Southern Gothic: Literary Intersections with Art from The Johnson Collection

About

on view October 1, 2026–January 3, 2027 at the LSU Museum of Art

This fall the LSU Museum of Art presents Southern Gothic: Literary Intersections with Art from The Johnson Collection. Drawing from the celebrated holdings of The Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Louisiana institutions and private collectors, this exhibition explores how visual artists have grappled with the American South’s layered history through a lens long cultivated in Southern literature.

Originally curated as a collaboration between The Johnson Collection and Wofford College, also in Spartanburg, the show examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists employed potent visual language to transcribe the tensions between the South’s idyllic aura and its historical realities. Using Southern Gothic literary traditions as inspiration, the grouping considers how artists translate into visual form the same tensions found in the writings of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Toni Morrison. Often described as a mood rather than a strict genre, Southern Gothic blends elements of horror, romance, decay, spirituality, and dark humor. In painting, printmaking, and sculpture, these sensibilities emerge as evocative landscapes, charged domestic interiors, allegorical scenes, stereotypical antebellum imagery, and portraits that hint at psychological depth and social complexity.

The core group of artworks has been expanded to engage Louisiana’s distinctive cultural environments, layered histories, and enduring traditions. Objects from The Johnson Collection are placed in conversation with selections from LSUMOA’s permanent collection and significant loans from the Louisiana State Museums system, the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, the renowned Roger Houston Ogden Collection, and art collector Jeremy Simien. This expanded framework creates a dynamic dialogue between regional voices and the broader scope of Southern art history. Together, the objects illuminate how artists have negotiated myth and memory, confronting the South’s romanticized imagery alongside its difficult and often contradictory realities.

Founded in 2002, The Johnson Collection has grown into a distinguished holding of more than 1,400 objects spanning multiple centuries that trace the cultural evolution of the American South. The organization champions the pivotal role Southern art plays within the national narrative and is dedicated to elevating historically under-recognized voices through thoughtfully curated publications and exhibitions that continually reassess and expand the story of Southern art.