This spring, the High Museum of Art will present “Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads,” an exhibition that celebrates the region’s self-taught artists and offers a rare look at how their worlds converged with contemporary American photography and literature.
On view March 2 through May 19, 2019, this exhibition is the first collaboration between the Museum’s folk and self-taught art and photography departments. Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-taught Art Katherine Jentleson and Associate Curator of Photography Gregory Harris drew inspiration for the exhibition from an unpublished manuscript for a guidebook of Southern self-taught artists by late poet and publisher Jonathan Williams (1929–2008), who had road-tripped around the South with photographers Guy Mendes and Roger Manley in the 1980s and ’90s. Williams intended to publish the manuscript through the press of The Jargon Society, an organization he had founded during his student days at Black Mountain College, which “championed outsiders, mavericks and the neglected.”
