The exhibition endearingly titled “The Dirty South” was one of the most talked-about, and lauded, art offerings of 2021. Debuting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the show made a bold stand on behalf of a region of the country long overlooked for its contributions to contemporary art in the United States.
It is, in fact, music that ties this show together. Fans of pop know the term “Dirty South” as a hip-hop movement that came into its own in the 1990s with the breakthrough of artists such as Ludacris, Outkast and Timbaland. This wave of musicians made space for places like Memphis, Houston and Atlanta in a creative and commercial landscape that was dominated by artists on the East and West coasts of the country.Visitors can walk into Rodney McMillian’s 2012 “Asterisks in Dockery .
Some is quite troubling to view, most notably Allison Janae Hamilton’s 2019 video, “Wacissa,” which greets and gurgles at visitors near the MCA entrance. For the piece, Hamilton dragged her camera above and below the surface of the Wacissa River, part of Florida’s Slave Canal where captive laborers dug muddy channels to ferry cotton cultivated by other captive laborers upstream.
Church also inspired more earthy things like blues music, as Rodney McMillian’s 2012 installation “Asterisks in Dockery ” points out. The piece is a life-size recreation of a chapel on the Dockery Farm in Mississippi, a cotton plantation often referred to as the birthplace of the blues. Museum visitors can wander inside, settle into a pew and contemplate things both religious and material, as well as the spaces that exist in between.
That quality of light and dark permeates all of “The Dirty South” and the tale it weaves around the creation of Black culture over the many years it traces. The show cannot possibly escape the dominant feature of that narrative, the enslavement of human beings and the legacy of discrimination and abuse that followed, and continues through today.