AUGUSTA, GA.- Music in the South celebrates the culturally diverse and richly expressive traditions of this region’s musical arts in an exhibition of more than thirty-five works—paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. The exhibition, drawn from the Morris Museum’s permanent collection, is supplemented by loans of musical instruments from the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina, and includes many recent acquisitions. Organized by consulting curator Jay Williams, it is on view in the Coggins Gallery and the nearby stairwell though November 22, 2020.




Many artists represented in the exhibition are familiar to regular visitors to the Morris Museum, including Dale Kennington, Terry Rowlett, and James Michalopoulos. Alfred Hutty, a major painter and prodigious printmaker during the Charleston Renaissance, is represented by Jenkins Band (circa 1925), a beautifully executed etching. Paintings by Bernie Fuchs (Eureka Brass Band, 1977) and Frank Ashley (The Birth of Jazz, 1952) celebrate New Orleans. The thrill of performance by such venerated figures as Elvis Presley and James Brown is captured by Howard Finster, Joni Mabe, and LeRoy Neiman. Other performers are portrayed in Dale Kennington’s Gospel Sing (1997) and Edith Caywood’s Little Molly Plays the Muskrat Ramble (1998).

Photographers Birney Imes, famed for his depictions of juke joints; Jim McGuire, whose Nashville portraits chronicle three generations of country music stars; Jerry Siegel, whose photographs documenting the Black Belt of Alabama have achieved national recognition; and Shane Lavalette, commissioned by the High Museum of Art to create a new series for its Picturing the South project, are represented here by some of their most iconic images. Jack Stoddart, Jack Spencer, John Gutmann, and Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott round out the photographic portion of the exhibition.

Music and the visual arts have been similarly shaped by the traditions, values, and attitudes of Southerners, especially in the realms of religion, community life, family life, and identity. Moreover, music and music-making have often inspired the creation of paintings, photographs, prints, and other forms of visual art. Unhampered by the South’s prevailing Protestant, often iconoclastic, ideals, musical idioms have passed freely across the region’s racial and cultural boundaries. In this way music has led the way to freer, increasingly multicultural, expression in the visual arts.

As Albert E. Brumley’s gospel masterpiece "I'll Fly Away" would have it, the music of the South makes it “a land where joy shall never end.”