The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Judith H. Bonner is senior curator/curator of art of The Historic New Orleans Collection and author of numerous scholarly articles and catalogs on southern art, including Newcomb Centennial 1886-1986: An Exhibition of Art by the Art Faculty.Estill Curtis Pennington is an independent scholar and author of many books, including Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920.Charles Reagan Wilson is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

From the Potomac to the Gulf, artists were creating in the South even before it was recognized as a region. The South has contributed to America's cultural heritage with works as diverse as Benjamin Henry Latrobe's architectural plans for the nation's Capitol, the wares of the Newcomb Pottery, and Richard Clague's tonalist Louisiana bayou scenes. This comprehensive volume shows how, through the decades and centuries, the art of the South expanded from mimetic portraiture to sophisticated responses to national and international movements. The essays treat historic and current trends in the visual arts and architecture, major collections and institutions, and biographies of artists themselves. As leading experts on the region's artists and their work, editors Judith H. Bonner and Estill Curtis Pennington frame the volume's contributions with insightful overview essays on the visual arts and architecture in the American South.