The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, explores the aesthetic legacies and traditions of Black Culture in the African American South as seen through the lens of contemporary Black musical expression. This groundbreaking exhibition, lauded by critics from The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, argues for the importance of the American South and Black culture as critical to our understanding of America’s past, present, and future. 

Occupying all three floors of galleries at MCA Denver, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse will make visible the roots of Southern hip hop culture and reveal how the aesthetic traditions of the African American South have shaped visual art and musical expression over the last 100 years. Beginning in the 1920s with spirituals, jazz and blues, the exhibition interweaves parallels in the visual art production of the Southern United States. This exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists working in a variety of genres from sculpture, painting and drawing to photography and film as well as sound pieces and large-scale installation works.

Presenting artworks drawing from the visual imagery found in music videos, song lyrics and cultural ephemera, The Dirty South looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, belief systems and the Black body. Through the contributions of artists – both academically trained as well as those creative intellectuals relegated to the margins as ​“folk artists” – the foundational aesthetics that gave rise to the shaping of our contemporary expression are uncovered. 

Organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Dirty South features art, ephemera and sound work by artists with ties to the South. Included in the exhibition are Allison Janae Hamilton, Mose Tolliver, Rodney McMillian, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Minnie Evans, Nadine Robinson, Thornton Dial, Jr., Rashaad Newsome, Sanford Biggers, Mildred Thompson, Radcliffe Bailey, Bisa Butler, RaMell Ross, Alma Thomas, and El Franco Lee II, among many others. 

In addition to the music, the exhibition features the contemporary material culture that emerges in its wake, such as ​“grillz” worn as body adornment and other bodily extensions such as instruments used by celebrated Southern musicians. The exhibition will also feature commercial videos and personal effects of the industry’s most iconic artists — from Sun Ra and Cee Lo Green to Bo Diddley.

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This exhibition is presented at MCA Denver by Miranda Lash, Ellen Bruss Senior Curator. The exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, edited by Cassel Oliver, features an anthology of critical essays by Cassel Oliver, Fred Moten, Anthony Pinn, Regina Bradley, Rhea Combs, Guthrie Ramsey, Andrea Barwell Brownlee, Roger Reeves, Kirsten Pai Buick, Charlie Braxton and Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid. This publication documents works in the exhibition as well as artists’ biographies and a chronology of iconic moments that have shaped the Black presence in the South.

About the Curator

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2000 – 2017). She has served as director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995−2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988−1995). In 2000, she served as one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

During her tenure at the CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012). She has also mounted significant survey exhibitions for Benjamin Patterson, Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen. 

Her 2018 debut exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was the five-decade survey of work by Howardena Pindell entitled, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen. The exhibition, co-organized with Naomi Beckwith, was mounted for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and, named one of the most influential of the decade. At the VMFA, Cassel Oliver organized the exhibition, Cosmologies from the Tree of Life that featured over thirty newly acquired works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Most recently, she opened the exhibition, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse, to critical acclaim. The exhibition that opened in Richmond May 2021 and is currently touring through January, 2023.

Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007); a fellowship from the Center of Curatorial Leadership (2009); the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011); the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation-to-Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016) and the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018). From 2016 – 17, she was a Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in Spring 2020, she served with Hamza Walker as a Fellow for Viewpoints at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Most recently, Cassel Oliver was named the recipient of the 2022 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the awardee of the College Arts Association’s 2022 Excellence in Diversity Award. In March, 2022, she accepted the Alain Locke International Art Award from the Detroit Institute for the Arts.

Cassel Oliver holds an Executive MBA from Columbia University, New York; an M.A. in art history from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, a B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.

Photo courtesy the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Photo by Travis Fullerton.