition nonetheless suggest their makers' cultural and aesthetic kinship through the use of found and repurposed materials. Their subjects are likewise varied, rooted in personal history and experience, regional identity—particularly common legacies of slavery and post-Reconstruction histories of oppression under the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws—in addition to national and international events.

Plan Ahead

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