Traveling Exhibit Brings Together Southern Literature, Music and Art

The new traveling Trio exhibit, which debuted at the SIBA trade show in September and celebrates Southern culture, will visit fairs, museums and bookstores around the Southeast.

By Tiffany Razzano |

Dec 08, 2015

Trio, a new traveling exhibit, celebrates Southern culture by bringing together literature, music and the visual arts.

Each Trio exhibit starts with a book written by a Southern author, which is selected by the project’s founder and writer Shari Smith (I Am a Town, River’s Edge Media). She then assigns that book to a Southern musician and visual artist, who creates a song or piece of artwork based on its themes, characters or storyline. The book, song and artwork are then displayed together in the exhibit. So far, there are 16 Trios in all.

Smith also produces the Shoe Burnin’ Show, a literary hootenanny that brings Southern music and literature to the stage, and said the idea for Trio was inspired by the success of the Shoe Burnin’. “It was really about seeing how much fun everyone was having, and how much the authors and musicians enjoyed working together,” she said.

Trio debuted at the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s 40th anniversary Discovery Show at the Hilton Raleigh North Midtown Sept. 18-20. Now the exhibit is making its way to conferences, festivals, museums, and bookstores around the South. Recent stops include displays at the Kudzu Gallery in Fairhope, Alabama, and at the Louisiana Book Festival. Smith said the tour isn’t completely set, yet, and there’s still room for venues and events to bring the exhibit to their cities.

Participating writers include Rick Bragg, Harrison Scott Key and Damon Tweedy. Musicians include Mac McAnally--who recently won his eighth consecutive and 10th overall CMA Award for Musician of the Year, Mary Gauthier, and Rodney Crowell--who participated as both a musician and a writer. The artwork accompanying the various Trios represents different mediums as well, Smith said, from paintings and sculptures to jewelry, knives and collage.

Key said he’s often worked with visual artists to illustrate his work, most recently for pieces that ran in Oxford American Magazine and Outside Magazine. “I’m addicted to working with people who can render an image for something I’ve written,” he said.

So when he was approached by Smith, he felt lucky to have his memoir, The World’s Largest Man (HarperCollins), selected for the project. He said he was also “blown away” to learn he had been paired up with McAnally. “It was so wild that this guy would just write this song based on my book,” he said. “My book is a funny comic memoir with a lot of pathos in it and his song really captured that. It deepens my own understanding of my own book, which is what I think a good collaboration should do.”