“The Dirty South” usually takes its cues from the influential hip-hop genre of the same identify that emerged from the area in the mid-1990s. Its musical constellation consists of the distinct sounds of Virginia’s Hampton Roads (Pharrell Williams, Missy Elliott, Timbaland), Atlanta (OutKast, Ludacris, Usher, TLC) and New Orleans (Lil Wayne, Learn P), as properly as artists in Houston, Memphis and Miami.
The exhibition explores a hip-hop society rooted in a Black Southern aesthetic courting back at the very least a century. That aesthetic, formed by spirituals, jazz and the blues, mixes the sacred and the profane, with the Black system as the holder of traditions, the creator of artwork, the generator of pleasure, the object of brutality, and the temple of resistance.
“There’s been these types of a chasm in between knowing the South write-up-civil rights,” Oliver stated. “The South turned form of codified as a area of struggle, a place of violence, as not the most welcoming room for Black bodies, even nevertheless we existed in the South from 1619 to the current.
“And there was some thing about the increase of Southern hip-hop lifestyle that gave a new sense of pride to a youthful technology of makers and citizens at huge.
“It’s just that these items do not occur out of a vacuum. This is a continuation of traditions, of means of contemplating, of methods of expressing self, that are so element and parcel of who we are as a community.”