Southern Democratic
September 26, 2024 - February 15, 2025
The Carnegie - Covington, KY
“I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more important or less important.”
-William Eggleston
In October 1976, William Eggleston left his home in Memphis, Tennessee and drove to Plains, Georgia on assignment for Rolling Stone Magazine, tasked with documenting the birthplace of Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate for President, just weeks before the election. The resulting images never appeared in the magazine, but the New York publisher Caldecot Chubb soon produced Election Eve, a collection of one hundred original prints in two leather-bound volumes, housed in a linen box and limited to five copies.
Eggleston’s trip was scheduled on the heels of his solo exhibition William Eggleston’s Guide at the Museum of Modern Art, a project that was widely viewed as a provocation and panned by the New York Times’ Hilton Kramer as “perfectly banal, perhaps” and “perfectly boring, certainly.” Undeterred, the artist used the Rolling Stone commission to further establish his uncompromising style: observational and democratic in nature, banal to the point of rigid and beautiful clarity. Eggleston’s South is decidedly and curiously devoid of people. Indeed, human beings only appear in two of the one hundred photographs, but the images are nonetheless rich with evidence of life: quiet restaurants, abandoned bicycles, empty roads, and seemingly anxious mailboxes show signs of attention and care beyond the captured instant. Viewed today, these photographs provide a personal and random catalog of a region that is increasingly unrecognizable as the South continues to shift and change in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1976.
According to the United States Census Bureau: the expansion of the South—the nation's most populous region—accounted for 87% of the nation's growth in 2023, as the region added over 1.4 million residents for a total population of 130,125,290. It is the only region to have maintained population growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse with each passing day. It is in this context that we have organized Southern Democratic, an exhibition comprised of meditative vignettes, each featuring a specific body of work by an artist who is actively examining this changing world, presented here in silent dialogue with Eggleston’s Election Eve.
Nearly fifty years later, the United States is on the precipice of another consequential presidential election, one that has the possibility to dramatically alter our collective futures across the region and beyond. We all have roles to play, but it is the artists whose often-quiet observations articulated through the lens of words, photographs, film, painting, and sculpture succeed in truly seeing change––for better or for worse––as it is lived. Not unlike Eggleston, Tag Christof, Casey Joiner, Claudia Keep, and Viva Vadim translate the quotidian while Coulter Fussell, Y. Malik Jalal, and Polo Silk work in lineages of Southern craft to illuminate social cycles. John Chae and Carey Gough meditate on the past and future of Southern land and our ever-threatened environment is the chief concern of Rose Marie Cromwell and Dawn DeDeaux. Albert Moser and Louis Zoellar Bickett work with taxonomies, creating distinct series of images that use repetition to illuminate and track while Amy Pleasant’s figures provide relief and inherent potential, contour renderings of the human form suggesting that our destinies are not fixed.
Curated by Phillip March Jones, founder at Institute 193 and owner of MARCH, New York, NY.
Artists: Louis Zoellar Bickett, John Chae, Tag Christof, Rose Marie Cromwell, Dawn DeDeaux, William Eggleston, Carey Gough, Claudia Keep, Coulter Fussell, Y. Malik Jalal, Casey Joiner, Albert Moser, Amy Pleasant, Polo Silk, Viva Vadim