Reclaiming History: Selections from the Tinwood Foundation

This exhibition highlights a generation of Southern artists in the 1980s whose work became a form of resistance, resilience, and remembrance. Working in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, they carried forward the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, confronting systemic injustice through murals, prints, paintings, and sculpture. Some spoke out directly—against police brutality, voter suppression, and racial violence—while others embedded messages in abstract forms and coded symbols. Whether loud or quiet, their voices were clear: art matters, and so do the people who make it. These artists, often overlooked, formed the second and third lines of the Movement—continuing the fight for equity through creativity. Their work reminds us that justice is not won once, but demanded again and again.

The Arnett family played a major role in bringing attention to Black Southern artists working outside the mainstream art world. Beginning in the 1980s, William Arnett and his sons traveled across the Deep South, building relationships with artists and collecting work that museums had long ignored—quilts, yard sculptures, assemblages, paintings. In 2010, they established the Souls Grown Deep Foundation to ensure this art would be preserved and seen. Since then, they’ve helped place hundreds of works by more than 160 artists into major museums, from the Met to the High to the National Gallery. Thanks to their efforts, this work—so rooted in place, struggle, and creative defiance—is now recognized as central to the story of American art.