Front Porch

Deborah Roberts, The inbetween, 2019. Mix media and colalge on paper, 44 x 32 in. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery. London. © Deborah Roberts.

In this moment, when connection remains paramount as our lives have shifted to isolation and virtual interaction, I picture an imaginary gathering of the captivating southern artists, photographers, scholars, storytellers, and writers whose work you will explore in this special Art and Vision issue of Southern Cultures, guest edited by Teka Selman. This assembly is loud. There is animated conversation, protest, raised voices, song, and poetry. Intricate maps and collages of southern riverways and African American women’s ways cover the walls. Images of southern sites of racial terrorism reflect past and present violence. Stories of southern artifacts, both human-made and of the natural world—from trees that witnessed lynching to the massive ceremonial mounds of southeastern Indian tribes—speak of generations of black and brown southerners as they resisted injustice and annihilation, demanding recognition of their humanity.

Jimmy Cohen with son Jerry at a construction site in northeastern Arkansas, ca. 1924. Courtesy of the Cohen Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On the heels of our spring volume on documentary practices, the Art and Vision issue is similarly fueled by present-day creativity that requires both our attention and activism. It is not enough merely to see as we have in the past. The covid-19 pandemic has dramatically changed how we understand our interconnectedness to the global community. We may have discussed the political, historical, cultural, and environmental connections that link our southern places to the larger world, but now we viscerally feel them. There is a profound awakening to the fragility of humanity—and the gut punch that significant change happens now or never. The southern artists assembled here insist that we take action regarding climate change, environmental exploitation, genocide, changing sexual and gender identities, racism, and sexism, all brought into stark relief as we collectively face a global health crisis.

We began work on the volume last fall, gathering (face-to-face!) with our friend and colleague Teka, who has been at the center of the contemporary art world for over twenty years. We are grateful for Teka’s counsel, time, and dedication in bringing together exceptional voices in southern art today, and in shaping this issue’s vision.

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while working on this issue, I felt the pull and place of my own southern family within the historical arc of a “long South,” which this volume’s art and essays explore. In the early 1920s, my grandparents Samuel Joseph “Jimmy” Cohen, a civil engineer, and his young bride, Luba Tooter Cohen, left their Russian immigrant families and the vibrant Jewish enclaves of New York City for the rich agricultural lands of Mississippi County in northeast Arkansas. They held tightly to the passports that allowed them safe passage to America, an imperative reflected in Susan Harbage Page’s gilded passport. Their journeys from eastern Europe were fraught by rising nationalism and anti-Semitism. Travel papers and documentation represented escape and the possibility of safety and opportunity in a new country. In Arkansas, they began a family and contributed to the region’s essential sectors of flood control, industry, and construction, including hundreds of miles of drainage canals, bridges, dams, and highways. In Blytheville and the surrounding swamps, bayous, and levees, Jimmy and Luba were touched by historical and geological forces from the past and in their future. In what became known as the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the great earthquake of 1811–1812 created the “Sunken Lands” where their livelihood was centered. They lived through the Mississippi River Flood of 1927, whose destructive force was directly tied to the politics and policies of land ownership and the control of the path and flow of the nation’s most powerful waterway. Artist Monique Michelle Verdin’s communities experienced this history at the other end of the river. Her striking collages of the Lower Mississippi River Valley...