Valerie Cassel Oliver discusses her latest trailblazing exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse.” Illustrating, through the frame of Southern hip-hop, how early 20th-century Black visual and sound aesthetics helped shape contemporary Southern art, music, and a material culture of customized cars and personal adornment, Cassel Oliver’s show is an exemplary expression of her curatorial vision.

Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Francis Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to this position, she spent sixteen years at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas, where she was senior curator.