B. Brian Foster is an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. For the last ten years, he has set his work in several towns and small communities in north Mississippi, where he was born and raised. Brian’s areas of expertise include the sociology of racism and race, place studies, urban/rural sociology, and qualitative methods. His perspective and theoretical orientation are rooted in the histories and paradigms of Black Sociology and the Black Radical Tradition.
Brian has written two books. I Don’t like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) chronicles the growth and development of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta. His second book Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a collaborative photo-essay collection featuring the work of award-winning photographer Richard Frishman. Frishman’s hyperpixel photographs document vestiges of racism, oppression, and segregation in the U.S. (e.g., a set of double doors that once was a “Colored Entrance,” the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma), and Foster’s essays blend memoir and personal storytelling with ethnographic reporting and sociological analysis to offer piercing commentary on the realities and histories captured by the photographs.
Brian is working on a new book—Casino Town—which interrogates the cultural, environmental, and human impacts of casino development in the Mississippi Delta. He is also building an expansive archive of oral history interviews and photographs focused on the histories and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural South.
October 15, 2024
Art in Dialogue: Placemaking Practices by Folk Artists from the American South—Walk and Talk
Time: 4:30pm
Location: Lehigh University Art Galleries, Main Galleries, Zoellner Arts Center
Event Description: Join B. Brian Foster, an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller, and Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG) Curator of Education, Stacie Brennan for an Art in Dialogue discussion about Nellie Mae Rowe and the importance of her artwork and its intersection with Black southern placemaking practices. After a tour of the exhibit and a short lecture, Brian will join Lehigh Professor of Sociology LaToya Council in conversation. Time will be permitted for audience participation. Light refreshments will be served along with a book signing of Brian’s books I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life and The Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight collaborated with award winning photographer Richard Frishman. The exhibit is located at LUAG which is inside the Zoellner Arts Center, first floor. The reception and book signing will take place on the lower level. Both floors are accessible by elevator and stairs. Parking is available in the Zoellner parking garage.
*This is a 5x10 event
About the exhibit
Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe presents an exhibition of 58 works by the self-taught Georgia artist, set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in the South of the 1960s. Rowe (1900-1982) saw art making as a radical act of self-expression and liberation that took many forms including found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings. The focus of her creative output was a "Playhouse" where she welcomed visitors, situated along a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia.
Organized by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) from their leading collection of Rowe's art, Really Free is the first major exhibition of her work in more than twenty years. The exhibition offers an unprecedented view of how she cultivated her drawing practice late in life, following the deaths of her second husband and her longtime employer. Starting with colorful and at times simple sketches on found materials, the works move toward her most celebrated, highly complex compositions on paper. Through photographs and other references to her Playhouse, the exhibition is also the first to put her drawings in direct conversation with her art environment.
Support for this exhibition and publication is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Major funding for this exhibition and publication is provided by Judith Alexander and Henry Alexander. Generous support for the national tour is provided by Art Bridges.