The visual expression of the African American South along with the Black sonic culture are overlooked tributaries to the development of art in the United States and serve as interlocutors of American modernism. Within the visual expression, assemblage, collage, appropriation, and sonic transference are explored as deeply connected to music tradition. The exhibition chronicles the pervasive sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape, and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body-deep meditative repositories of thought and expression. The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, investigates the aesthetic impulses of early 20th-century Black culture that have proved ubiquitous to the southern region of the United States. Photo by Sandra Sellars © 2021 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American Art. Valerie Cassel Oliver stands before Caspera, the 2019 inkjet print mounted on dibond by RaMell Ross (American, born 1982).

Are sonic and shadow brothers