Digging into ‘Souls Grown Deep’

Joshua Massey is a Ph.D. candidate at Bard Graduate Center, where they study the art and material culture of the contemporary American South. Their dissertation explores the yard environments of artists Lonnie Holley, Mary Tillman Smith, Dinah Young, and Joe Minter, and the ways in which they function as sites of Black creative, social, and political agency in the post-Civil Rights South. Joshua was a recipient of Rose Library’s 2025 Southern History and Culture Fellowship.

This June, I completed a short-term Southern History and Culture Fellowship at Emory University’s Rose Library. My objective, as part of my dissertation research on yard environments made by contemporary southern Black artists, was to explore the records of the Michael C. Carlos Museum related to its 1996 exhibition, Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South. The show, which featured more than five-hundred artworks by thirty “vernacular” artists, including Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary Tillman Smith, Hawkins Bolden, and Joe Light, was drawn from the collection of Atlanta art patron and dealer William Arnett and curated by art historian Robert Hobbs. It ran from June through November 1996, in conjunction with Atlanta’s Cultural Olympiad, at the newly minted City Hall East venue (now the Williams-Sonoma store in Ponce City Market). Alongside the High Museum of Art’s exhibition, Rings: Five Passions of the Art World, Souls Grown Deep and its companion show, Thornton Dial: Remembering the Road, were the city’s visual art contributions to a bustling—and troubled—Olympic Games.

The planning stage of Souls Grown Deep began in December 1993 when collector William Arnett, Carlos Museum director Maxwell Anderson, and Harry N. Abrams publisher Paul Gottlieb commenced discussions about a museum exhibition and illustrated catalogue of “self-taught” art by southern Black artists. An early version of the exhibition, variously titled African/American and From the Margins to the Mainstream, was to explore the development of “gratuitous” paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by contemporary southern Black artists (like Dial and Holley) as an extension of a larger tradition of “folk” artistry with roots in African ritual art, early decorative arts, and the twentieth-century practices of artists like Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, James Hampton, and Gertrude Morgan. By April 1994, the organizers had shed the historical examples and narrowed the scope of the exhibition to art made after 1970 drawn exclusively from Arnett’s collection. They chose a new name for the show, based on lines from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes: “I’ve known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”[1]

Over the next two years, the Carlos Museum undertook major renovations of City Hall East, adding 30,000 square feet of exhibition space to that of the newly minted main building on the university’s campus. Hobbs and Arnett worked to plan and sequence the exhibition, which they grounded in the logic of the frenetic assemblages of the “yard show,” where found and cast-off objects are repurposed through their physical and symbolic juxtaposition in and around artists’ homes. While early proposals had called for five recreations of yard environments (by Holley, Smith, Bolden, Light, and Dial), Holley was ultimately the only artist who was commissioned to create an “evocation” of his sprawling Birmingham, Alabama, yard. That installation, If You Really Knew, opened the Souls Grown Deep exhibition and drew visitors into the dizzying and strange world of art, which, for many southerners, had long existed right under their noses. Moving onward from Holley’s “yard,” visitors encountered root sculptures, earth paintings, crayon and marker drawings, wrought-iron furniture, paintings (on tin, plywood, and other scavenged materials), and wall-hanging assemblages that challenged prevailing histories of American art by virtue of their makers, materials, and conceptual underpinnings.

Despite being lauded by critics in popular and scholarly publications like Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and Art in America, Souls Grown Deep suffered from a litany of small controversies and missteps. Internally, Carlos Museum conservators were fearful of displaying over two dozen artworks they deemed “transitional,” or “in an active state of deterioration.” A proposal to remove these objects—many by Lonnie Holley—from the exhibition prompted a stilted exchange between lawyers for the museum and William Arnett. Externally, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games mislabeled the City Hall East venue on a map of Cultural Olympiad events, instead leading visitors to the Old Spaghetti Factory, a restaurant several blocks away from the actual venue. Finally, the Centennial Olympic Park bombing and general interest in the sports of the Olympics over the accompanying cultural events led to decreased turnouts across the board. Only 8,000 of an anticipated 200,000 visitors came to the Souls Grown Deep exhibition, which prompted Arnett to remount the show without Emory involvement beginning in February 1997. After three more months on view, the exhibition finally closed.

While the Carlos Museum records document the pitfalls and challenges of staging the Souls Grown Deep exhibition, they also reveal the exhibition’s successes. Of the 8,000 visitors to the show during its first run, over a quarter were local schoolchildren, many of whom were able to visit the exhibition thanks to the museum’s partnership with the Coca-Cola Company. The archive includes dozens of handwritten and hand-drawn thank you notes to the security guards, educators, and corporate sponsors of the exhibition, several of which feature drawings of artworks by exhibition artists James “Son Ford” Thomas, Joe Light, and Mose Tolliver, among others. Photographs of students engaging with Lonnie Holley’s yard environment are some of the only installation images of the show that survive today. Four years after Souls Grown Deep closed, William Arnett, his son Paul Arnett, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library published two sumptuously illustrated volumes of the same name that identify and contend with a “vernacular” tradition of among Black artists in the South. In 2010, Arnett founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit charged with gifting 1,300 artworks from his collection to major museums in the United States and around the world. Today, because of William Arnett’s dedication and generosity, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the High Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, and the Tate Modern—among over thirty other museums—can narrate more diverse and complex histories of the American South. The Carlos Museum and the original Souls Grown Deep exhibition—as a decisive, triumphant step towards artistic equity—are indelible parts of this important development in the history of American art.

[1] Copyright Credit: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.

Source: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press (BkMk Press), 2002).