Gallery Happenings

Drylongso:

An Ode to the Southern Black Landscape

Created by Curry J. Hackett

August–September 2021 / EXTENDED to October 10, 2021

Borrowing the old Black colloquialism meaning “ordinary” or “same old”, Drylongso: An Ode to the Southern Black Landscape is an acknowledgment and celebration of Black everyday life in the American South. This multi-generational collection of recorded phone conversations from Hackett’s family in rural Prospect, VA comprises a rich array of the under-recognized yet customary ways Black folks maintain and care for land, space, and people. Presented as an audiovisual collage, Drylongso asks what can be learned by documenting ordinary Black existence, as told in Black folks’ words.

The accounts offered in Drylongso are in dialogue with two timely conversations of today: the recognition of Black women as crucial protagonists in American society; and the need for reparations in the wake of mass dispossession of Black-owned land. These underscore the complicated relationships between struggle, agency, and joy in Black life. Moreover, by situating Blackness in the rural South, Hackett considers the Black landscape not only as one of flora and farming, but also as one of resistance, imagination, ritual, and memory.

While these conversations hail from families in rural Virginia—nearly 200 miles from Washington, DC—Drylongso invites you to discover your own personal connections to the stories’ underlying themes of family, identity, and perseverance.

Listen to the full set of conversations on SoundCloud.