9 February 2022
In this social and political climate where so many marginalized voices are crying out to be heard, it is gratifying that one particular platform has heeded the decision. Based in Atlanta, the regional arts organization known as South Arts has been sponsoring the Southern Prize and State Fellowships program for five years. It’s an attempt “to celebrate the excellence, innovation, value, and power of the arts of the South” by offering cash prizes to professional artists in the region.
For the next time, Columbia‘s 701 Center for Contemporary Art is hosting an exhibition of the work of the State Fellows — one from all the nine states in the region — and never has there been a more vibrant and diverse group of prize winners.
As Wim Roefs, the exhibition’s curator, points out, all but one of the nine artists in the present show represent immigrant and/or minority populations. They ergo reflect the changing demographics of the American South, and their work speaks to a need for greater public recognition of those changes.
One artist that might be designated for her representation of multiple constituencies is Tameca Cole, the 2021 Alabama Fellow. Not only is she female and Black but also on parole after having spent 26 of her 49 years alive in prison. She provides insight in to a swath of America — more than two million Americans are currently incarcerated — that’s been overlooked in the arts.
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Art helped her process what she calls her “personal demons” and simultaneously call attention to lingering inequalities in the justice system inside our country. In her collage entitled “Dark Chaos: The Aftermath, ” we find an African American head floating on a graphite background, the lower half of the facial skin partially “whitewashed” as an indication of the erasure of individual identity.
Attached to the scalp is a ball and chain; the mouth is open in a silent scream. It is a powerful image of how incarceration leaves its mark; the “prison” inside one’s head lingers long after the door to one’s cell has been opened.
How extraordinary and uplifting that the South Arts Fellow from Alabama should be a former inmate of a prison system criticized for its overcrowded and dangerous conditions.
Equally remarkable is the artist selected to represent Mississippi in 2021. Born in China, Ming Ying Hong teaches now at Mississippi State University. Her work, such as the mixed media piece “The One with the Dragons, ” deconstructs body parts with the aim of making the viewer question traditional binaries like masculine/feminine or robust/delicate and also conflating the real with the mythological.
For a state whose politicians seem too comfortable with their binary thinking — Mississippi signed into law a year ago an anti-transgender sports bill — and whose customs and policies have never been particularly welcoming to immigrants, Hong’s choice is unexpected but gratifying.
A indigenous of Iran, Raheela Filsoofi is the 2021 Tennessee Fellow. Ever conscious of her immigrant status, the mixed media artist is represented in the 701 CCA show with five parts of a nine-part video instillation entitled “Imagined Boundaries. ” In five panels, whose frames are shaped like the pointed and bulbous arches of Islamic architecture, adults and children peek out at the viewer.
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What we see of these individuals is always within the outline of these arches so that regardless of age or gender affiliation, the identity of each is invariably defined by the Middle Eastern design element. Thus, Filsoofi tells us, how we perceive the others is most often informed by certain preconceived parameters.
Other resonant voices given a platform in this crucial exhibition include the team of Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, who have taken transparencies and negatives damaged in the floods that accompanied Hurricane Katrina and restored, enlarged and printed the images to bring to life memories of the African American community in New Orleans.
Photographic images that may once have been considered “damaged” and for that reason dispensable have been partially “restored” like the Black neighborhoods that once were the heartbeat of the Big Easy.
Nearer to home are the South Carolina Fellow, Fletcher Williams III, and the Florida Fellow, Marielle Plaisir. The former, an African American resident of North Charleston, is the $10, 000 Southern Prize Finalist, and the latter may be the $25, 000 Southern Prize winner.
A conceptual artist, Williams is particularly drawn to the fence and fence pickets — the latter a reference to the pointed stakes once used by infantry to repel cavalry — as objects that not only delineate space but also set boundaries and enforce separation.
French-Caribbean by lineage, Plaisir is represented in the exhibition by a seven-by-nine-foot fabric piece whose mixed media imagery recalls the French colonization of the island of Guadeloupe with whom the artist has ties. The task entitled “Divine Comedy” includes a lone figure in 16th-century garb with arm outstretched as if to present to the viewer an aqueous world that is both beautiful and menacing.
South Arts Fellows deserve to be applauded for their work. It not just pleases the eye but also illuminates some of the most challenging issues of our time.