For over 20 years, Tarleton Blackwell has created lively, antic scenes of Southern rural life, featuring pigs, wolves, foxes, dogs, roosters, and more-layered with portraits, figures, and familiar icons from both high and popular culture. This exhibition of 25 oil and mixed-media paintings examines some of varied sources of Blackwell's art, focusing on his personal and expressive intermixing of Southern imagery, the Baroque art of the Spanish master Diego Velazquez, and symbols of American power, justice, and money. The works range from an early oil painting in the famous Hog Series, History of Uncle John Edwards Boar (1986), to one of his most recent, Fox Chef with Link Sausage/Coffee (2005), a zany tableau from a hog sub-series called the Cinderella Section. The selection features some of the artist's best-known characters, like the militaristic Fox General and the U.S. Marshall (a possum), as well as the numerous hogs and piglets that have made him one of the most accomplished American artists working in the South today.

For more information on this artist or the Southern masterworks in our collection, please visit our gallery website.

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