The Whole of the South
The multimedia visual art of Ted Whisenhunt mystically conjures the totality of the South—our flora and fauna, our food and music, our people and communities—in strikingly original ways.
The rusty license plates, cicadas, and Mason jars spoke to me from afar. A crow perched on the rump of a wooden mule gave me the side-eye.
As I made my way through the Huntsville Museum of Art, past gallery walls hung with a brilliantly curated collection of Southern art, I couldn’t help glancing ahead at the spectacle that awaited at the end of my self-guided tour. For me, it was a little like a kid patiently eating his vegetables with his mind on dessert. I took my time, digesting the more conventional paintings, savoring the delayed gratification.
When I finally arrived in the expansive gallery that contained a solo exhibit titled “Cultivated,” the riot of natural objects and thrift store finds that greeted me was an assault on the senses—a glorious fusion of the found and the formed, held together with baling wire and ten-penny nails. The assortment of ordinary items that formed the large, three dimensional works rendered them at once familiar and otherworldly, like an unexpected haunting by an old friend.
The whole thing seemed to scream, this is the South, these are our things, this is our place. This complex tangle of material culture, this thoughtful assemblage of reclaimed items, it was who we are. The artist seemed to reframe the entire Southern narrative with only the visual language of our cultural flotsam and jetsam.
Six weeks later, I couldn’t stop thinking about the aptly named “Cultivated.” What was it that so captivated me about the commingling of fancy and poignancy? What sort of artist taps into a vein of Southernness so deep that the mind is still buzzing with it weeks after viewing?
When another month went by and I found myself daydreaming about one or other of the pieces I encountered in Huntsville, I was moved to do something that rarely crosses my mind: I had to meet the artist. I needed to know how he casts that kind of spell.
Either that, or I needed an exorcism.
Not Folk Art. Folksy Art?
If untutored, creative genius defines folk art, Whisenhunt is anything but a folk artist—at least as far as the untutored part is concerned. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Birmingham-Southern College, an MFA from Florida State University, and has just recently completed requirements for a second MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art—this time with a concentration in graphic design. On a day-to-day basis, he is busily engaged as a professor of art at Young Harris College in North Georgia. Before that he was a sort of one-man art department at Judson College, a small liberal-arts institution near Selma, Alabama, that closed its doors in 2021. Such credentials exclude him from the ranks of visionary and outsider artists, and yet, there is a quality to his work that suggests a certain point of view rooted in the folk artist’s sublime naïveté. It is quite the feat for a trained artist.
For me, walking through the “Cultivated” exhibit in Huntsville was an invitation to contemplative whimsy. Many of the pieces were kinetic, simultaneously engaging the imagination and tactile sense: whirligigs could be cranked to life; flies buzzed about forest creatures; cow bones dangled and swayed on the air currents of human movement. Other works explored the interaction of people with their environment or served as reminders of a fading and hauntingly familiar material culture, vaguely reminiscent of the depression era. The thoughtfully rendered pieces managed to evoke tradition without the attendant sentimentalism present in similar works; they were slyly clever without being cloying.
He doesn’t claim to be a folk artist, but doesn’t run away from the obvious parallels and the questions they raise about the squishy ground between folk and fine art.
The artist is keenly aware of “folk art adjacent” comparisons. He doesn’t claim to be a folk artist, but doesn’t run away from the obvious parallels and the questions they raise about the squishy ground between folk and fine art. That the notion provokes passions on both sides of that ill-defined divide, doesn’t seem to trouble him. Folksy idioms and forms do not, by themselves, qualify one as a folk artist, but Whisenhunt seems to exploit the definitional vagaries to maximum effect. He openly admires the vibrant colors, diversity of materials and the resourcefulness of folk masters, and much of his own work can be thought of as an homage to the larger-than-life characters of Southern, outsider art—the Howard Finsters and Thornton Dials who in the twentieth century grabbed the attention of the global art world.
But the expansive aesthetic vocabulary, refined technique, and training evident in Whisenhunt’s finished works never let you forget that folk art comparisons have their limits. His eye for detail, masterful finishes, and complex narratives—often jarring, sometimes darkly humorous—suggest a sophistication that belies the folksiness in the presentation. His more recent graphic design compositions—most of them created for a master's thesis—depart almost entirely from vernacular forms while still evoking an intense sense of Southernness. They quite evidently flow from the same creative mind, but it’s hard to put a finger on why one might think so.
Pickin’ & Paintin’ & Sculpture-Makin’
If you shook Ted Whisenhunt’s family tree, far more musicians than visual artists would fall out. His upbringing in a musical household established an early sense of family and community. The branches of his maternal and paternal lines are adorned with first-rate old-time and bluegrass pickers who almost certainly influenced the young creative’s aesthetic choices in his formative years.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that when the artist references community in his work, music often opens the doors to it. Anyone with a passing knowledge of music and the rural South will understand that a banjo picker has easy access to people and places where a college professor or fine artist might find it difficult to establish a foothold. But the universality of music and the respect musicians afford their own ensures that a good picker is almost always welcomed into an old-time jam. Whisenhunt sees music making as a key through-line integrating his work and community.
Whisenhunt’s artistic impulse draws few distinctions between the various facets of Southern culture: food, art, music, and community play interchangeable roles in his world.
When he was in Alabama, the Kudzu String Band, with Whisenhunt on banjo, played bluegrass festivals and headlined old-time music events. Relocated to North Georgia, he now fronts Cornbread Ted and the Butterbeans, an act as eclectic as one of his multimedia sculptures. By now you’ll guess that the choice of kudzu, butterbeans and cornbread—ubiquitous Southern flora and foodways, deeply ingrained in rural identity—is no coincidence. Whisenhunt’s artistic impulse draws few distinctions between the various facets of Southern culture: food, art, music, and community play interchangeable roles in his world.
Whisenhunt’s prowess as a banjoist (and passable skills with other stringed instruments) lends itself to an irresistible number of roots music styles including ragtime, blues, old-time and a sort of hybrid bluegrass. Listeners sometimes have a hard time pigeonholing his music, but that’s rather precisely what Whisenhunt aims for—that quizzical look that overcomes concert or gallery goers when they experience something new and yet oddly, bone-deep familiar.
Streams of Consciousness
A longtime fascination with wading Southern waters began by befriending crawdads, tadpoles, and salamanders in a shallow creek behind Whisenhunt’s boyhood home. In adulthood, that translated into a passion for paddling and whitewater rafting. For the artist, it was always about the cultures that coalesced round the rivers of Southern Appalachia that commanded his attention more than the thrill of frothing rapids.
Whisenhunt’s most recent work can be taken as a broader exploration of the South through his experiences traversing the vital arteries and watersheds of four states. His thesis exhibition, “Watermarks,” and its companion book of the same name, are an intimate portrait of the water that rages through the river gorges of Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The exhibition, which opens August 29 at Young Harris College’s Campus Gate Art Gallery, is part travelogue, part environmental impact study, and part ode to river culture.
Tagging along for the “Watermarks” journey, we get to see the river through the eyes of recreational paddlers and anglers, chemists and hydrologists working to improve river ecology, preachers who immerse believers like John the Baptizer in the River Jordan, biologists who study the abundant life that teems in the water, and average people who are born to these environs and see themselves as loving caretakers. Whisenhunt’s probing curiosity and creativity connects all these disparate perspectives. He somehow makes his fellow travelers see the beauty of these wild places and the people who inhabit them. More than that, he gently moves us to reckon with the uncertain future they both face. If ever art served a nobler purpose, somebody will have to remind me what that is.
He somehow makes his fellow travelers see the beauty of these wild places and...gently moves us to reckon with the uncertain future they face. If ever art served a nobler purpose, somebody will have to remind me what that is.
“Watermarks” will remind you what it’s like to float down a lazy river on a perfect summer day, or turn over mossy rocks in search of mud devils. It will remind you that water is life—a precious, shared resource we disregard and squander at our own peril.
The Myth of One South
I once asked the Southern literary titan, Clyde Edgerton, if the regionalist label bothered him, if “Southernness” was too narrow a lens through which to view his astounding body of work. The quick-witted novelist allowed he didn’t mind keeping company with the likes of William Faulkner, if that’s what it meant to be a regionalist. At the time, I remember pondering the divergent styles of those two writers, and the curious similarities of Faulkner’s Mississippi and Edgerton’s North Carolina. It’s a thought Ted Whisenhunt can appreciate.
As an artist whose work takes in broad swaths of the region’s bucolic landscape, and embraces the diverse people who populate it, Whisenhunt may be better positioned than most to talk about what makes an artist Southern. Even so, he’s reluctant to make grand pronouncements on the subject, preferring to let the work speak for itself.
His work shouts with clarity: there is no single Southern identity. There are only people connected by a sense of community, a deep awareness of the complexities of Southernness, and a shared responsibility for the region’s history, warts and all. In Whisenhunt’s vision, that might mean the repetition of the number three to symbolize the omnipresence of the Christian trinity of father, son, and holy spirit. It might summon subtle references to haints, omens, and common folk beliefs. It might look like brooding darkness and child-like whimsy in the same piece of art. It might take the form of a muddy riverbank—actual Southern soil—smeared across a canvas, or a junk store bauble finding a second life as the crowning glory of a big sculpture. In each instance, Whisenhunt’s deep, generational roots in Southern places define the work, but it’s the pitch-perfect way he channels the cultures that make it truly original.
His work shouts with clarity: there is no single Southern identity. There are only people connected by a sense of community, a deep awareness of the complexities of Southernness, and a shared responsibility for the region’s history, warts and all.
In contemporary community development circles, the term “place-making” is often deployed in the interest of economic progress. The concept asserts residents might intentionally create appealing spaces, using a community’s unique “assets” to attract outside investment. It’s a mercenary approach to local culture—at best, an economic band-aid, at worst, outright exploitation. But artists like Ted Whisenhunt offer alternatives to the soullessness of such crass commercial pursuits. His work argues that places leave indelible stamps on the people who inhabit them, if they care enough to scratch beneath the surface; that community informs creativity in tangible ways that can abolish cliches and get to the heart of who people are. That’s the only “place-making” that matters.
Ted Whisenhunt doesn’t live the image of the tortured artist, toiling away in the isolation of his studio. You are more likely to catch him kayaking the Ocoee River or picking his banjo at a music festival somewhere. But you can count on one thing: when he gets back in the studio, the work of his hands will somehow mystically conjure the burble of water and the resonance of banjo strings.
“Waterworks” at Young Harris College, August 29-September 26
Ted Whisenhunt’s latest exhibition opens Thursday at Young Harris College’s Campus Gate Art Gallery, 5140 College Street in Young Harris, Georgia.
About the author
Shawn Pitts’s writing has appeared in Southern Culturesand The Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, among other periodicals. Shawn has served on the boards of The Tennessee Folklore Society, Humanities Tennessee, and The Tennessee Arts Commission, as well as numerous economic and community development agencies. He lives in Selmer, Tennessee, and is a founding director of Arts in McNairy, a thriving local arts organization.
- Shawn Pittshttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/shawn-pitts/
- Shawn Pittshttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/shawn-pitts/
