Visual art and sonic art are often presented as two sides of a coin and there’s no other place this seamless commingling is more apparent than in the works of Black artists, both from Africa or the diaspora. Black art in essence is an Oreo of music and visual art with the rich, quintessential soul of Black culture serving as the center filling. 

In the South of the United States, a museum is organizing a show to examine this special relationship in all its nuances. The show, titled “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse”, is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, and it is targeted towards exploring the creative output and traditions of Black artists through the lens of music and sound art. Specifically, it investigates the aesthetic impulses of early 20th-century Black culture that have proved ubiquitous to the southern region of the United States.

“The confluence between the visual and sonic arts in the Black creative expression has long been recognized,” the show’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, said in a press release. “What has remained elusive, particularly in the presentation of these forms, is the long trajectory of this exchange.”

“André 3000’s iconic phrase, ‘The South’s got something to say,’ really sparks for me a meditation to dig deep and to understand how Southern hip-hop artists were shaping their identity within the bedrock of the landscape that they knew and the creative expression born from the history of that landscape,” she added.

According to the museum, the show collects more than 140 sculptures, paintings, drawings, films, photographs, installations, and sound works, all blending into one another. These works are by an intergenerational assemblage of artists working in a range of media and genres.

Beginning in the 1920s with jazz and blues, the exhibition interweaves parallels of visual and sonic culture and highlights each movement with the work of contemporary artists, creating a bridge between what has long been divided between “high” and “low” cultures.

Upon entering the pulsating space that is the exhibition, visitors are drawn down a hallway where the show’s introduction is Paul Stephen Benjamin’s Summer Breeze, an installation featuring a lyric from Billie Holiday’s heart-wrenching song about lynching, Strange Fruit, projected on a video screen and filling the gallery. The work is surrounded by other screens showing Jill Scott’s 21st-century rendition of the song, while, on a pyramid of televisions behind the singers, a young Black girl plays on a swing set.

“Ultimately, The Dirty South creates a meta-understanding of southern expression—as personified in the visual arts, material culture, and music—as an extension of America’s first conceptual artists, those of African descent. The exhibition traces across time and history, the indelible imprint of this legacy as seen through the visual and sonic culture of today,” the press release states.

The show runs till the 6th of September 2021.