Many artists who participated in last week’s conversation about the arts in rural Alabama recognized the draw of the Black Belt for tourism, and they want to amplify it.
Above all else, the Alabama Black Belt values its history and traditions. See the article : The Black Phone, Netflix’s The Gray Man and more new movies to watch. The quilts, sculptures, and paintings that come from the region tell its story and are an integral part of the cultural and economic vitality of the Black Belt.
Women in rural Wilcox County sew colorful quilts because that was their great-grandmothers’ livelihood decades ago. It reminds them of the time when their black ancestors sheltered on plantations or found economic empowerment by selling their art during the Civil Rights Movement.
Charlie Lucas, the famous Selma “Tin Man” sculptor, makes his art because “art is our story.” His great-grandfather was a blacksmith, and it was he who introduced Lucas to the metal work that he incorporates into each of his pieces.
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The recognizable Miller family pottery, made from Perry County clay, has a history of more than 150 years. National folk art collectors value his vases and bowls, but the family still sells them at local festivals and galleries such as Black Belt Treasures in Camden.
“You can talk a lot of crap about Alabama, and it sticks in a lot of areas, but one thing we’ve produced is a wide range of artists, from writers to musicians to craft artists, and many of them have their roots in traditional. culture,” said retired Alabama folklorist Joey Brackner. They are from this place.
Brackner and other representatives from across the arts gathered in Selma last week to discuss the joys and struggles of carrying the torch for Alabama traditions. There to listen were Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, president of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Dr. Elliot Knight, director of the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
“There is a strong network of artists and arts organizations in rural Alabama. There is also a need for funding and support for their work,” Jackson said in a statement to the Advertiser. “There was a healthy conversation around the table about the resources that are available to support this work. Sometimes that support is at the federal level through the National Endowment for the Arts. Sometimes it is at the regional, state or local level.”
Brackner worked for the Alabama State Council on the Arts for 36 years, chronicling the work of traditional artists in Alabama and ensuring they were not left out of NEA and ASCA funding opportunities.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he said public support for the arts through tax dollars focused primarily on bringing “someone else’s art,” such as orchestras and ballets, to Alabama’s underserved populations.
“There is nothing wrong with those art forms,” he said. “Now, though, it also includes lifting up those arts that are from Alabama communities.”
Many artists who participated in the conversation recognized the appeal of the Black Belt for tourism and want to expand it.
Sulynn Creswell, executive director of the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, said the organization is intentionally located in Wilcox County “to attract tourists from the interstates to communities in the Black Belt region.”
To date, he said Black Belt Treasures has sold more than $1.9 million worth of works by local artists, and tourists from all 50 states and 32 other countries have visited the gallery.
However, the problem Black Belt artists may face in attracting tourists is lack of access. Without many places where tourists can stay or restaurants where they can eat, the artists said it’s hard to bring people to rural Alabama, even though they have a story worth sharing.
Limited broadband access also adds another barrier.
“One of the things we want to do is make sure that this craft becomes an economic engine for small communities like where we are,” said Kim V. Kelly, a consultant with Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy. “People want to be here and they want to buy products, but in Wilcox County, it’s very small.”
Kelly works with Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy on a pro bono basis and helped the organization achieve 501(c)(3) status. The nonprofit organization aims to preserve the history of the original Freedom Quilting Bee, which was established in 1966 as an organization of black women who sold their quilts on a large scale during a time when they would otherwise be deprived. of your rights.
Before the Freedom Quilting Bee opened in Alberta and secured contracts with retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the area to advocate for voting rights.
“His message to the assembled crowd, and it was a great crowd, was that when you register to vote and when you vote, you will get your freedom,” Kelly said. “The Freedom Quilting Bee was called because of the speech he gave.”
The 4,200-square-foot manufacturing building closed before the turn of the century, when people moved out and quilting returned to being a traditional art form, not a manufactured product. Now, however, the nonprofit organization Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy is working to restore the building and turn the 14 acres that surround it into a community center for artists. They plan to organize workshops and tours, build cabins for lodging and have a gift shop.
The Alabama State Council on the Arts awarded the nonprofit a $35,000 design grant to begin executing this plan in October. Kelly looks forward to the future of the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy and said the nonprofit will potentially apply for National Endowment Grants, or NEAs, for the project as well.
“They said one of the things the NEA wants to do more of is give direct grants to rural communities and individual nonprofits instead of funneling money through different organizations,” Kelly said. “So I’m very interested in the NEA’s commitment to that.”
Several artists mentioned that the prospect of applying for NEA grants can be daunting. Due to the agency’s broad reach, smaller organizations or individual artists sometimes worry that their application is one of a massive influx from across the country.
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“It can be intimidating to apply for something with the national donation,” said Elvie Schooley, director of the DRUM program. “But one of the needs that we have is that we need financial support to develop teaching teams, because our program comes with a curriculum, the services that we provide, and we also collect data to understand our impact. We were busy.”
Schooley’s nonprofit uses arts education through summer camps and after-school programs to teach West African drumming and dance in Montevallo. He said he believes art should be a part of every child’s education, saying it was moving to meet more than a dozen people in Selma dedicated to similar goals.
“The invisible divisions in our communities, that racial divide fades away when you have art as a catalyst,” he said. “Art has found a way to create community.”
Hadley Hitson covers the rural South for the Montgomery Advertiser and Report for America. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support their work, subscribe to Advertiser or donate to Report for America.
