Blackbird on your shoulder features visual artists, writers and performers who have a deep attachment to the Southeastern United States and are inspired by (auto)biography and storytelling.  Multiple disciplines are integrated, united in creative processes that bring narrative to form. Separately these attributes are not foreign to many; it is how they overlap that distinguishes the selected participants. Essays and poems are installed among sketches and sculpture. Video, music and spoken word come together in multifarious voices telling of lives lived.  From the marrow of the South these tales grow like beanstalks, reaching toward the patient sky.

All artists in the exhibition have deep roots in the South, grown from native seed or intense immersion of long-term residence. The culture of place vibrates through their writings, visual art and performance in a myriad of ways: as a base tone subtly pulsing through compositions; in the hum of a character’s speech; or sometimes just in the setting. From the raucous, humid city to splashing at the swimming hole, Southern voices draw on the simple and absurd of the everyday. With an ear to the ground, artists pick up on the nuances of life stories. Conjured up are sounds of Joel Chandler Harris’ Brer Rabbit and the sublime characters of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, Jacob Lawrence’s rhythm of color and the found object harmonies of Thornton Dial. In the exhibit the new New South is conveyed by voices that encompass broad perspectives. Such an electric history of storytellers and their melodic tales brings forth an audience of attentive listeners and inspired future authors.

Performers, writers and visual artists use descriptive clues—spoken, writ, told through movement, shape and color—to guide the story.   Careful titling can infuse multilayered meaning into shrouded stories as an artist divines the perfect combination of words, such as E. K. Huckaby’s I Have Filled Six Wells. Narrative can be expressed through form, hue and texture. In George Long’s installation Tincture…. the artist stitches together painting and sculpture into space to encourage a story boundless in its readings, his process reminiscent of his grandmother patchworking her quilts. The collaborative Tindelmichi, “two fat Southern boys that paint,” embed text and signifiers of language within the territory of the picture plane, intuitively laying out charged words like “Mason-Dixon,” that bring up a wealth of history marking a certain a time and place.

Artists working in all sorts of media can be motivated by writing, reading, listening, telling—folklore, fiction, true tales, and their own experiences. Songsters and storytellers will dip their proverbial pens into pools of personal mythology to write private lore or legend. Grace Braun’s interest in medieval ballads and Victorian culture of mourning intertwine with her personal experience to make for formidable song writing. The haunting quality of her voice penetrates through to an otherworldly realm. Fiction and actual circumstance are blended so that it is impossible to distinguish heads or tails, where one begins and the other ends. A level of intimacy, from a deep dug personal history to the clarity of how an artist inhabits her world, can emanate from artwork. Dana Kemp revisits photographs of her ex-boyfriends, juxtaposing an image from the past with a short reminiscence of a significant memory of them. The beaus featured in the exhibit are chosen from her extensive roundabouts in New Orleans, told through a sexy honesty that makes me blush. An artist’s intimate familiarity with the material woven and folded into a work of art makes for a powerful experience. Early in the film “Ray” (2004), Ray Charles’ future wife says that his music will have a deeper honesty, more umph, if he brings more of himself into his songs. He responds teasingly, “Ray Charles—who’s he?”  She tosses back “Nobody if you don’t know!” When a rich connection between an artist and their work is made palpable to the observer, a universal vibe can take over.

Mining through one’s environment can stir up issues of identity, family, faith and home. Inherited and collected objects, even everyday detritus, can become the foundation for ones artmaking process. A seemingly insignificant story dug from ancestral or cultural history may tug at the shirtsleeve.  Throughout her career the artist may return to the tale as a muse who continues to elicit fertile fodder for art making. Larry Anderson draws on the boy who taught many how to read, “Dick” from “Dick and Jane.” He uses Dick to represent an every-boy, who holds the possibility of being gay. He superimposes a delicate outline of Dick with objects that call it as they see it: delicately bound twigs in What is a Faggot? and a colorful grouping of fruits in What is a Fruit? Sometimes, in the search to understand oneself, well-protected boundaries between the private and public realm disintegrate. This can make one shy away from presenting too direct a link to one’s own story. Rumors from friends and strangers are appropriated, juicy details sketched into the composition. This allows the artist to design a tale that resonates with a semblance his own, with the parallels often going unrecognized by anyone beyond intimates.

To identify oneself as a Southerner can be as simple as growing up somewhere and as complex as the unspoken knowing of the stacking, layering, tarring over and breaking back through of a terrible history. Lisa Tuttle excavates her family albums to cull images that express the strained relationships between her white family in Bowling Green, Virginia and the African Americans who worked for them. She juxtaposes these photographs with images of growth and hope. For Blackbird on your shoulder, Tuttle has created a series of images to become a temporary public work in remembrance of the 1906 Atlanta race riot, spanning ninety-six feet at the front of Agnes Scott College.

Defining the South beyond geography is a difficult road to travel. It is a gumbo of cultures--how can I speak of New Orleans and the Ozark Mountains in the same breath? Even more trying is identifying a southerner. Some just are the South, seeing traces of themselves in the land and its harvests. A transplant who embraces the South over a period of time, its foible and goodness, can be an honorary southerner—may be. As a southerner, can I make such generalizations about the storyteller who stems from below the Mason-Dixon line? For instance, that she can sometimes be identified just by a certain quality of timing, combined with a special blend of irony and humor. She must know the taste of summer heat mixed with grasses and the wondrous smell of salty cornbread on the stove. Can’t a southerner, fictional or fleshed, always opt out of a linear telling of a tale, or be recognized by partialities to certain foods as much as the soft twisted tones of vowels?

The breadth and wealth of the collected artistic endeavors in Blackbird on your shoulder are not gathered together to break stereotypes but too inspire (though here I must say that the roster has shied from artists who deem to exemplify the South). This exhibition is the culmination of one person’s vision, my own, a gathering of artists and themes to which I gravitate—home, loss, lust and texture—and I hope that the viewer will too be taken in by these storytellers. Do not mistake the intentions of the switcheroo of the title, with the bluebird done gone and ye old undaunted bird not still at the door but perched on your shoulder. The blackbird minds not the hierarchies of artistic media or class structure. She, the traditional keeper of the laws of nature, is whispering in your ear, keenly watching alongside you, cawing and cackling at the world while keeping your stories intact and true.