AUGUSTA, GA.- From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason, an exhibition of twenty-six oil paintings by Appalachian artist Eugene Thomason, opened Saturday, October 11, 2014 at the Morris Museum of Art, and remains on display through December 28, 2014.

This exhibition is drawn largely from the Johnson Collection of Spartanburg, South Carolina, which holds the largest single body of Thomason’s paintings. It is supplemented by major works on loan from the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; and the Morris Museum of Art. In addition to a series of paintings that featured a fictional mountain clan that Thomason dubbed the Hankinses, the exhibition features a selection of portraits, landscapes, and scenes of recreation and agriculture.

A product of the industrial New South, Eugene Healan Thomason (1895–1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York City to advance his art education and launch his career. Like so many other aspiring American artists, he understood that the city offered unparalleled personal and professional opportunities—prestigious schools, groundbreaking teachers, and an intoxicating cosmopolitan milieu—for a promising young painter in the early 1920s. The patronage of one of the nation’s most powerful tycoons, North Carolinian James B. Duke, afforded him entrance to the renowned Art Students League, where he fell under the influence of some of the leading members of the Ashcan School. There, George Luks became his particular friend and mentor. In all, Thomason spent a decade in the city, adopting—and eventually adapting—the Ashcan movement’s gritty realistic aesthetic into a distinctive regionalist style that utilized thick paint and simple subject matter.

Thomason returned to the South in the early 1930s, living first in Charlotte, North Carolina, before settling in a small Appalachian crossroads called Nebo. For the next thirty-plus years, Thomason mined the rural landscape’s rolling terrain and the area’s residents for inspiration, finding there an abundance of colorful imagery more evocative—and more personally resonant—than the urbanism of New York. Painting at the same time as such well known Regionalists as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Eugene Thomason embraced and convincingly portrayed his own region, becoming the visual spokesman for that place and its people.

From New York to Nebo is accompanied by a 112 page, hardback book. Co-published by the Johnson Collection and the University of South Carolina Press and written by noted art historian Martha R. Severens, this book tells the story of how one Carolina artist translated an early twentieth century urban art movement into a distinctly Southern vernacular. It is available in the Morris Museum Store for $34.95.