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Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/842307
LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.17 87 THE ARTS South Bound The new Speed celebrates its first full year with a powerful exhibition on Southernness. By Mary Chellis Austin Photos by Amber Thieneman On a hot June afternoon, the Speed Art Museum feels like a sanctuary, the cool air inside evoking the feeling of movie theaters in summer. rough the light-filled atrium and up the glass staircase is the muse- um's largest, most ambitious contemporary art exhibit ever: "Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contem- porary Art," up through Oct. 14. e Speed's curator of contemporary art, Miranda Lash, a West Coast native who has spent much of her career in Texas and New Orleans, curated the show with Trevor Schoonmak- er, curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Several years of conference calls, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations helped the two narrow down "Southern Accent" to 60 artists and 125 works on just about every subject that has branded the South — from biscuits, kudzu and Piggly Wiggly to the KKK, Con- federate memorials and lynching. Works date to the 1950s, though most are from within the past 30 years. Lash says the exhibit could have easily been three or four times as big. Since the two began curating the show, events such as the massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the rise of Black Lives Matter provide a new context for wounds that the South, and the country, has had trouble healing. e exhibition opened in Durham last September (after its run at the Speed, the show will not travel and the works will go back to their owners). Lash points out how, toward the end of the show in Durham and before opening in Louisville in April, "We had a presidential election in November that I would say heightened the tenor of many of the discussions in the show." "Southern Accent" deals intimately with racism and race relations. e show has pieces by Kara Walker, whose paper silhouettes depict black exploitation and sexualization. In a work by William Cordova, a 2014 film titled Silent Parade… or e Soul Rebels Band vs. Robert E. Lee, the New Orleans