Folk Art in the South: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Folk art—often characterized as outsider, visionary, or self-taught—varies widely in medium and subject matter. The range of descriptive terms applied to it does little to describe the imaginative ways in which folk artists express deeply personal ideas in visual language. They employ readily accessible materials, including found objects, to produce their work, putting mundane materials to fresh and ingenious uses.…
The Eugene Fleischer Collection of Studio Art Glass
The history of the studio art glass movement in America is relatively brief. Its origins can be pinpointed precisely to two workshops conducted by ceramist Harvey Littleton, who was interested in the potential of glass as an artistic medium, and chemist and engineer Dominick Labino held at the Toldeo Museum of Art in 1962. Littleton had envisioned a more or…
Modernism in the South
Since 1900 much of American painting and sculpture has been represented by a series of revolts against tradition, especially academic tradition. At the dawn of the twentieth century, realism became the new direction for American artists. Later those realists gave way to modernists, many of them arriving from Europe. The impact of the 1913 Armory Show, where Americans saw Marcel…
From Brayer to Brush: Hand-Colored Prints by Jim Sherraden
Since 1977, artist Jim Sherraden has resided in Tennessee, where he managed Nashville’s Hatch Show Print from1984 until his retirement in 2017. He oversaw its transition from a cultural survivor of the nineteenth century to its current status as a widely recognized graphic design house and destination for letterpress enthusiasts. At Hatch, his clients included Emmylou Harris, B.B. King, Neil Young, Bruce…
Music in the South
Music in the South celebrates the culturally diverse and richly expressive traditions of this region’s musical arts in an exhibition of more than 35 works of art—paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. The exhibition is mainly drawn from the Morris Museum’s permanent collection, supplemented by selected loans of musical instruments from the McKissick Museum in Columbia, South Carolina. Organized by consulting curator Jay…