A feature from the Spring 2019 issue.
Hancock’s art, which includes paintings, fabricated toys, a theatrical performance, and a graphic novel, defies categorization and pulses with an almost religious intensity. Much of his work has followed the denizens of his alternate reality called “The Moundverse,” where beastly, beautiful Mounds are often attacked by skeletal, sadistic Vegans. There’s a goddess figure named Undom Endgle, who represents the power of Black women as “bringers of color and light,” and TorpedoBoy, a heroic figure in razor-covered cleats. Hancock employs a constantly shifting aesthetic that suggests he can create literally anything.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
We compliment his lovely plumage. “Color doesn’t matter,” Laurel says, even though this is the only quality that strikes a newcomer at all—how pretty that dusty gray one is! What a fine burgundy comb! Foolish are the uninitiated.
With painstaking clarity, Dalton captures scenes from Louisiana bayous, small-town Alabama, and urban centers of Texas, documenting a pervasive sense of isolation across the South and the hope that defies it.
A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue
Like many other locals, I had never valued the glades. I had never learned to see past the scraggly trees and the rocky fields. A chance Google search one day told me about the wildflowers, these endemic species that carpet the barrens and are found nowhere else in the world. I started hiking the Flat Rock State Natural Area. I dove into deed research, seeking to know more about the people who used to carve a living out of the limestone.
Hancock’s universe is so detailed and varied that we had trouble narrowing our selection to just the five pieces we published in the Spring issue. Here, enjoy more of the Austin-based artist’s work, an example of what the New Yorker once described as his “boisterous mythologies.”
A Conversation with Chris Offutt
“I’m not much of a cook, and my relationship with food is more like fuel for a machine. In other words, I have to eat in order to do stuff—like be alive and write.”
An Omnivore essay from the Spring 2019 issue.
Due to his health, Leon Redbone can no longer be interviewed. In a way, he’s become a version of the old-time musicians he so admired, about whom little is known: You can only reach them through recordings, archival materials, and the accounts of other people. Longtime friends and band members tell me they knew never to ask about his past. Others say they were sworn to secrecy, and intend to keep the secrets. His own family members say they know little about his early life.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Auntie B doesn’t eat out on her own much because the cost to live in her residence includes food. She doesn’t miss cooking, cleaning, or grocery shopping. But after thirty minutes, she hadn’t described any meal that satisfied her. She hadn’t told me how anything tastes.
Consisting of images of rushing streams, secluded lakes, and the structures that disrupt or contain these waterways, the Savannah River Basin Photographic Survey depicts water as both a vital resource and a recreational point of connection.
A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue
My family has laid claim to a variety of nationalities and regional affiliations, yet there are still questions I reflect on from time to time regarding my own claim to my current home. Am I a Southerner, and do I have a right to call myself a Southerner? Will others recognize me as a Southerner, despite my lack of accent and because of my Asian face? And what does it mean to take on this identity—what does it mean for me to claim Dixie?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
CDS Shortwave is a new project from the Center for Documentary Studies’ DocX lab—a place for technology-influenced, imaginative thinking around documentary forms, styles, and perspectives.
On the architecture of white supremacy
Let us look again, now, at this beautiful house, read it this time as a series of universally legible signs for white supremacy. You arrive on horseback and wait outside a gate—the first of several barriers, both physical and human, that must be passed through to reach the master—and enter onto a private road that takes you through a cathedral-like apse of oaks, arranged to express the planter’s dominion over the natural world. From this road, you do not see the functional buildings—kitchen, smithy, stables—nor the quarters for the people the planter enslaves; those are small, unpainted, off to the side. The planter’s house stands alone at the end of this archway of boughs, a telos and a temple. Great white columns rise two stories from their plinths, supporting a pediment that drags its tip against the sky. It looks for all the world like a Roman temple. And who lives in temples but the gods?
