Exploring the vast diversity of Southern art
“Southern/Modern” runs at the Mint Museum Uptown, 500 S. Tryon St., through Feb. 2.
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on Jan. 11, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger.
Mint Museum’s ‘Southern/Modern’ yields surprises around every bend
The vast “Southern/Modern” exhibit occupies the top floor of the Mint Museum Uptown and runs through Feb. 2.
by Lawrence Toppman
In the 1950s, Lenny Bruce got laughs from snobby New Yorkers by saying he couldn’t imagine a nuclear scientist with a Southern accent. A decade earlier, he might have said “great painter.”
The Northeastern art establishment wrote off the land south of Baltimore as a backwater of folk art and fiddler’s conventions (both great in their ways) and decided grits ‘n’ gouache never went together.
The Mint Museum explodes that notion with “Southern/Modern – American Art, 1915-55.” This 100-piece show, which runs through Feb. 2, sprawls across the top floor of the uptown Mint. Room after room offers diversity of ideas, subjects, artists — by gender, age, race and region — along with blasts of visual and cerebral pleasure.
The show has a smaller cousin downstairs, a juried exhibit titled “Coined in the South: 2024,” which stays through April 27. But if you get museum fatigue after two hours, spend all your time right now absorbing the range of beauty, drama and provocation in “Southern/Modern.”
As the dates suggest, “modern” refers not to our era but to styles loosely classed in the first half of the 20th century as modern art. The influences of cubism, surrealism, expressionism and other trends run through this collection, which varies from realism to pure abstraction. (The Mint’s wall plaques, thorough and thoughtful but never verbose, reward your attention.)
The first painting you come to lets you know you’ll have to look closely. Marie Hull’s “An American Citizen” shows 89-year-old John Wesley Washington, wearing a red tie and blue-and-white shirt that link this dignified Mississippian to the U.S. flag. But peer beyond him to the rear of the painting, where a small red, white and blue cup seems to be full of pencils. Is he selling those in 1936, in the depths of the Great Depression? What does “citizen” mean to a man born into slavery who still can’t vote because of Jim Crow laws?
You’ll find the twin peaks of Piedmont painting, Charlotte-born Romare Bearden and Gastonia native John Biggers, side by side near the middle of the exhibit with depictions of the grinding nature of manual labor. The Mint has shown so much of Bearden’s work over 40 years, most of it collages, that it’s a pleasure to encounter his 1941 “Cotton Workers,” which subtly reminds us that African-Americans did the picking and white women got the mill jobs.
“Cotton Workers” by Charlotte-born Romare Bearden. (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
That pales in impact next to Biggers’ unflinching “The Harvesters,” with bent elderly laborers alongside pregnant women who clutch hoes wearily, imagining the children in their bellies carrying on this tradition of unrewarding work. Biggers makes gnarled hands and elongated feet, symbols of toil’s toll on their bodies, more important than faces.
The adjective “Southern” has been interpreted loosely enough to include people who grew up here, went to schools or taught here, painted here or just passed through. Missouri-based Thomas Hart Benton qualifies peripherally with depictions of northern Arkansas, but I’d have hated to miss “Ploughing it Under,” where a sharecropper buries a successful crop to comply with a government decree to keep supplies down and prices up. He knows the landowner, not the laborer, will reap the federal subsidies.
Thomas Hart Benton’s “Ploughing It Under.” (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
These artists strove to combat romantic piffle about the glorious Old South, often showing poor whites and blacks sharing the same hard lives. Richard Blauvelt Lee’s darkly fiery “Birmingham Steel Mill” looks like a set for “Hadestown.” In 1936, the year Margaret Mitchell won the National Book Award for the blather in “Gone With the Wind,” Hale Woodruff’s “Southland” showed a blistered region full of broken trees, a burned-out building and sterile fields.
I passed quickly through the abstracts — museum fatigue, you know — but paused long enough to appreciate the way Will Henry Stevens learned from and topped Kandinsky in “Untitled,” Walter Anderson turned autumn into a chaos of color in “Fall Foliage,” and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith riffed darkly on Hokusai in “Deep Water.”
I was saving myself for a last push through the socially conscious pieces, and I hit what may be my favorite: George Biddle’s “Folly Beach Pavilion.” I have collected shells at that beach near Charleston, which was segregated until the 1960s, and I winced at this piece, which told us about Jim Crow without images of cruelty or degradation.
Well-dressed white adults eat, sew, smoke and chat under an awning, as two children dash around their feet. To the side of this gathering sits a Black nanny, the only person looking at the viewer. Her tired eye seems to ask, “When will I have real equality with these people, not just to be allowed to swim here but to have the full measure of their respect?” I didn’t have an answer.
If You’re Going: “Southern/Modern” runs at the Mint Museum Uptown, 500 S. Tryon St., through Feb. 2. You can get $10 off parking in the Levine Center deck off Church Street or Brooklyn Village Avenue, if you get the ticket validated at the museum desk. The uptown Mint is open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free from 5 to 9 p.m. on Wednesdays.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
Need to sign up for this e-newsletter? We offer a free version, as well as paid memberships for full access to all 4 of our local newsletters:
The Charlotte Ledger is a locally owned media company that delivers smart and essential news. We strive for fairness and accuracy and will correct all known errors. The content reflects the independent editorial judgment of The Charlotte Ledger. Any advertising, paid marketing or sponsored content will be clearly labeled.
◼️ About The Ledger • Our Team • Website
◼️ Newsletters • Podcast • Newcomer Guide • A Better You email series
◼️ Subscribe • Sponsor • Events Board • Merch Store • Manage Your Account
◼️ Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack Notes