Vernacular Voices

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The Ogden Museum of Southern Art's newest exhibit highlights the work of self-taught, outsider, and visionary artists from the American South in Vernacular Voices. Together, this diverse range of work offers a broad view of the practices of different groups of artists who share interesting commonalities—the most significant being that they have each created truly original bodies of work outside of any formal academic dialogue. This is art drawn from life itself—intuitive, honest, and tied to the culture in which it was created. 

Just as spoken vernacular dialect is bound to location and free from the confines of social propriety and academic dialogue, the visual art of a region can be viewed as a vocabulary built on a sense of place. 

The artists represented in this exhibit were born across the span of a century—from Clementine Hunter to Welmon Sharlhorne—yet they all exhibit similar expressions of the changes that occurred across the Old South during the late 19th and 20th centuries. 

Differentiating this exhibit from the broader category of folk art is an expressive aesthetic more commonly associated with Modern or contemporary art. Artists from all levels of academia are concerned with the same things: line, color, shape, form, value, space, and narrative. But brought together as a group—these particular artists seem to have more in common than any other movement of art. They share a common tongue, so to speak. 

The exhibit will be on display from March 8–July 14, with an opening reception on March 14 from 6 pm–8 pm. $13.50; free for members. ogdenmuseum.com. 

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