October 11, 1995
Web posted at: 7:50 p.m. EDT
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- You've heard the expression "looks good enough to eat." Food-loving artists felt these pictures looked good enough to paint. The artwork comes from an exhibit in Atlanta on southern foods.
Curator Marianne Lambert said she knew there would be no shortage of works for the exhibit "because Southern artists paint their environment so much, and so much of the tradition of Southern art is about storytelling, and their lifestyles, and of course food is very much a part of that lifestyle."
Lambert talks about some delicious examples from the exhibit:
The South was up until World War II primarily an agricultural society and it is still, in many ways. And Southerners have always loved food, and in the past they produced it on the farm and in the small towns. And so food is very much a part of social life of the South.
There's one painting by Henry Gorham, who is from a little town in south Georgia, that describes a Friday night fish fry, which is very much a part of the tradition of the South. Fish fries, I know that when I was growing up, were something that whole families went to on weekends. We ate catfish, lots of catfish, lots of bream, things that were caught in our local streams and rivers, and very much a part of small town Southern living.
Of course family dinners are very important, and what Bernice Sims is showing is a Thanksgiving dinner, and the whole family gathered around, and the variety of meats and variety of vegetables, and the whole way the family celebrates Thanksgiving in the South and as a family.
There's still a great closeness among families in the South, and particularly families who still live on the farm, still live in a rural part of the South. ... Baking; the women baked apple pies and peach pies in the summer, and everyone got together to do it, sort of like they did with quilt-making. The women would prepare food together. Made it more interesting and fun than just the way we do it today, which is alone in the kitchen. It's a homecoming, and a gathering of the whole family, a coming together.
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