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Issue 124, Spring 2024

Building on the Oxford American’s years-long tradition of publishing compelling works of art alongside prose and poetry, the Southern Art Issue explores multiple pathways of visual expression and their practitioners. “The art and stories throughout the issue imagine and recast maps, borders, and the very notion of time,” art editor Alyssa Ortega Coppelman writes in her prologue. Short fiction by Iheoma Nwachukwu and a graphic story by Wesley Allsbrook appear alongside words and work from creators of paintings, drawings, photography, textile, mixed media, ceramic works, and more. The Spring 2024 edition also includes work by Marcus Dunn that explores the horror and complexity of Native American boarding school stories, a new reflection by multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker RaMell Ross, an essay about working in an art-framing shop by award-winning author Wendy Brenner, and a selection of landscapes by renowned portraitist Dawoud Bey.

Prologue: Dredging the Sea
By Alyssa Ortega Coppelman

POINTS SOUTH

Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife
By Wendy Brenner

What If It All Burned Down?
By Katrina Andry

Hosanna Japa Town
A story by Iheoma Nwachukwu

Plain Art
By Holly Haworth

POEMS

A triptych by Analicia Sotelo

FEATURES

THE ENTWINING OF MATTER
Dianna Settles infuses her paintings with flora, earth, water, and breath
Q&A by Alyssa Ortega Coppelman

GROUND CONTROL
Digital surveillance, global capitalism, and Gobelin tapestry
By Noelle Mason

ELEGY
Dawoud Bey makes the past visible in the present
Q&A by Danielle Amir Jackson

RE/EDUCATED
On painting a new record of Indigenous history
By Marcus Dunn

THE WORK
A graphic story by Wesley Allsbrook

SUNNY SIDE UP
Notes from inside the crate
By RaMell Ross

STRANGE PARALLELS
Looking closely at the other Panama City
Photographs by José Castrellón

TAMMIE RUBIN’S COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHY
The artist reclaims truths and lives, lost and forgotten
By Tyler Isaiah Campbell

OMNIVORE

FLASH OF THE SPIRIT
How photographer Rose Marie Cromwell sees the world
Q&A by Kamille D. Whittaker

THE MYTHIC AND THE EVERYDAY
Artist Raul Rene Gonzalez finds the beauty and the iconic in domestic life
Q&A by Michelle García

THE THREADS OF TIME AND PLACE
Sonya Yong James creates monumental moments thread by thread
Q&A by Beth Ward

ART BY: Ben Tollefson, Lauren Lesley, Preetika Rajgariah, Taylor Holland, Katrina Andry, Fidelis Joseph, Annie Wellborn, Dianna Settles, Noelle Mason, Dawoud Bey, Marcus Dunn, Wesley Allsbrook, RaMell Ross, José Castrellón, Tammie Rubin, Rose Marie Cromwell, Raul Rene Gonzalez, and Sonya Yong James

COVER: My butterfly year, 2022, acrylic and colored pencil on wood panel, by Dianna Settles. Courtesy the artist and MARCH