New on Mississippi Stories, films created by Southern Studies graduate students Victoria De Leone and Rebecca Lauck Cleary as part of SST 598: Documenting Southern Foodways Class in spring 2017. Southern Foodways Alliance Pihakis Film Fellow Ava Lowrey taught the course.
We’ve just posted a new Mississippi Story, a collection of excerpts from Dr. Andy Harper’s Fall 2016 Documenting the South in Film course. The student films tell stories about education, violence, activism, art, race, sexuality, and music in contemporary Mississippi.
Southern Documentary Project Producer / Director John Rash has just returned from a week of cultural exchanges and discussions as an invited presenter and teacher at Photo Beijing, the largest annual celebration of international photography in Beijing, China.
The Center will host a Brown Bag screening of An Outrage, a documentary film about lynching in the American South at noon on Thursday, October 19 in Barnard Observatory. Filmmakers Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren will introduce the film and take questions. They will also attend Dr. Andy Harper’s Documenting the South in Film class following the screening.
Photographs from the Do Good Fund’s photo collection will be exhibited at various venues in Mississippi during the fall of 2017. Those venues include the Gammill Gallery (Southern People, Southern Places) from late September through mid-December, the UM Art Department’s Gallery 130 (NOW: Contemporary Southern Photography) during October, as well as at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gallery of Art and Design (Portraits of Southerners) October 12–December 12. There are smaller exhibits scheduled in several Water Valley venues and possibly one in Sumner.
The photographs in this exhibit are from last spring’s Southern Studies seminar in documentary photography taught by David Wharton. The students’ semester-long assignment was to construct a visual inquiry of north Mississippi, paying special attention to comparing some of the area’s small communities to bustling, college-town Oxford.
Last week, we hosted a three-day documentary workshop for 11 incoming and current MA students in Southern Studies and students in the new MFA in Documentary Expression program. Documentarians Andy Harper, John Rash, and Rex Jones of the Southern Documentary Project and Ava Lowrey and Sara Wood of the Southern Foodways Alliance taught the workshop.
Eva Walton Kendrick gave a lecture on April 26, 2017 as part of the Center’s Radical South Brown Bag Lecture Series. Before the lecture, Chris Colbeck interviewed Eva about her work as an advocate for LGBTQ rights in Alabama. Watch a clip here, and read a full transcript below.
Three Southern Studies alums have recently completed or have ongoing documentary projects on the region’s waterways.
John Rash is a filmmaker, photographer, and video artist who earned his M.F.A. in Experimental and Documentary Art from Duke University in 2014. He has worked as a freelance photographer and college instructor for more than 15 years and comes to the University of Mississippi after spending the past three years in Shanghai, China.