Houston | Curator-led Tour of ‘The Dirty South’ at CAMH, with Patricia Restrepo

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About Patricia Restrepo

Patricia Restrepo is the Assistant Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), where she has worked since 2014. Restrepo most recently co-curated Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City through Mutated Lenses, an interdisciplinary exhibition orbiting around DJ Screw’s process of material manipulation. She also curated Will Boone: The Highway Hex, which commissioned site-specific work and was the artist’s first solo exhibition, as well as Stage Environment: You Didn’t Have to Be There, a celebration of CAMH’s history of championing performance. Restrepo has managed and contributed to the institution’s publications and orchestrated their digitization to increase accessibility to the museum’s significant scholarship. Fostering exhibitions as laboratories, her curatorial interests include the generative potential latent in archives, museology, and performative work. Prior to CAMH, she worked at art institutions and publications in Mexico, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Restrepo holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and Bachelor’s degrees from Rice University.

About the exhibition

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, makes visible the roots of Southern hip hop culture and reveals how the aesthetic traditions of the African American South have shaped visual art and musical expression over the last 100 years.

Echoing from New York to Los Angeles in the 1980s, the musical genre of hip hop became, for many, the empowering language of the voiceless. In the mid-1990s, André 3000 of the Atlanta-based duo OutKast, proclaimed, “The South got something to say!” André’s clarion call shone a light into a centuries-old repository of rich Southern aesthetic traditions rooted in the fraught histories of this nation while centering the South as a vital contributor to the rich musical genre of hip hop. While the expression “Dirty South” is codified within the culture of Southern hip hop music, it encompasses a much broader understanding of the geography, history, and culture of the Black South. The Dirty South explores the traditions, aesthetic impulses, and exchanges between the visual and sonic arts over the last century. Featuring a multi-generational group of artists working across a wide range of media—including sculpture, painting, film, photography, and sound—The Dirty South presents more than 130 works and spans the entire Museum. Click here to read more about the exhibition.

Images: El Franco Lee, II, DJ Screw in Heaven 2, 2016. Neon bulb and single-channel audio, 3:04 minutes, 60 x 60 inches. Image and work courtesy the artist & CAMH; Patricia Restrepo headshot, provided by the speaker.