The Stars Fell on Alabama: Southern Black Renaissance

Mary L. Bennett | Richard Dial | Thornton Dial | Lonnie Holley | Ronald Lockett | Joe Minter | Mose Tolliver.

The Stars Fell on Alabama: Southern Black Renaissance is a fleeting glimpse of a cultural phenomenon too large for any museum or gallery to hold. The exhibition highlights works produced between the 1980s to present day by seven artists from Alabama whose talents are emblematic of an expansive cultural revolution. The vast majority of these artists’ peers created works that were seen by too few eyes in settings that were overwhelmingly non-institutional, non-commercial, and perhaps intractably local. The focus on Alabama, particularly on the Birmingham metro area, is a reflection of the state’s role as epicentre and unintentional but logical host for a confluence of artists, five of whom continue their work today. The exhibition is produced in collaboration with MARCH. Ranging from mixed media painting to assemblage sculptures and quilts, the works in the show come directly from artists and artists’ estates, as well as definitive private collections from the region. In the month of November 1833, the stars fell on Alabama. The mass witnessing of a Leonid meteor shower burned a deep impression in the memory of Alabama’s denizens and ultimately gave rise to a book and popular songs, ultimately earning an official place on every motorist’s license plate.

 

 

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination sent a shockwave of grief through the country: a mixture of fear, anger, and a sense of profound and irreversible loss. Once again, a collective response slowly began to ferment among the South’s Black artists who increasingly expressed themselves through the creation and public display of highly sophisticated and often abstracted works of art.

 

The visual equivalent of jazz, blues, gospel, and a touch of rock n’ roll, these artworks spilled out from private spaces: cemeteries, parlors, and backyards, into the front yard and along the road during a heightening flowering of creativity. The environments, dubbed “yard shows,” were constructed across the region at vastly different scales and using a host of aesthetics: humble, complex, and metaphoric monuments to shared cultural identity, finally and resolutely displayed for all to see.

 

 

Alabama was the epicenter of this creative flowering. The collector and scholar William S. Arnett posited that visiting Alabama in the 1980s was akin to visiting Florence, Italy at the height of the Renaissance. In contrast, Alabama and the larger South’s Black renaissance was not invigorated by an influx of wealthy and competitive patrons, but propelled by the near-simultaneous need to articulate shared experiences, thoughts, and feelings that had been nearly silenced by the realities of chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation.