American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World

By Ann J. Abadie and J. Richard Gruber

American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a major contemporary survey of landscapes in art and literature of the United States, especially the American South. Inspired by William Dunlap’s extraordinary landscape Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and a collection of forty paintings and photographs by Southern artists, this volume brings together artists, authors, and scholars to present new perspectives on art and literature both past and present.

The volume includes art and text from artists John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Ke Francis, Linda Burgess, Randy Hayes; photographers Sally Mann, Ed Croom, and Huger Foote; museum directors Betsy Bradley, Jane Livingston, and Julian Rankin; and authors W. Ralph Eubanks, John Grisham, J. Richard Gruber, Jessica B. Harris, Lisa Howorth, Julia Reed, Natasha Trethewey, Curtis Wilkie, Joseph M. Pierce, and Drew Gilpin Faust. This diverse group explores major eras of American history portrayed in Dunlap’s painting, a landscape that evokes the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the Civil War, and William Faulkner’s fiction. They examine the history of landscape art in America, connecting art with the works of major writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Natasha Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward.

In eighteen new essays written during the pandemic and since the events of January 6, 2021, the essayists emphasize how the key issues Dunlap addressed in his 1987 artwork have become part of the national discourse and make his work even more vital today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496848376

Book preview

in praise of american landscapes

Landscape is one of the sinews of American history, identity, and character. And nowhere is that better demonstrated than in this monumental volume. From the gorgeous illustrations to the historical essays to the reflections of the artists and photographers, this book is a cornucopia of delight. Editors Abadie and Gruber and their contributors have given us a book to be both valued and cherished.

—Robert W. Hamblin, emeritus professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University

You will want this collection on your coffee table or nightstand. Keep it close for reference, reflection, and inspiration. They are all here, an assortment of Mississippi luminaries, thoughtfully telling you about Southern road trips and the formidable power of this place we call home.

—Margaret McMullan, author of Where the Angels Lived

"American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World is a wonderful tribute to the life and art of William Dunlap. Twenty-five writers, artists, photographers, and art historians whose work is anchored in the American South reflect on Dunlap’s work Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America and how the region’s sense of place inspires its artists and writers. Beautifully edited by Ann Abadie and Richard Gruber, the book explores Southern art and literature in exiting new ways."

—William Ferris, author of I AM A MAN: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960–1970

Readers will enjoy a riveting cultural road trip though the American South. The twenty-five contributors—painters, photographers, writers, culinary artists, curators, and museum directors—reflect on the rich Southern ‘sense of place,’ landscapes physical, personal, historical, and artistic. A brilliant master class in visual and verbal arts richly illustrated and presented in spirited conversations among the luminaries who shape the South’s artistic landscapes today. Truly, a trip worth taking!

—Annette Trefzer, author of Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty’s Photographic Reflections

"My friend David Dark argues that beauty prepares the heart for justice. In the same way, American Landscapes straightens our collective spine to walk with courage into a new day, bolstered by the beauty drenching the pages of this lovely book."

—Susan M. Glisson, executive director of the Welcome Table Collaborative, a network of organizations devoted to racial healing, reckoning, and repair

Commemorating an important interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the work of the artist William Dunlap, Ann Abadie and Richard Gruber have assembled a stunning monument to the Southern landscape, bringing key painters, photographers, writers, literary critics, and more into a communal meditation on the land that inspired and shaped them all. The essays and exhibits (which include glorious full-color reproductions of art of all types) illustrate the aesthetic and deeply human reflections the South’s body has stimulated from generations of artists, thinkers, and ordinary citizens. Simultaneously the collection limns the effect of seismic cultural events, such as the civil rights movement and the pandemic, on the production of images of the land, providing exhilarating evidence of the South’s changing same.

—John Wharton Lowe, author of Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature

"To meditate is to focus one’s mind deliberately, attentively. American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World results from a community of painters, poets, photographers, writers, editors, philanthropists, curators, and designers collaborating with ‘an angle of vision’ (Jane Livingston) inviting viewers and readers to think deeply about all aspects of this work’s subjects: landscapes, art, literature, a changing America. This collage of more than 150 images of art, keynote presentations, conversations, event photographs, the full exhibition of Landscape Painting and Photography, a coda of twenty post-pandemic reflections brings to mind Joseph Cornell’s Americana Fantastica for the cover of the January 1943 View, a surrealist magazine. Yet, when I consider William Dunlap’s 1987 monumental Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America, impetus for the March 2019 symposium ‘Meditations on the Landscape in Art and Literature’ at the University of Mississippi that engendered American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World, I salute the genius of editor Ann Abadie, designer John Langston, artist William Dunlap, and curator J. Richard Gruber, and I envision the experience of viewing a creation by M. C. Escher. Narrative artist Ke Francis writes in his coda ‘Meditations on Landscape,’ ‘We see the caterpillar and we see the butterfly, but we are missing the magic transformational power of that metamorphosis.’ The bold assemblage of these meditations corrects such a misstep. Each page of American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World (the publication is a work of art itself) invites us to meditate on the mysteries of time and landscape."

—Pearl Amelia McHaney, author of A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photography and editor of The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques

"The pleasures and rewards of this volume radiate outward from William Dunlap’s extraordinary, haunting painting Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America, through the museum exhibition curated around the painting and the interdisciplinary symposium organized to celebrate and explore it, and outward still further into the history of American landscape painting, the Mississippi artist’s eye and ear for the land, and the challenges of painting, writing, and curating against a contemporary landscape of pandemic and imposed solitude. Splendid and sumptuous, this book is a feast for the eyes and mind."

—Jay Watson, Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Mississippi

American Landscapes

Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World

Edited by Ann J. Abadie and J. Richard Gruber

With contributions from the following panelists and writers

John Alexander

Melanie Munns Antonelli

Jason Bouldin Betsy Bradley Linda Burgess

Ed Croom William Dunlap

W. Ralph Eubanks

Drew Gilpin Faust Huger Foote

Ke Francis

John Grisham

J. Richard Gruber

Jessica B. Harris

Randy Hayes

Dorothy Molpus Howorth

Lisa Howorth

Carlyle Wolfe Lee

Jane Livingston

Sally Mann

Joseph M. Pierce

Julian Rankin

Julia Reed

Natasha Trethewey

Curtis Wilkie

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson in association with the University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses

University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses Series / Volume 2

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Publication of this book was made possible by funds from Friends of the University Museum.

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the American Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Mississippi Museum

All rights reserved

Printed in China

First printing 2023

Designed by John Langston

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023020193

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-4573-3

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-4837-6

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4838-3

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-4839-0

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4840-6

Pages 1 (detail) and 2: William Dunlap, Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America, 1987, wood, canvas, polymer and oil paint, steel, snakeskin, wire, flag, 48 × 96 × 24 inches. University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses. Purchased with funds provided by the Friends of the Museum and the Mississippi Arts Commission, through the Avery B. Dille Jr. Fund for Art Acquisition, in memory of Mr. Avery B. Dille Sr., Mrs. Katherine T. Dille, and Avery B. Dille Jr., 2018.003.0001a and b.

Natasha Trethewey, Miscegenation and South from Native Guard. Copyright © 2007 by Natasha Trethewey. Reprinted by permission of Natasha Trethewey.

C. P. Cavafy, Ithaka from C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992. Reproduced by permission of Princeton University Press.

From Hold Still by Sally Mann, copyright © 2015. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown, and Company, imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Secretaries from The Collected Poems, 1931–1987 by Czeslaw Milosz. Copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

"What to Do about Faulkner: Review of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra." Permission from the author, March 2, 2021. © 2020 Drew Gilpin Faust, as first published in The Atlantic.

The Capitol Rioter Dressed Up as a Native American Is Part of a Long Cultural History of ‘Playing Indian’: We Ignore It at Our Peril by Joseph Pierce. Permission from Julia Halprin. This article first appeared in Artnet News in January 2021. Permission for title change from the author March 25, 2023.

William Christenberry, quoted in Mark J. Spencer, William Christenberry (St. Joseph, Missouri: The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, 1994), 30.

William Faulkner, from interview with Jean Stein, Paris Review, Spring 1956.

Eudora Welty, One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (1971; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 7, 12.

University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses

P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677

University Avenue and 5th Street, Oxford, MS 38655

662.915.7073 ▪ museum.olemiss.edu

Thanks for Support of the March 2019 Reading, Exhibition, and Symposium Friends of the Museum

Museum Staff

Robert Saarnio, Director

Melanie Antonelli, Collections Manager/Exhibitions Coordinator

Kate Wallace, Membership, Events and Communications Coordinator

Michelle Perry, Finance and Administrative Manager

Kyle Hoehn, Museum Preparator

Amy Evans, Graphic Designer

Program Committee

Ann J. Abadie

Linda Burgess

William Dunlap

W. Ralph Eubanks

J. Richard Gruber

Jessica B. Harris

Dorothy Howorth

Thomas S. Howorth

Carlyle Wolfe

Arrangements Committee

Ann J. Abadie

Jason Bouldin

Billy Chadwick

W. Ralph Eubanks

John Hardy

Dorothy Howorth

Amy Lowe Lewis

Rebeca Phillips

Mary Thompson

Diane Scruggs

Carlyle Wolfe

Kathryn York

The acquisition of William Dunlap’s artwork was supported in part by funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, through the Avery B. Dille Jr. Fund for Art Acquisition, in memory of Mr. Avery B. Dille Sr., Mrs. Katherine T. Dille, and Avery B. Dille Jr. Friends of the Museum and the artist contributed to the acquisition. Friends of the Museum is sponsoring the exhibition, symposium, and related activities. Funding for the events was partially provided by the National Park Service.

in memoriam

Julia Evans Reed

September 11, 1960–August 28, 2020

Julia Reed with Henry, New Orleans, 2007.

Photograph by Vasser Howorth

I may not always know the question, but I do know the answer—it’s Road Trip! No one did the road trip quite like Julia E. Reed, and Southern Road Trip was the title of the panel we shared at the Meditations on the Landscape in Art and Literature symposium.

It is our generation’s destiny to drive the last interstate mile on the last gallon of gasoline and coast to a stop at some rest area or the other, get out, and start a plein air painting, or make a photograph, or just look around. Given that the humidity outside is approximately 108 percent, there’s more water in the air than on the watercolor paper.

And so it goes. That’s the nature of the Mississippi landscape and the roads that run through it. Julia Reed towed that Mississippi in her wake.

Until the advent of the famous Hot Tamale Festival in Greenville, we seldom saw each other in Mississippi. It was always New York or Washington or New Orleans, but whenever we were together, Mississippi was front and center. It was what we had most in common. We could finish each other’s sentences, and often did. She learned to drive on those long, straight Delta roads that have claimed the lives of so many. Julia made the trek from New Orleans to Greenville countless times and always at a high rate of speed, a drink and cigarette in one hand and her cell phone in the other. Music was blasting, and she usually buckled her seatbelt, but not always.

I would not have been surprised to get a phone call saying that her big black Cadillac, which still carried cardboard plates from the dealership, had rear-ended some farm implement or the other, but that never happened. Instead, she was attacked from within by cancer cells that have no better sense than to destroy their host.

She was not well when she came to Oxford for our Meditations on the Landscape in Art and Literature symposium that cold March weekend. Like a good Southern lady, she never complained and never explained. As a matter of fact, her contributions to the panel discussion we shared were cogent, crucial, and, as usual, funny as hell.

I once told her she had a good twenty or thirty more years of work to do to get the South straight. She answered that she would be lucky to have two or three, and she was right. We left each other numerous emails and messages, most of which I’ve kept. When I said Julia, my voice-activated cell phone dominatrix Siri heard Junior, and Julia came to sign off that way. The last letter I got from her closed with Love, Junior. It contained a pocket square from London to be folded just so and placed in my jacket pocket. I wear it regularly and always think of her when I do.

I have a book of short stories at the printer. Its title, Lying and Making a Living, is a quote from the late Barry Hannah of Clinton, Mississippi. Its dedication is to the late Julia Reed of Greenville, Mississippi. It says, in part, For Julia Reed, who lived her life with a fierceness that made sparks fly, illuminating all around her.

I was one of the lucky ones. I knew her well, and while those sparks could set you on fire, it was always worth the risk.

—William Dunlap, Webster County, Mississippi

William Dunlap in San Miguel, Mexico, 2020.

Photograph by Linda Burgess

Dunlap on Dunlap

William Dunlap

I was born in northern Mississippi, in those red clay hills at the southeastern-most base of the Appalachian range. The Natchez Trace, a game trail for the French, Scottish, and Irish settlers on their way south, ran through my hometown. It’s now a National Park, as is the Blue Ridge Parkway, which follows the same Appalachian Trail, used also in turn by some of the same game and by Indian, migrant, and government roadbuilders.… My work is all about the landscape that flanks the two officially converted old roads. As a member of the postwar generation set free by … the automobile … I’ve seen the landscape between New Orleans and New York become a peripheral blur—something glanced at out the window at high speed, a unique perspective—and one that makes the pursuit of absolute clarity more difficult, but no less rewarding. —from Dunlap

Contents

prelude

Friends of the University of Mississippi Museum’s Acquisition of Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America

Dorothy Molpus Howorth

introduction

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

J. Richard Gruber

AMERICAN LANDSCAPES

The Power of Place in Art and Literature

William Dunlap

The Lyrical Landscape

Introduction: W. Ralph Eubanks

Presentation: Natasha Trethewey

Symposium Keynote Address Opening Remarks

Diane Scruggs, President, Friends of the Museum Noel E. Wilkin, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Robert Saarnio, Director, University of Mississippi Museum and Historic Houses

keynote address

The American Landscape Painting Tradition: History, Place, Charged Objects, and Southern Road Trips

J. Richard Gruber

SYMPOSIUM PANELS

Southern Road Trip

Betsy Bradley, Moderator John Alexander, William Dunlap, Jane Livingston, Julia Reed

The Power of Place in Art

Lisa Howorth, Moderator

Jane Livingston, Sally Mann

The Written Word and Sense of Place in Landscape

W. Ralph Eubanks, Moderator

John Grisham, Jessica B. Harris, Curtis Wilkie

Ways of Seeing the Landscape

Julian Rankin, Moderator John Alexander, Jason Bouldin, William Dunlap, Carlyle Wolfe

EXHIBITION

Meditations on the Landscape in Art and Literature

William Dunlap, Guest Curator Melanie Munns Antonelli, Museum Curator

John Alexander

Walter Anderson

Andrew Blanchard

Jason Bouldin

Marshall Bouldin

Charlie Buckley

Jane Rule Burdine

Linda Burgess

William Christenberry

Langdon Clay

Maude Schuyler Clay

Ed Croom

Warren Dennis

William Dunlap

William Eggleston

William Ferris

Huger Foote

Michael Ford

Gilbert Gaul

Rolland Golden

William Goodman

Theora Hamblett

William Hollingsworth

Marie Hull

O. W. Pappy Kitchens

Jack Kotz

Terry Lynn

John McCrady

Robert Malone

Sally Mann

Tom Rankin

R. Kim Rushing

Jack Spencer

Glennray Tutor

Wyatt Waters

Eudora Welty

Milly West

Brooke White

Carlyle Wolfe

Event Photographs

Linda Burgess, Danny Dickey, and Thad Lee

CODA

introduction

Look at It/Think about It.

J. Richard Gruber

COVID-19 Pandemic and the Making of Art

William Dunlap

My Landscape’s Not Your Landscape: Some Musings on the Multiplicity of Landscapes of and in the Mind

Jessica B. Harris

Landscape in the Time of COVID: A Funky Valentine

Lisa Howorth

Sense of Place

Curtis Wilkie

Four Meditations: From the Land of Rowan Oak

Ed Croom

Transitions

Randy Hayes

Epiphanies and Meditations

Linda Burgess

Source of Inspiration

John Grisham

Oxford Odyssey

Huger Foote

Meditations on the Sublime in Mississippi Landscapes, 2021

Betsy Bradley

Meditations on Landscape

Ke Francis

Southern Light, Southern Landscape

W. Ralph Eubanks

Stars and Snakes Forever: An Interview with John Alexander

J. Richard Gruber

Bearing Witness: Visual Aesthetics and Meaning

Jason Bouldin

Landscape as Subject

Carlyle Wolfe Lee

Returning

Julian Rankin

Playing Indian: The Capitol Rioter Dressed Up as a Native American Is Part of a Long Cultural History. We Ignore It at Our Peril

Joseph M. Pierce

What to Do about William Faulkner

Drew Gilpin Faust

afterword

Meditations

J. Richard Gruber

About the Contributors

Index

PRELUDE

Friends of the University of Mississippi Museum’s Acquisition of Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America

Dorothy Molpus Howorth

In hindsight, the acquisition by Friends of the Museum of William Dunlap’s Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America for the University of Mississippi Museum seems so appropriate as to have been inevitable, but in fact, the process was improvised and serendipitous. For me, the process began when a friend told me about the grant opportunity, a challenge from the Mississippi Arts Commission funded by the Dille Fund for Art Acquisition to acquire a major landscape painting. The grant offered up to $25,000 to be matched one-to-one to acquire a significant work of art, specifically, a landscape. I immediately consulted with museum director Robert Saarnio, who knew about the grant, but had concluded that the museum, being a part of the university and so of the state, was ineligible. This is a fundamental reason Friends of the Museum and the University of Mississippi Foundation exist—to enhance the museum with initiatives, efforts, and means outside its reach as a university/state-funded organization. Additionally, while the University Museum did not have unencumbered matching funds on hand, the Friends did.

In consultation with Robert and the collections manager, Melanie Antonelli, Friends went to work. Three members of the Friends’ board of directors—Lynn Wilkins, Carlyle Wolfe, and I—became a task force, and Lynn worked with Katie Snodgrass, an officer with the University Foundation, to prepare an unrefusable grant application. Although the application was not required to identify a particular work or artist, we thought detail would make for credibility, and if we were successful, the purchase would be preapproved. Identifying an artist would be better, and best, a specific piece of art.

To narrow our range within the vast realm of landscapes to target, we studied the artists’ names included in the grant guidelines as eligible examples: some were living, more were dead. A dead artist might be a safer choice, but immediate availability at our target price being a challenge, the de facto task force decided to propose a specific piece by a living artist.

Among the living artists considered, William Dunlap soon emerged as a likely favorite. Dunlap was on the list of qualified examples; Dunlap’s landscapes are well known for extending the range of the genre, engaging conception and perception equally, and incorporating mythical themes into his representations of landscape. Our task force reached out to Bill to find out what paintings might be available, and he responded enthusiastically to the prospect of having a major work in the University Museum’s permanent collection—after all, Bill earned his MFA at the University of Mississippi, and he has long been an active alumnus and supporter of the university, its museum, and its art department. The task force knew Bill and his oeuvre, and he helped identify pieces that would be available to purchase, either immediately or in a relatively short time frame. The monumental painting/construction Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America was among them, but, at $75,000, was not within the available budget. Otherwise, the task force believed the painting was perfect. Sharing that opinion, Dunlap offered to discount the price to the $50,000 available, making three equal contributors to the acquisition of this important piece of art.

Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America is not an image of bucolic serenity emblematic of the landscape genre. It references such landscapes and then overwhelms them with stronger visual references of violence, conflict, and death, giving the lie to the lingering nineteenth-century American mythic ideal of manifest destiny. Two specific images—his representation of the graphic 1867 photograph of the mutilated body of Sergeant Frederick Wyllyams and the fragment of the rebel flag that Dunlap had picked up on the campus after a University of Mississippi football game in the 1970s—stirred great consternation among some of the museum constituency: It will frighten the children. Indeed, Meditations is a deliberately challenging work of art, a piece that was created over a period of months or years, perhaps, assembled in layers, subconsciously, on Dunlap’s studio desktop as he made other pieces on easels. One day in 1987, he realized that the desktop itself had become the art; he fixed the objects onto it and hung it on a wall.

It has taken some years since the day Dunlap hung his desktop for America and Mississippi to accept his Meditations. Resistance to the proposed acquisition and apprehension about its display convinced Friends that its unveiling should be accompanied by an exhibition and a symposium that would place the work in context. Thus arose Meditations on the Landscape in American Art and Literature. These efforts were generously supported by the community and contributors, and now this publication documents it—and then some.

Time has not stood still since March 25, 2019. We have seen attitudes change and many not. We have learned firsthand what disruption and devastation a novel virus can cause a population, even with access to unprecedented medical knowledge and capability. Imagine what it did to populations with none. We have witnessed the sociopolitical challenges a culture can face when it embraces powerful mythology in preference to and unchecked by genuine knowledge of history and science.

And we have art to remind us.

INTRODUCTION

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

J. Richard Gruber

On March 25 and 26, 2019, the University of Mississippi hosted Meditations on the Landscape in Art and Literature, a two-day event that featured a symposium on this topic and a related exhibition, curated by William Dunlap, at the University of Mississippi Museum. These events were inspired by the art and writings of William Dunlap, notably by a specific work, Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America (1987), acquired that year by the University of Mississippi. As I suggested in the symposium’s keynote address, this painted and sculpted construction offers an encyclopedia of Dunlap’s overriding subject and themes—history, landscape, a sense of place, charged objects, and Southern road trips. It fully reflects the time of its making, America in the 1980s, and the artist’s immersion in the art and life of those times.

Looking back in 2021, at the issues raised during our meditations upon Dunlap’s work of art—in the symposium, the exhibition, and the related programs in Oxford—the events might be seen to have been both historic and predictive, reviewing what had happened in and on the American landscape during the past and suggesting aspects of the social and cultural wars that loomed ahead. Dunlap, who is as adept at writing and public speaking as he is at painting and sculpting, wrote about certain aspects of this work in 2019. Any work of art is more than the sum of its parts, he noted, pointing to the old tabletop he used as the ground, the canvas, one he pierced with a butcher knife, to violate the picture plane, and placed next to his painting of Sergeant Frederick Wyllyams, late of the US Seventh Calvary, killed in 1867 by the Cheyenne on the plains of Kansas. Below that, subtly, he introduced Oxford’s—and the South’s—preeminent literary figure, William Faulkner. Next to an arrangement of stamps, he placed a brass door to a post office box, one he found on the University’s campus, which he suggests was one of the boxes William Faulkner failed to fill with mail when he worked as a postmaster.¹

Dunlap explained the concept of charged objects, elements and details central to his art. That this mailbox came from Ole Miss is significant, as is the presence of the Rebel flag creeping out from under the corner of an unfinished snowbound landscape. This object was picked up after a football game in the late 1970s when such flags were passed out in the student section. Then he addressed the larger issues. The flag’s presence should be obvious, for it is impossible to think of the origins of agriculture in America without coming to grips with this symbol and what it has come to mean. Of equal importance is the forced removal of the American Indians referenced by the image of Sergeant Wyllyams, ‘Saint Sebastian of the Plains,’ as he has been called. He explained how this forced removal related to his family and his own sense of place. The 1830s Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek opened the rich bottomlands of north central Mississippi to my ancestors, who came here and remained. Concluding, he referred to the diverse elements within Meditations, observing that they come together inside the frame to speak honestly about the origins of agriculture in America. This is something I would hope we remember and meditate on from time to time.²

Those meditations have continued, beyond the symposium, to the present, as documented in this publication. While working on this project, I have been reminded of Edward Bellamy’s classic book Looking Backward, 2000–1887, published in 1888. In Bellamy’s book (a best seller that sold more than a million copies), the protagonist, Julian West, who lived in Boston at the end of the nineteenth century, fell into a deep sleep, waking up one hundred and thirteen years later. From that remote, and as the novel has it, more utopian future in Boston, he looked back and meditated upon the challenging realities America faced in the 1880s. What if, I have wondered, he slept until 2021? And awakened to the realities of our era? Certainly, in the two years since the symposium, across America there has been a sense of time interrupted, of time suspended, of a dreamlike state that defies what we had come to anticipate as the flow of normal life.³

2019 | Meditations

On the evening of March 25, Meditations on the Landscape in Art and Literature began with The Lyrical Landscape, a program presented by Natasha Trethewey, former United States Poet Laureate. In his introduction, Ralph Eubanks said, While memory is the great theme of the poetry of Natasha Trethewey, memory is knitted together with the landscape, particularly the landscape of her native Mississippi Gulf Coast. Continuing, he explained the role of memory in her work. It’s in the memories recalled in Natasha’s poetry that we see a reflection of herself where she wrestles with her dual consciousness of being both Black and Southern as well as a child of Mississippi and a child of a place where her parents’ marriage—as well as her very existence—was once deemed a crime. He concluded, The Gulf Coast exists not simply as an existential landscape that inspires her work, but it is also an interior landscape of the psyche that Natasha shares with her readers.⁴

Symposium Panel: Dunlap, Reed, Alexander, Bradley, 2019. Photograph by Thad Lee.

Trethewey talked about her early life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and how this was tied to her family’s complex racial history, including the murder of her mother. She spoke of her fraught relationship to Mississippi, the landscape, both physical and cultural, literary and monumental, beginning at the time of her birth, on Confederate Memorial Day. She described the burning of a cross by white men in their gowns in the yard of her grandmother’s home in Biloxi. She talked about her relationship to her father, a White poet, and a journey with him to Monticello, her resulting thoughts on Thomas Jefferson, and issues of equality there and within her family. She spoke, eloquently and emotionally, about her Black mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who was murdered in Atlanta on Memorial Drive, the road to Stone Mountain, the nation’s largest Confederate monument (the subject of the book she was writing, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, published in 2020).

Trethewey talked about memories of trips to Ship Island, about the dominance of Confederate monuments, of White monuments, and the absence of monuments to the 200,000 Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War described as the monumental landscape when no monuments are erected. She spoke expansively about flags, about Southern history, about Vicksburg, the Fugitive poets, King Cotton in 1907, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. She ended by speaking about Mississippi, its place in the imagination, and its unique sense of place marked by its terrible beauty and its complexity.

The next day, in the keynote address, The American Landscape Painting Tradition: History, Place, Charged Objects, and Southern Road Trips, I considered a larger context for the art of Bill Dunlap, using these four guiding themes. His ties to the landscape of Mississippi and his sense of place were nurtured by his family’s history in the state and by his memories of early road trips. In those days, he listened to his family’s voices telling stories as he studied the passing landscape, leaning over the front seat and looking across the dash of a moving car. Today, his art is still inspired by landscapes, now seen from the front seat of a moving automobile, one that he is driving, often on an interstate highway. The importance of memory and history in Dunlap’s work was noted early in his career by art critic Barbara Rose: Resonant memory, and history, was to become the theme of his work. She referred as well to his love of found objects, the items he calls charged objects: More often than not, the objects—shells, stones, gourds, branches, animal skulls and skin—are found in nature, souvenirs of the artist’s travels and adventures, charged with personal association and historic memories.⁵

Four symposium panels followed the keynote, with titles reflecting the themes of the day: Southern Road Trip, The Power of Place in Art, The Written Word and Sense of Place in Landscape, and Ways of Seeing the Landscape. In the Southern Road Trip, moderated by Betsy Bradley, John Alexander talked about road trips made during the 1970s with Bill Dunlap and Jane Livingston and said that on those road trips that are life-changing is the idea of sense of place. Road trips help you understand a sense of place if you do it the right way and immerse yourself in it, as opposed to driving through as a tourist and looking at it. Continuing, he said, When Jane, Bill, and I would go on road trips to various places … we didn’t just go by as tourists on a bus and look. We spent time with the people and became immersed in the places.

Julia Reed underscored the importance of these uniquely immersive journeys. It all involves getting in the car and getting on the road and going deep into these cultures that you otherwise wouldn’t understand. Building upon this, Alexander said that certain artists, and only a few artists, travel and see things that enhance or add to the core, which is their inner soul and essence of where they are. For Julia, it’s Greenville [Mississippi]. For me, it’s the swamps of the Southern forests and bayous. For Bill, it’s Mississippi and the foothills of the Appalachians. You dig into that core. It gives you an art form that is like a gumbo that is so much richer and better and more aromatic and more tasteful than a plain gumbo.

And on these automotive journeys of exploration and discovery, artists and writers often find darkness, as well as light, as Jane Livingston explained. We have a lot of landscape paintings in the United States ranging from Frederic Church and the Hudson River School to California painters to painters of Western art. But, she explained, when you paint the South, it’s a little more complicated than that. In both John’s and Bill’s work, there’s an undertone. There’s a darkness. There’s a complexity … a lot of John’s landscapes literally have this creepy darkness … a hovering atmosphere. I hate to say it, but there’s a hell of a lot of violence in Bill’s imagery. It just sneaks in there. Bill Dunlap agreed and added, It’s a very violent place I come from. Julia Reed expanded upon this idea. Like Shelby Foote said, until the Vietnam War, we were the only place that had lost a war and knew what that meant. And there is blood on the ground, not just from the war, but from all kinds of stuff we’d rather not face up to.

Sally Mann, addressing the topic of The Power of Place in Art in the panel moderated by Lisa Howorth, presented a selection of her photographs, many of Mississippi and Louisiana, and read a detailed passage from her book Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. She described the transition from photographing her family, with its private, individual memories, to landscape photography with more public, emotional memories, adding this thought: "I came to wonder if the artist who commands the landscape might in fact hold the key to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor. Since my place and its story were givens, it remained for me