Opened 2010 Type of business Foundation | Address Atlanta | |
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Similar American Folk Art Museum, Ackland Art Museum, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, High Museum of Art, Institute 193 | ||
Souls Grown Deep Foundation works in coordination with leading museums and scholars to produce groundbreaking exhibitions, publications, using its extensive holdings, which includes approximately 1200 artworks and field photographs of the genre. Ranging from large-scale sculptural pieces to works on paper, the works in the collection date from the early twentieth-century to the present, a period that includes key moments in American history such as the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights movement, and the election of the country’s first African American president.
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The Souls Grown Deep Foundation was founded in 2010, but traces its roots to the mid-1980s, when William S. Arnett, an art historian, scholar and patron, began to collect the artworks of previously underappreciated self-taught African American artists across nine southeastern states. By the mid-1990s Arnett’s efforts resulted in an ambitious project to survey the visual tradition of the African American South: an exhibition and two-volume book, titled Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, which was ultimately presented at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and remains the most in-depth scholarly examination of the movement.
The Foundation is led by Maxwell L. Anderson, who serves as its President and a member of its Board of Trustees. Anderson concurrently serves as Executive Director of the New Cities Foundation and was previously director of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Collection
Through the use of its 1,200 artworks and thousands of field photographs, the organization’s goal is to bring this vital and quintessentially American art form to a wider audience and ensure its recognition as one of the great American contributions to the history of art. The Foundation’s holdings are extensive and unique in terms of scope and depth. They include works by more than 150 artists—among them Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, Purvis Young, Ronald Lockett, Joe Light, and the collective of quiltmakers that create The Quilts of Gee's Bend.
On November 24, 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that 57 works by contemporary African American artists from the Southern United States were donated to the Museum by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from its William S. Arnett Collection. An exhibition devoted to the gift will take place at the Metropolitan Museum in fall 2016.
As Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum, described the gift, “From Thornton Dial’s magisterial constructions to the emblematic compositions by the Gee’s Bend quilters from the 1930s onwards, this extraordinary group of works contributes immeasurably to the Museum’s representation of works by contemporary American artists and augments on a historic scale its holdings of contemporary art.”
Mission
From their mission statement: "Souls Grown Deep Foundation is dedicated to documenting, researching, preserving, and exhibiting the work of self-taught African American artists of the American South."