Highlights

Tradition/Innovation invites you to share the heritage of the Southeast’s traditional arts and contemporary crafts, as well as to explore innovations within both artforms. Touring through June 2013, Tradition/Innovation will be hosted by partner museums across the country. View the touring schedule.

In Tradition/Innovation, you’ll experience works made by 30 of the South’s practicing master artists from South Arts’s nine partner states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The artwork in the exhibit was selected by the artists in consultation with curators Jean McLaughlin and Kathleen Mundell. These pieces, some created as far back as the early 1970’s, some created in 2007, represent what the artists deem as their living masterpieces. Though no exhibit could include every master artist or masterwork of art in the region, we hope that Tradition/Innovation opens a door for you to a broad range of forms, materials and content.

The South is home to many traditional arts that families and communities continue to practice today. These visual arts, typically utilitarian, are usually deeply rooted, reflect a community aesthetic, and have experienced only modest change over time. Contemporary craft in the South, in comparison, also possesses its own rich history beginning with the folk school movement in the early 1900s, and has grown in range of expression with each individual artist. Artists have been, and continue to be, drawn to this region to learn and practice their chosen artforms. Throughout the exhibit you will find both parallels and contrasts in the lives and works of contemporary craftspeople and traditional artists.

We hope your visit to the exhibit in person, or virtually through this website, will initiate a conversation between the curators and you; will share the voice of the artists with you; will prompt your own questions and discoveries; and will illustrate some of the South’s most intriguing  art.