OakGrove Carpet Bags, E.I. Schutt line

Dixie Icons – Re-Visioning the Dixie Myth, an invitational exhibition held at the Firehouse Gallery in Georgia, invited southern print artists to revisit and reinterpret the images that framed the myth of Dixie.  The exhibit opened in September 2011 and was timed to coincide with the Civil War sesquicentennial.  These works were my response to a carpet bag ad from the 1920's.

My great, great aunt–Eleanor Isham Schutt, or “Aunt Nelle” as she was referred to in my family–was an illustrator for the Department of Agriculture in the early 1900’s. A legend in our family, Nelle was a fiercely independent woman - a feminist ahead of her time. Growing up, I was always told that I was “talented like Aunt Nelle,” fostering my own sense of entitlement to be an artist and to be independent.    With the invitation to be a part of the Dixie Icons exhibition, I saw an opportunity to collaborate across the generations with Aunt Nelle. I chose her renderings of damaged and bruised citrus fruits and a rendering of carpet grass as the source images for some contemporary carpet bag designs that spoke to the issues of Northern entitlement and exploitation inherent in the political connotations of Carpetbaggers. 


My own family's relationship to the class divisions and political landscape during the post Civil war times was complicated. Nelle herself was quite proud of the fact that her mother had renounced slavery and freed the slaves that had been given to her, but the family was one of privilege and that notion of the family being "of good class" was also ever-present. 

On first appearance, the images are seductive and beautiful, hinting at the nostalgia present in the original Saks Fifth Avenue ad that was my assigned/chosen Dixie Icon source image.  On closer inspection, injured fruits suggest problematic relationships.  I used notation fragments from the illustrations and Nelle’s signature from the drawings to “tag” the bags with their privileged Northern class.

Artist's Statement for the Dixie Icon's exhibition: