Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-taught Art

Front Cover
Carol Crown, Charles Russell
Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2007 - 286 pages
Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art presents historical and cultural analyses of southern self-taught art that focus on the cultural contexts of the art's creation, as well as on the lives and works of representative artists, while also addressing their reception by the mainstream art world.

Reflecting the South's complex cultural, religious, racial, and political admixture, the artists draw from, and frequently combine, diverse visual sources and creative traditions. Sacred and Profane focuses, in particular, on southern artists' efforts to find personally fulfilling forms of aesthetic expression that give vision and voice to the simultaneous demands of the sacred and the profane dimensions of existence.

Because in the South religion is woven through the very fabric of society, interlacing social beliefs, customs, practices, and behaviors, vernacular artists often testify to intensely held religious beliefs through their art. Essays by Charles Reagan Wilson and Frédéric Allemel discuss the range of religious artistic creations, while studies of Howard Finster, Myrtice West, Anderson Johnson, and Eddie Martin (St. EOM) illuminate the intensely personal religious experience of particular artists. The works of some artists, such as Nellie Mae Rowe and Clementine Hunter, address both the sacred and the profane dimensions of their lives, while the art of Bill Traylor, George Andrews, and Thornton Dial focuses more on the individual artist's social observations and personal responses to their times and the history of the South.

From inside the book

Contents

SelfTaught Art the Bible and Southern Creativity
3
Visions of the Sacred in Southern SelfTaught
40
The Music of SelfTaught Artist and Evangelist Anderson Johnson
66
Eddie Owens Martins Pasaquan
80
George Andrews
98
Multiple Contexts Multiple Meanings
111
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 265 - Project: from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College.

About the author (2007)

Carol Crown is curator of the exhibit Coming Home! and associate professor of art history at the University of Memphis. She is also editor of Wonders to Behold! The Visionary Art of Myrtice West. Charles Russell is associate professor of English and director of the American Studies Graduate Program at Rutgers University.

Bibliographic information