Ed McGowin and T.M. Dossett:
“True Stories” and “The Southern Voice”

Ed McGowin, under a variety of names and guises, has created an expansive body of art which has rarely fit comfortably into standard contemporary categories. As curator Jane Livingston observed in 1975, “Ed McGowin’s work has been notoriously difficult to characterize in words, and even to fix in the mind’s eye.” This remains true, to a significant degree, to the present date. Despite this, he has maintained a national reputation, working in a variety of media and styles, inspiring and challenging a generation of artists. What his diverse art forms—including paintings, sculptures, conceptual art projects, films, writings and public art installations—seem to have in common is a Southern sensibility, one rooted in his early experiences in Mississippi and Alabama, and marked by his appreciation of the oral, narrative and literary traditions of the South. This has been tempered, as well, by an intuitive outsider’s analysis of the evolving political and critical direction of New York’s art world.

Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1938, McGowin emerged from the Deep South, far from New York’s insider art circles, yet he quickly became a pioneering figure in the art worlds of New York, Washington and Baltimore during the 1960s and 1970s. He established a national profile as a conceptual artist and maker of abstract sculptural forms, demonstrating that he was an artist from the South who was keenly attuned to the nuances of both New York and the international art world. Over time, he was recognized as an “artist’s artist,” known for his technical skills, innovation and unique vision. Due, in part, to his continual evolutions in styles and materials, as well as his deliberate use of diverse names in his projects, McGowin remains an elusive target in many ways. At times baffling critics and the general public, he has avoided the creation of easily identifiable imagery that could be recognized simply as “Southern” by an expanding range of Southern collectors and art audiences.

Essential elements of his art and his aesthetic philosophy were embodied in works featured in two significant exhibitions of the 1970s, the “Name Change” project, presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1972 (discussed in a related essay by Tom Sokolowski), and “Ed McGowin’s True Stories,” presented in Washington at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1975. A third related exhibition, “The Southern Voice: Terry Allen, Vernon Fisher, Ed McGowin,” was presented at the Fort Worth Art Museum in 1981. These exhibitions document McGowin’s evolution as an early proponent of the pluralism that came to define the American art world in the 1980s and 1990s. The latter two exhibitions and the works of this period are the subjects of this essay, as are related works created by McGowin and T.M. Dossett in the 21st

Ed McGowin first moved to Washington in 1962, when he was selected to serve as an aid to Mississippi Congressman William Colmer. He had completed a B.S. degree at Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) in Hattiesburg, in December of 1960, studying in the small art department there with Vernon Merrifield, Walter Lok and Charles Ambrose. After one semester of graduate painting studies at the University of Alabama, encouraged by Merrifield, McGowin accepted a position as an art instructor and returned to Mississippi Southern, teaching there and supporting his young family until his move to Washington, in April of 1962. He established himself rapidly in Washington, visiting studios and befriending artists such as Howard Mehring, and meeting local gallery owners and museum officials, including Gudmund Vigtel at the Corcoran Gallery. At the invitation of Vigtel, an exhibition of his paintings was presented at the Corcoran in December of 1962. Following this first exhibition at the Corcoran, he was invited by Henrietta Ehrsam to join her stable of artists at the Henri Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia.

Encouraged by these developments and the promise of an exhibition at the Henri Gallery, McGowin moved back to Tuscaloosa to complete his MA degree in painting at the University of Alabama, in the fall of 1963, after he was offered a teaching assistantship. Alabama was recognized then as one of the most progressive art departments in the South. McGowin regards faculty members Theodore Klitzke, chairman of the department, Melville Price (an Abstract Expressionist painter and New York studio partner of Franz Kline), Tom Scott, Richard Zoellner and Howard Goodson as important influences upon the development of his early career. William Christenberry, who would become a teaching colleague of McGowin’s at the Corcoran and a prominent figure in the Washington art world, had served until 1961 as one of the youngest members of the Alabama art faculty, and was a also graduate of its MA program.

McGowin left Tuscaloosa in 1964, aspiring to be a painter, and returned to Washington, then a more supportive environment for a Southern artist than New York. In 1964, however, the New York art world was moving beyond Abstract Expressionism, embracing Pop Art and a range of emerging styles and media. During the 1960s, he witnessed a proliferation of new styles and movements including Pop art, Neo-Dada, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Conceptual art, Earth art and Feminist art. In April of 1964, before returning to Washington, he wrote to his dealer, describing a direction that seems to anticipate his future course in the art world, as well as his “Name Change” project of 1972. He indicated that his art would be “changing constantly, never repeating anything no matter how much I like it....I don’t want to be put in any school or group. It is too confining—I want to be able to do anything I damn please—which is the only way….I don’t want a label unless the label is change. I change every day, every hour, every second. Why shouldn’t my art change, and the more the better….”

In contrast, during this period his native region, the Deep South, was perceived by many to be a dark and dangerous place, unenlightened and primitive, far removed from the rest of the country, especially the world’s enlightened art capital, New York. Names and locations from Mississippi and Alabama dominated national television and newspaper headlines--Emmett Till; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King; Autherine Lucy; Medgar Evers; George Wallace; James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Eugene “Bull” Connor; Selma, Alabama; and Birmingham. While New York’s art wars were challenging, they were nothing compared to the brutal realities of the civil rights era in the segregated South. People died there—hung, burned, buried in levees, dumped in rivers, or they just disappeared, permanently—as civil rights and voter registration activities accelerated. And the nation watched.

For the nation, and for any sensitive person from the South, these were shocking images, disturbing realities. For Ed McGowin, these were deep and difficult issues, related to the very nature of his birth place and native region, issues that directly influenced his art, as first evident in the “Name Change” and “True Stories” exhibitions, and continuing to the present date. These were difficult realities to introduce directly into the contemporary art world during the time of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art, especially when there was limited recognition of the importance of the art and culture of the South. Andy Warhol, in his way, addressed the topic in works drawn from the front pages of the daily papers, works such as Red Race Riot (1963).

Consistent with his university art department training, McGowin’s work began with an abstract focus during the 1960s. Though trained as a painter, he quickly became a sculptor and pioneer in the use of vacuum-forming, creating a distinctive early body of abstract forms in a variety of new materials. From 1964 to 1966, he directed the McGowin/Bright Art School in Alexandria, Virginia. And, from 1966 to 1978, when he served as an associate professor of art and chair of the sculpture department at the Corcoran School of Art, McGowin emerged as a highly influential figure in the Washington and Baltimore art worlds.

By the early 1970s, the direction of his art changed. In 1971, he launched his unique “Name Change” project, legally changing his name twelve times and working under those names, in the following order: Alva Isaiah Fost; Lawrence Steven Orlean; Irby Benjamin Roy; Nathan Ellis McDuff; Eure Ignatius Everpure; Isaac Noel Anderson; Nicholas Gregory Nazianzen; Thornton Modestus Dossett; Ingram Andrew Young; Melvill Douglas O’Connor; Edward Everett Updike; and William Edward McGowin. He has explained this project concisely. “In October 1971 I had my name changed in the Washington DC courts to Thornton M. Dossett. This was one of the twelve legal names that I had over a period of eighteen months….This was an effort to demonstrate a theory I had about the development of art history as a pluralistic model rather than the linear model that Modernism had followed since its beginning.” Continuing, he clarified why the Dossett name was used so often. “While working on a number of things as Ed McGowin I have also developed a body of work under the name Dossett….The Dossett work refers in large part to race relations and the issues and events surrounding race relations that effected me growing up in the South. The contradictions, irony, fear, anger, etc. that effected me as a white male in a society that was going through a profound and fundamental change is something that I feel compelled to express.”

McGowin advanced his work in a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, “Ed McGowin’s True Stories,” presented from September 13 to October 26, 1975. Notably, as he recently affirmed, the concepts and the major works featured in this exhibition took final form in Paris, in 1974, in a studio and a residency made possible by the Galerie Darthea Speyer. In the “True Stories” exhibition he created a foundation for ideas he would explore throughout his career, also demonstrating the range of his technical and conceptual progress, as indicated by Jane Livingston. “He thought it more interesting to go from one medium or idea to another….he is a skilled painter, draughtsman and sculptor in plastic and other materials; when he decided to make a series of technically sophisticated prints he proved himself not only proficient but superior; he’s created works using both film and videotape. Beyond this, his is a verbal and conceptual artistic personality.” Livingston also reflected upon his influence in Washington.

One simply does not know whether his presence in the late sixties in a city like Washington, DC—an artistic center at the time, close to New York but certainly not New York—catalyzed McGowin’s independence of style, or whether he happened to be an artist from the South whose development would have followed a similar course no matter where he worked. (It does seem clear, for some reason, that he “had to get out” of Mississippi and Alabama; there were, however, any number of alternatives besides Washington.)….Be that as it may, McGowin settled here in 1964…and proceeded quickly to engage in every manner of unpainterly activity, besides continuing to paint….There is no doubt that he has been immensely influential—albeit more by his presence, and suggestive, experimental approach, than by an imposed “look”—through his years of teaching at the Corcoran.

For a Southerner from Mississippi and Alabama, what better way to address complex and difficult realities than in the form of the familiar, the Southern story, and related sculptural environments, as he did in his “True Stories” project? McGowin maintained a fine balance in this project, moving in new directions with “True Stories,” as Livingston has suggested. “McGowin has displayed both literal and metaphorical bents of mind as an artist, more the former when he was making ‘conceptual’ and sculptural work, more the latter in recent work.” Yet, in this body of work, she believes, he has created something new, “it is as though the artist at last has become confident, relaxed and self-possessed enough to act truly ingeniously—simply to tell stories. McGowin may be said to singly comprise an important part of a well-defined ‘movement’—narrative art as a component of conceptualism.” Noting that the exhibition “transcends an analysis of the artist as a painter,” she offers this conclusion: “What finally becomes the overarching issue and content of the project is the narrative spirit in which all of the works are conceived, in which the present catalogue is constructed, and which integrates all of the artist’s excessively disparate activities into a complex, fully formed art.”

By presenting his Southern stories within this museum context, transcending his earlier works, he demonstrated, as Livingston indicated that “the overarching issue and content of the project is the narrative spirit,” perhaps creating even a new art movement, what she calls “narrative art as a component of conceptualism.” In the exhibition and his tabloid catalogue, McGowin created a complex narrative world familiar to, but somehow different from, those known to Southerners. One series related to Hoyt, “The Stories About Hoyt,” including “Hoyt and the Dog’ and “Hoyt Clobbers Fur Ball.” Another main character is Bobby D., who was featured in two major stories and Corcoran installations, “Bobby D.’s Cabin” and “Bobby D.’s Chicken Episode,” the latter a Southern gothic tale centered around Bobby D., a push lawn mower, and a group of baby chickens: “he had buried these chickens about eighteen inches apart down this curvilinear driveway, right down the middle of it, each one up to its neck.” Anyone familiar with Southern storytelling knows where this is narrative is leading (and that a moral lesson would be involved, somehow), but also understands that the art is in the storytelling, as McGowin demonstrated in his concluding paragraphs (creating a tale that soon became legendary in Washington and Southern art circles).

The drive was made of a sort of sandy pea gravel, this little fine gravel and sand. So the chickens were in all these little mounds, buried about eighteen inches apart, making a curvilinear line, their heads sticking up, turning from side to side, and they were going “peep, peep, peep,” and it was a very strange sight. My grandmother said, “Bobby D., what is this?” She said, “What have you done this for?” And one or two of the brothers were saying, “What the hell is going on?” and swearing. And the women were speaking to one another sort of hysterically and the children were running around.
And with that, Bobby D. reached up under the house and pulled out one of these old-fashioned lawnmowers. And before anybody realized what was going on, Bobby D. ran as fast as he could with the lawnmower right down the row of chickens and just chopped off each biddy’s head as he ran. The women were screaming and shouting and the children were running and the men were sort of staggering and swearing at Bobby D. and trying to catch him before he could kill all these baby chickens. And my grandmother had sort of semi-collapsed; she was about to faint. I was sort of looking between Bobby D.’s legs as he went charging down this driveway. The dust was flying and the chicken feathers, and the blood from the chickens’ heads was flying.
Bobby D. just went right down all twelve chickens and never stopped. He just dropped the mower and there were a couple of brothers chasing him and he kept right on running and ran out through the lot down past the barn and right off into the woods. And he never came back. He just vanished again. Eventually they found him back in Detroit and he was still drunk and he was a derelict and was refusing any help from the family or anyone.
Finally, when Bobby D. was very old, he moved back to south Mississippi and bought himself a little house down by this creek, sort of in the swamp. And he spent his last years fishing.


In 2006, McGowin’s “True Stories” would be a radical concept and a challenging installation for many art museums, perhaps for some contemporary art centers as well. In 1975, in a Washington art museum, it was more than radical, reflecting the innovative and embracing nature of the curators (it was one of Jane Livingston’s first exhibitions at the Corcoran) and the administration of that institution (where, during the 1980s, controversy over the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe raised an entirely different set of issues). “True Stories” and McGowin’s evolving art forms in 1975 should also be considered within the larger context of the period, at a time when plans for the 1976 American Bicentennial celebrations were evolving, bringing a new level of appreciation and understanding of American art, and at a time when there was a new interest in the regions (and regionalism) of the country.

In 1975 and 1976, there was an emerging sense of the importance of contemporary Southern art and artists, and McGowin and his unique works were vital parts of this process. The foundations for the prominence and acceptance of Southern art today can be traced to this period, which expanded considerably during the 1980s. A milestone event in 1976, building upon what “True Stories” suggested, was the hosting of the Southern Rim Conference by Appalachian State University, organized by artist Bill Dunlap (whose ties to Washington’s art world were strong by this time) and curator Jane Livingston, bringing together a major number of the Southern artists who are now acknowledged leaders of what was then an emerging Southern art renaissance, not unlike the Southern literary renaissance of an earlier period. Notables present included McGowin, Dunlap, Livingston, William Christenberry, Terry Allen, William Eggleston, James Surls, John Alexander, Marcia Tucker, Paul Schimmel, Jerry Noe, Bill Fagaley and Charmaine Locke. That same year the appearance of Eggleston’s color photographs, featured in the Museum of Modern art’s first exhibition of color photography, in the exhibition and book, “William Eggleston’s Guide,” served as another critical milestone in this process.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, interest in the nation’s regions expanded-- especially in the Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast--as those areas experienced a new boom period and as populations, industries and corporations embraced them. In the art world this resulted in a new form of regionalism, different from that classified as “Regionalist” during the 1930s, which featured John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Benton lived until 1975, long enough to see the return of narrative traditions and to defend his career, including the fact that he never identified himself as a “regionalist,” explaining in 1969 that it was a pejorative term used by New York critics after he, Curry and Wood left New York for the Midwest and were then typecast as provincials. “We came in the popular mind to represent a home-grown, grass-roots artistry which damned ‘furrin’ influence and which knew nothing about and cared nothing for the traditions of art as cultivated city snobs, dudes and aesthetes knew them. A play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles.”

For McGowin, the work of the late 1970s and early 1980s continued the trends and directions he had initiated by 1975, leading to the development of his “inscapes,” sculptures he described as “narrative architecture,” such as Mississippi Inscape, dedicated in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1979. He designed it as a tribute and metaphor to the writings of Mississippi native William Faulkner, incorporating quotations from Faulkner on the exterior of the piece, surrounding an interior tableau that was visible through a window opening. He developed the concept for a related work in the series in 1981, Spanish Music Inscape, for the University of Southern Mississippi, as a tribute to Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Building upon his unique and expanding Southern narrative aesthetic, he offered clarification of his intent for these works. “I was trying to invent a new aesthetic I thought was interesting. I decided to invent a piece of sculpture that the viewer could read going from one piece of information to the next piece….It’s another layer that allows the viewer to participate in the work without having an art history background. It makes it more accessible, if not populist in its intent.”

By 1981, the year he completed Spanish Music Inscape, McGowin was featured with a
group of emerging national artists in the exhibition, “The Southern Voice: Terry Allen, Vernon Fisher, Ed McGowin,” organized by the Fort Worth Art Museum. This show was significant for stressing his importance as a Southern artist, and placing him within the company of these two prominent figures. “The Southern Voice” exhibition and catalogue also reflected a very different attitude toward regions and regional art than that evident during the 1930s (especially in contrast to that described by Benton, in 1969). By the time of this show, McGowin was far from unknown; he had been featured in thirty one-man shows, beginning in 1962, in galleries including the Henri Gallery, the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Simmone Stern Gallery, the Fendrick Gallery and Sculpture Now, to museums and institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S. 1, the American Culture Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.

However, “The Southern Voice” added a new level, and a new focus, to the recognition of his emerging vision, and his regionalist ties. Looking back, in 2006, to the importance of “The Southern Voice” exhibition, McGowin has stated that the exhibition was directly related to the evolving and expanding Southern aesthetic that he initiated in the “Name Change” project of 1972, but even more directly to the Southern narrative and conceptual concerns of “True Stories” in 1975. He considers the period from 1974 to 1976 to be a “breakthrough period” for his art, which “until then, had been other directed.” Yet, as he clarifies, he did not travel to Washington seeking to be a Southern artist, or to develop a Southern aesthetic; that issue emerged later, over time.

From 1964, when I returned to Washington, until around 1974, I was not trying to be a Southern artist. It was not my intent to be a Southern artist. I was operating out of the mainstream, even in Washington, where the mainstream was Color Field painting. Sam Gilliam was an extension of the Color Field painting. Rockne Krebs and I both functioned outside of that mainstream approach. So how hard was it to be Southern in Washington? It was easy to be Southern in Washington. But the art was not addressed to being Southern. Nobody seemed to care. My art became Southern in “True Stories,” and in works leading up to “True Stories,” before I went to Paris in 1974. Even in the “Gilliam, Krebs, McGowin” show at the Corcoran, in 1969, there were pieces that appeared to be abstract but the force behind them was narrative, especially one work called Mo-Digger, made from large plastic sheets with silk-screened dots and urethane foam balls. It was really about this mythical swamp monster we knew as kids, that we heard about in summer camp, this monster that would get us in the woods and swamps. This and other seemingly abstract works in that show had a narrative foundation.

Perhaps, most importantly, this show was significant for acknowledging that McGowin was a pioneer in the emergence of Southern contemporary art, of a “Southern Voice.” Prominent critic Dave Hickey, in his essay for the exhibition’s catalogue, wrote: “The thing that interests me is that Terry Allen and Vernon Fisher and Ed McGowin seem to share a lot of the strategic concerns with the three best artists to come out of this area in recent years: Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Barthelme and Robert Wilson.” Continuing, he observes that “this is a new culture: the post-technology Sun-belt, so the artist has a new job to do and a new job requires new tools. Lacking those tools, he has to engage in research and development with the materials at hand.” Hickey offers his analysis of what is most unique about the work of these three artists.

All three of these guys, Allen, Fisher and McGowin, are somehow concerned with the way people live down here, or out here, or over here, but the traditional forms of imitation don’t get it for them, don’t communicate what it is about the world that they wish to “vilify or celebrate,” as Barthelme puts it, so they have to mix and match. If you look at the work in this exhibition, you’ll see versions of all the traditional conventions of imitation: painting, sculpture, song, theatre, fiction, opera, etc, etc but there are also tactics inferred from other more secular forms of expression: the pageant, the tableau, the arrest report, the legal brief, the job application, the map, the homecoming float, the home show exhibit, the public school audio-visual, the vacation Bible school felt board, the half-time activity and the science fair booth.

After the American Bicentennial cultivated new interest in American art and culture, and after “The Southern Voice” exhibition was presented in Fort Worth, a series of regional and national museum exhibitions, and related catalogues and publications, placed emphasis upon the art and artists of the American South, bringing the art of the region to growing national audiences. These included the Corcoran Gallery’s Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980 (1982); the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Painting in the South: 1564-1980 (1983) and Art and Artists of the South: The Robert P. Coggins Collection (1984). Beginning in 1992, when the Morris Museum of Art opened as the first museum dedicated to Southern Art (with the Coggins Collection as its core), and continuing in 1994, when the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (founded upon the collection of Roger Houston Ogden) was announced by the University of New Orleans (opened 1999, 2003), recognition of Southern art became an established fact. Collections, exhibitions, art markets, publications and developing scholarship reflect these realities.

By the early 1980s, when Ed McGowin had served as an artist, professor and leader in the contemporary Washington art world, was an established resident of New York (beginning in 1976) and served as an art professor at the State University of New York, he had become, to some degree, an art world insider. Beginning in the 1970s, attracted no doubt by his Southern roots and his interest in the Southern narrative, he witnessed the emergence of exhibitions and interest devoted to self-taught art and artists, and began to collect in this field. For thirty years, he and his wife, artist Claudia DeMonte, have assembled an important collection of outsider and folk art, which they have exhibited and traveled in Japan and elsewhere as “Art in Paradise, From the Claudia DeMonte & Ed McGowin Collection.” Focusing primarily upon artists they have met and known, including many from Mississippi and Alabama, their collection now includes works by Lucy Estrin, Howard Finster, Lonnie Holley, James Harold Jennings, O.W. Pappy Kitchens, R.A. Miller, Bernice Sims, Mary T. Smith, Jimmie Lee Sudduth, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Mose Tolliver, Bill Traylor, Inez Nathaniel Walker, Fred Webster, and Luster Willis.

More than forty years ago, McGowin indicated that he looked forward to creating art that was “constantly changing, never repeating anything, no matter how much I like it.” His evolution during the 1970s and 1980s reflected this philosophy, and his “Name Change” project anticipated the pluralism of today’s art world. He recently underscored this point, stating that “pluralism as it is used today refers to simultaneous schools of art coexisting. In my case the names were a metaphor for this, anticipating its predictability. You could see it coming.” During the 1990s he became increasingly involved in the creation of large-scale sculptural projects and grew less interested in traditional gallery and museum exhibitions. These larger public projects made it possible for him to explore issues in the studio at a more personal pace, especially the T.M. Dossett projects reflecting the racial history of Mississippi and Alabama as it resurfaced in the past decade.

In 2000, reflecting the evolution of his aesthetic philosophy, the Mississippi Museum of Art presented “Works In Progress: Ed McGowin,” an exhibition featuring works that mirrored concerns of an earlier period, revised and updated. As explained by curator Rene Paul Barilleaux, the show focused on works by T. M. Dossett. “In the traditions of the South, McGowin uses storytelling techniques to construct his visual journeys. The strong linear quality and stark silhouettes in these cartoon-like narratives make them inviting and familiar. Ironically, they seduce the viewer with their charm and primitive lyricism before fully revealing their disquieting subjects—for example, civil rights activists Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers and the death of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”

These long-standing concerns continue to the present date. In a recent artist statement, related to a proposal for a “Delta studio” for the Deep South, McGowin suggests that he is far from finished with Dossett or the goals he established for this persona. “As an artist that grew up in Mississippi and Alabama I have long been curious about any ‘Southern’ mystique or the lack of it. Over the years I have developed a body of work under the pseudonym T.M. Dossett that has aimed at creating an aesthetic to acknowledge the kind of irony and contradiction, the mystique if you will, that I see demonstrated in so much Southern culture.” Continuing, he explains what it is he is exploring in (and what he means by) Southern culture.

It is my opinion that the roots of Southern culture come not from the popular notion of the plantation life style myth, which only represented a small fraction of the population, but from the experience of the white society being defeated and occupied in what is arguably the most psychologically shocking experience in the history of the U.S. I believe that it is this experience for the white population, joined with the influence on the society by the enslaved African population, and the combining of those two cultures after the war that has produced whatever uniqueness that is the Southern mystique. At its best this can have glorious results as demonstrated by the food, music, literature, vernacular architecture and to my
mind, especially the art of the untrained.

Issues addressed, in diverse ways, more than 30 years ago by Ed McGowin (and T.M. Dossett) still drive his distinctive vision of contemporary American art. During the intervening years, McGowin has explored the realities of other, diverse art forms in a variety of media—including self-taught and outsider art, as well as art from “third world” countries. He has collaborated with artists from these countries, and has explored other collaborative ventures. As one new T.M. Dossett project suggests, he has imagined ways to collaborate with workers and artists in the Deep South, perhaps inspired by the success of Project Alabama and the quilters of Gees Bend, Alabama. Another Dossett project, a new painting hanging in his Connecticut studio, devoted to the Civil Rights-era murder of Medgar Evers, is being completed in a style “that will not be well-painted, or well-crafted, but that will be just as brutal, just as ugly, as the historical event itself.” The works and words of Ed McGowin indicate that, in his South, “the past is never past,” and the narrative and the conceptual, the ironic and the absurd, endure, in a delicate balance.

My art is derived from my roots; not only the narrative, but also the conceptual art—the way I perceive and go about something—both come from that ironic culture. It comes out of that mix of being born into a society that was defeated and occupied, and that was married to a society and culture that was enslaved. And it comes from all that boiling around. That is what I am interested in, as an artist. And, I think, I could make a good argument for my name change project. I could say that being multi-disciplinary is a natural outgrowth of that environment, for me. It may not be for someone else. Irony and absurdity are parts of Southern culture that I recognize, that I embrace, in my art.


J. Richard Gruber, Director
The Ogden Museum of Southern Art
University of New Orleans
June, 2006

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