We recognized individuals born in the South but embraced the many artists who specifically chose to come to the region to experience it or to teach here, thus leaving their own legacy. As noted art historian William H. Gerdts said in the introduction to my volume Greenville County Museum of Art: the Southern Collection: “I suspect the solution for a truly Southern Collection is perceptive inclusivity. That is, when in doubt, include rather than exclude.”

People derive comfort in labeling others: liberal/conservative, baby boomer/millennial, southern/northern. In the field of art, this habit is especially prevalent: impressionist/post-impressionist, realist/abstractionist. In all instances, we think we have a clear idea of what these labels mean, but when it comes to defining modernism or modernist, we find there are a variety of opinions. One camp thinks of the early twentieth-century European artists Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp as “modernists,” though each in turn wears another mantle, namely and respectively, Fauvist, Cubist, and Dadaist. A different group, led by critic Clement Greenberg, maintains that it is only such mid-century figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline who deserve the moniker of “modernist.” They too have their own particular designation: Abstract Expressionist, which has been heralded as the first definitively American art movement, one that was responsible for reorienting the center of art away from Europe to New York.

Both points of view share one thing: art no longer needed to represent something; art can, and maybe should, be about the component parts of art itself: color, line, shape, texture, material, etc. It did not have to be mimetic. Sometimes an image can be categorized because of its subject matter: “still life,” “portrait,” or “landscape,” but of equal or possibly greater importance are such things as the fundamentals of art making. When it came to defining “modern,” once again, the organizers of Southern/Modern had differing opinions. I tended to take the more formalistic point of view—one that was concerned more for the style of the work. Others, and specifically Jon Stuhlman, wanted to include artists who reflected the fading of the Old South and its agrarian tradition and those who depicted the New South represented by steel and textile industries—namely the New South.

So what does all this have to do with Maud Gatewood? It is intended to serve as background and to demonstrate that definitions—labels—are porous and imperfect. Was Gatewood a southern artist? The answer is an emphatic affirmative because of her nativity: she was born in the region and was educated at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). She also lived the majority of her life in North Carolina. Post-graduate study took her further afield: to Ohio, to Harvard, and then Vienna and Salzburg. From time to time, she left North Carolina yet significantly remained in the South, teaching in Alabama, Texas, and Virginia. However, throughout her career, Gatewood was also an inveterate traveler. Before 1994, she had visited over twenty countries, ranging from western Europe, South America, and the Far East. It is as if she worked to transcend her ties to the region: “I’m sure that other people would call me a southern painter. I don’t think in those terms. I tend to think of me as me. I just paint what I see and know.” Of course, there is a latent admission in that last sentence: she “knew” the South and was used to “seeing” it.

And you might ask: was Maud Gatewood included in Southern/Modern and if not, why not? Alas, she was not, and although she is a fine example of what we were looking for, she did not make the cut because she was too young. The date parameters we selected were: 1913 because of the Armory Show and the introduction of European modernism on a large scale to American audiences, and 1955, the full-blown acceptance of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant art form. In 1955, Gatewood was just twenty-one; she had graduated from college the year before and the next year she completed her master’s degree from Ohio State University. In her thesis, she articulated her raison d’être: “This is the fundamental goal: to become a painter through the production of significant paintings.”