Mint Museum’s 'Coined:' A true Southern show (or is it?)
'Coined in the South: 2024' runs through April 27 at the Mint Museum Uptown
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on March 23, 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. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
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Review: Mint Museum’s ‘Coined in the South: 2024’ explores the identity and global influence of Southern art
Texas artist Eliza Au’s “Sanctuary” is a meditative space made from three large stoneware lattice screens. (Courtesy of Eliza Au)
by Lawrence Toppman
I realized as soon as I stepped into “Coined in the South: 2024” that even the Mint Museum wasn’t quite sure what “South” meant.
There on the wall is an 11-state map of the region that stretches up to Maryland, down to Florida and over to Mississippi. Yet it leads you into an exhibit with 49 artists who come from as far away as Louisiana and Texas.
Their art, meanwhile, invokes images from Africa, Vietnam, Taiwan, Mexico and many other places through which the artists have moved. That reveals a new reality: We’re a region of recent immigrants, like most of the United States these days. These artists all live in the South, but their art has planetary roots.
Anyone who saw the excellent “Southern/Modern” show, which closed at the Mint Museum Uptown in February, may be expecting the same kind of subjects: country stores, river baptisms, farm owners and migrant laborers. The third biennial edition of “Coined,” which will be uptown through April 27, has fewer traditionally regional topics.
Patrick Owens’ assemblage “Quality Work,” with its functioning time clock and garbage can full of pink slips, swipes at corporate greed that moved factories and mills overseas to maximize profits. (The title comes from a sign that reads “Quality work means job security.”) The Gastonia-born Owens was thinking of employers who made his mother work unpaid over her lunch hour and fired his father before he could claim full benefits. But northern mills and factories shuttered for the same reasons, including consumers’ unwillingness to pay higher prices for American-made goods.
Clarence Hayward’s arresting “Looking for Terry 18.5” paints an African-American face in profile, green against a red background in an eight-sided setting. The title refers to a Terry frisk, a stop-and-frisk police procedure some people see as racial profiling, and the red octagon immediately suggests a stop sign. Yet Terry frisks go on all over America every day.
A few artists are not only from the South but of the South. An optimistic future meets a painful past in Precious Lovell’s “Indelibly Seared,” as a crocheted sampler reading “Brand New Day” stretches above a branding iron — inevitably reminiscent of slavery — reading “BLM” and an Adinkra symbol representing the power of love. Stacey Davidson’s small, beautiful “Child (Assistant to Union Troops)” paints a boy proudly, somberly and anxiously wearing his uniform.
Most artists, however, explore universal themes. Owens’ savage “Thoughts and Prayers” presents us with dozens of severed porcelain hands in prayer attitudes, piled in a wheelbarrow next to a gravedigger’s shovel; he’s slamming mealy-mouthed politicians who mumble that dead kids’ families are in their thoughts and prayers after every mass school shooting.
Edison Peñafiel’s large paintings of people with humble faces and arms upraised in surrender or helplessness might show us migrants arrested at the border, kidnap victims across that border, or any undocumented immigrants rounded up by ICE. He doesn’t specify and doesn’t need to.
“Large” is an operative word for much of the show. Eliza Au’s “Sanctuary” creates an ecumenical sacred space into which one can walk; intimations of immortality come from hints of mandala, archway and grid patterns. Sara Lynne Lindsay’s 25 sq. ft. “I Am Surprised We Didn’t Meet Sooner” resembles a titanic tree stump made of cloth; it’s ringed with journal entries and love letters from the artist’s late mother, mixed with oak gall, rust, soil and other natural dyes.
Jan-Ru Wan’s “The Taiwanese” takes up a side room by itself. It traces that nation’s history through domination or occupation by Dutch and Spanish traders and the governments of Japan and China before the current democracy. The long green wall hangings, coated with tiny objects alongside a mysterious box on the floor, remain an enigma.
I desperately wanted a curator’s aid in understanding it, but the three judges of this exhibition allowed the artists to say as much or as little as they chose in wall texts. That’s often a mistake, as artists are rarely good writers. (And vice versa.) So it proves here, as we usually get either too few words to help with comprehension or ambiguities and cliches: “She is both flawless daughter of nature and vessel carrying forth the whispered wisdom of the ancestors.”
I did appreciate artists who told me about technique and history. Deborah Kruger described her “Ropa Arco Iris,” screen-painted on recycled plastic and sewn with waxed linen thread, as being inspired by a huipil, the traditional women’s garment worn in Mexico and Guatemala. It was up to me to decide that this earthly cloak had been transformed into the feathers upon an angel’s wings, if angels dress in rainbows.
If You’re Going: “Coined in the South: 2024” runs through April 27 at the Mint Museum Uptown, 500 S. Tryon St. Times and admissions vary, but the museum is free on Wednesday nights from 5 to 9.
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 several times a month in the “Toppman on the Arts” newsletter.
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