Great Migration art exhibit opens at Mississippi Museum of Art

Great Migration art exhibit opens at Mississippi Museum of Art

Robert Pruitt's 
"A Song for Travelers (detail), 2022. Charcoal, conté, and pastel on paper, mounted onto
four aluminum panels. Courtesy of the artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery.

For the duration of the 20th century, 6 million African Americans still left the South for cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Good Migration altered American culture. It altered the life of these who left and individuals who stayed behind.

In “A Movement in Each individual Way,” a new show that opens Friday at the Mississippi Museum of Artwork, a dozen top up to date Black artists ended up asked to explore how the Fantastic Migration affected the nation and their very own family members.

“All of them have a link to the Good Migration and about half of them have ancestral ties to Mississippi,” reported MMA’s Main Curator Ryan N. Dennis, who arranged the exhibit with curator Jessica Bell Brown of the Baltimore Museum of Artwork.

Larry W. Cook's "Chester from the series Let My Testimony Sit Next To Yours" (detail), 2022. inkjet print, pigment-based, printed on Hahnemuhle Baryta fine art paper. 40” x 50”. Courtesy of the artist

The opening of the exhibit will be celebrated with a weekend of free of charge talks, guided excursions and tunes.

Friday night’s activities are for MMA users only, and include a conversation at 6 p.m. led by Ebony Lumumba, 1st woman of Jackson and associate professor of English at Jackson Point out College, with two of the show’s artists, Robert Pruitt and Leslie Hewitt. The discuss will be followed at 7:30 p.m. with a performance by Theaster Gates Jr. and The Black Monks, which blend blues and gospel with the musical tradition of Eastern monks.