Tradition – Tennessee Lives and Legacies, open SEP 26TH – DEC 5TH, 2010, highlights the state’s folk heritage through profiles of 25 subjects across Tennessee who preserve arts and culture distinctive to their families, communities, or places.
The exhibition will be on view at the Hunter from September 26 through December 5 in the Museum’s lobby hallway gallery.
The exhibition evolved from a book which is a collaboration between Dr. Robert Cogswell, Director of the Tennessee Arts Commission Folklife Program, and Nashville photographer Dean Dixon. Cogswell drew on his 25 years of fieldwork experience with Tennessee folk culture to select subjects for the project, and Dixon photographed them over a period of a year and a half.
Tradition is organized by the Tennessee Arts Commission, with support from the Hunter Museum of American Art. After the Hunter show, the exhibition will travel throughout the state for three years to a variety of venues.
The exhibition and book testify to the strength and diversity of Tennessee’s grassroots cultural life, and to the importance of everyday people who continue to sustain its art forms and practices through their mastery and dedication. The subjects—most individuals, but a few pairs and trios of people—represent different parts of Tennessee, different ethnicities, and different cultural specialties—from music and crafts to cooking and marble-playing. Dixon’s photographs capture the personalities of these interesting and mostly unsung people in settings significant to them.
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