American (b. 1944) Mathiston, Mississippi William Dunlap is one of the most important and celebrated painters in Southern art today. His mixed-media canvases, constructions, installations, and works on paper are what he calls “Excavations” of the Southern culture, literature, and the landscape. They are a rich vernacular for what it means to live in “The American South.” Imagery undulates in his landscapes which are often inhabited by Walker Hounds, Ghost Riders, Antebellum homes, cooling towers and other reminders of industrial and agricultural incursion into the landscape. Numbers and words seep up from this landscape like the humidity in a Southern sky. Dunlap’s works fuse the sublime with a rich pageantry of what has come before, what is now and what will be in a gumbo-like stew of Southern narrative. Says the artist of his work – tongue in cheek, “I call what I do hypothetical realism, these places, situations and events I paint are not real but they could be.” Dunlap’s work can be found in numerous public and private collections across the country including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Mississippi Museum of Art and the Arkansas Arts Center.
