“Little of Artistic Merit?”: The Art of the American South (original) (raw)

sure that my experiences are not unique to those who seek to unmask regional narratives in their teaching to connect with a local student body. In my case, the writings of John Michael Vlach, Dell Upton, and Maurie McInnis were necessarily supplemented by primary sources, articles, and excerpts from exhibition catalogues. 3 Teaching that course forced me to reckon with both the limitations of my own training as an Americanist, and to consider more generally the confines of our discipline. I also became more familiar with the city that I live in: Montgomery, Alabama. Learning about the South in My Own Backyard As an outsider-someone not from the South-I am continually confounded by the regional idiosyncrasies. Alabama, like much of the region, is a place of contradictions. The city seal of the state capital, Montgomery, is "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, Cradle of the Confederacy"; these seemingly incongruous historical moments define the broader regional divisions of the South. The cultural landscape of the city illustrates its opposing histories. Indeed, these two poles are epitomized by dueling tourism sites: the progressive National Memorial for Peace and Justice (fig. 1), alternately known as the National Lynching Memorial, erected by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2018, and the First White House of the Confederacy (fig. 2), which is maintained by the White House Association (WHA) of Alabama (founded in 1900), heroicizes Jefferson Davis, and upholds the Lost Cause ideology. 4 Coined in 1866, the Lost Cause is a form of historical revisionism and signifies a pervasive belief system that glorifies the antebellum South and mythologizes Confederate values. 5 Followers of the Lost Cause forward the especially pernicious idea that the Civil War was fought over states' rights and not slavery; it is an assertion that dangerously undermines the links between slavery and white supremacy, contemporary racism, and neo-confederacy. 6 In 2007, vandals made those links explicitly clear when they painted the faces and hands of Confederate soldier statues black on the Alabama Confederate Memorial Monument (fig. 3). 7 The 88-foot-tall monument (fig. 4) sits to the north of the State Capitol Building and was erected in 1886 to commemorate the state's 122,000 Confederate veterans. 8 A few blocks away, the Civil Rights Memorial (fig. 5), created by Maya Lin (b. 1959) and erected by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1989, records important dates in the struggle for civil rights. The American Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement are, of course, themselves deeply intertwined-the roots of one fomenting the struggles of the other-and Montgomery occupies a central position within both histories.