The Met Embraces Neglected Southern Artists - The New Yorker

News of the acquisition by the New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art of of fifty-seven paintings, drawings, mixed-media pieces, and quilts by thirty African-American artists from the South. The pieces, including works by Mose-T of Montgomery and Thorton Dial of Bessessemer are from the collection of Atlanta collector Bill Arnett.



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The Met Embraces Neglected Southern Artists - The New Yorker: Marla Prather, who will be the curator of the 2016 show, said that the Souls Grown Deep gift represents “significant shifts in the pattern of how the Met has collected art to date.” She said, “African-American art is not a completely overlooked area, but there’s work to be done. To my knowledge, we’ve never looked at a concentrated group of works by black artists” until now. “These artists have been neglected; there isn’t necessarily a substantial art-historical record for them,” she said. Souls Grown Deep’s research has documented a “whole important, legitimate world for scholarly research” that might otherwise have been lost, she added. “It’s been a kind of rescue operation that I’ve found incredibly moving.”