![]() Hudnall’s works document specific moments and trigger sonic memories of singing in spaces like during childhood play, churches, and social gatherings. ![]() The cinderblocks in Buchanan’s piece form a throne-the “dirtiness” of the concrete blocks is also found in Earlie Hudnall’s photographs documenting cityscapes, civic life, and nature of Black people in Houston and throughout the South. Courtesy the artists and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. 1978, Earlie Hudnall photographs, RaMell Ross, Caspera, 2020, installation view, 2021, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, dimensions variable. Buchanan’s oeuvre revisits the idea of space in sculptural assemblages and works on paper capturing homes and other structures-the architectural forms act as embodiments for former inhabitants, real or metaphorical, to find “emotional grounding.” From center to background center to right: Beverly Buchanan, Untitled (Frustula Series), ca. 1978) concrete structures appear sourced from cast-aside, broken-up building foundations. In the same gallery as Ross’s photograph, Beverly Buchanan’s Unititled (Frustula Series, ca. Caspera belongs to a collection of works on the first floor that includes materials from the land, capturing dwellings and everyday Black life in a Southern vernacular. Ross’s dark apparition, a walking figure of death with only its feet recognizable as human, interrupts the viewer from interpreting the space as a wooded area common to rural childhoods to confront something more ominous brewing in the bucolic Alabama backdrop. “We’re people, we like the birds and the bees The apparition recalls lyrics from James Brown’s “Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud” that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver cites in her catalogue essay for the show, “What You Know About the Dirty South?”: The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic ImpulseĪ sweeping two-floor exhibition currently on display at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston-which features more than 130 works that range widely across media types and generations-swells the contributions of Southern United States traditions, as well as Dirty South hip hop culture, in an attempt to illustrate its invaluable regional sway on nationwide art and music.Įntering the first gallery of The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, RaMell Ross’s Caspera (2020) strikingly positions a subject clad in a ghostly black sheet, standing in a wet, muddy field of sand encircled by a woodsy, green backdrop. RaMell Ross, Caspera, 2020, large-scale archival pigment print, 40 x 60 in.
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