Southern Gothic: Literary Intersections with Art from The Johnson Collection

The LSU Museum of Art presents Southern Gothic: Literary Intersections with Art from The Johnson Collection. Drawing from the celebrated holdings of The Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Louisiana institutions and private collectors, this exhibition explores how visual artists have grappled with the American South’s layered history through a lens long cultivated in Southern literature. The show examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists employed potent visual language to transcribe the tensions between the South’s idyllic aura and its historical realities. Using Southern Gothic literary traditions as inspiration, the grouping considers how artists translate into visual form the same tensions found in the writings of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Toni Morrison. Often described as a mood rather than a strict genre, Southern Gothic blends elements of horror, romance, decay, spirituality, and dark humor. In painting, printmaking, and sculpture, these sensibilities emerge as evocative landscapes, charged domestic interiors, allegorical scenes, stereotypical antebellum imagery, and portraits that hint at psychological depth and social complexity. The core group of artworks has been expanded to engage Louisiana’s distinctive cultural environments, layered histories, and enduring traditions. On display through January 3. lsumoa.org.