Intended for professional and lay audiences alike, this documentary asset offers any number of dangling threads that may, in time, entice another curious cultural scholar to pick up the trail and begin crafting a new contribution to the whole. When a listed artist is represented in the Johnson Collection, her name is linked to additional information on this website. Artists who achieved significant professional recognition under both a maiden and married name are cross-referenced. Marital names that were not used as an artist’s primary identity are denoted in braces. Within name listings, alternate spellings are noted where we discovered persistent records of such variations.

With those caveats in place, the information presented includes: artist’s name (including birth and married names, nicknames, professional monikers, and pseudonyms, where applicable) artist’s life dates (ideally with birth and death locations, and occasionally with place of burial) and the Southern state or states with which the particular artist was associated (whether by birth, residency, education, or exhibition activity). Sourced from scholarly and primary materials, as well as museum archives, exhibition records, and socio-cultural records, the list is neither exhaustive nor perfect. Now numbering over two thousand names of established, exhibited female practitioners, this index is not comprehensive and is emphatically not presented as such. This directory seeks to address-and redress-the lack of a comprehensive codex of Southern women artists active between the late 1890s and the early 1960s, the period surveyed in TJC’s most recent book, Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection. While many of the artists connected to the region are widely known and duly noted in the canon of American art history, far more fine artists-and female artists, in particular- have been overlooked. Through its academic research, the Johnson Collection has worked intently to document and celebrate the achievements of artists associated with the South.

Death by Arrogance by Bruce E. Dunn