A note on the show:

This collaboration fulfills one of our early objectives: to serve as a host and platform where artists can present work on their own terms, with minimal external framing.

The artists represented in this exhibition come from across the southern region—from the Mississippi River Delta to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. As a collection, these works resist reduction into a singular narrative and help counter the tendency to treat the South as a symbol, often flattened into metaphor in politics and popular culture.

Appalachian Shibboleth gathers a pluralistic congregation, with works shaped by each artist’s individual relationship to their Southernness—whatever that may mean to them. By stepping back and allowing organizers and artists to work without interference, KIOSK remains committed to cultural expression that is author-driven, context-aware, and true to its origins, and through this process, we hope to invite reflection on how we all navigate identity and cultural shorthand.

From Hank Smith (co-organizer):

The coded wails and bays of the diaspora in the dark, as they crash blind, driven by an invisible master to something coiled, haunched, fanged—waiting in the blackness. The argot barks that connect and guide them, piercing through the coyote babble of a strange land.

This exhibition, titled “Appalachian Shibboleths and Other Trail Trees,” presents a collection of art and poetry that explores the secretive visual and thematic language employed by Southern artists. Like an argot—a dialect used to signal membership while remaining indecipherable to those outside—this hidden language allows the southerner to grapple with facets of Southern identity in a way that is legible only to other Southerners, freeing them from the strictures imposed by an ever-present awareness of a non-Southern gaze.

Like trees with limbs bent by hand to mark a trail for future travelers who know to recognize them, this argot serves as a kind of waypost for Southern artists—a shared language that guides and offers waypoints on the journey forward.

Participants: Rodney Ellis, Anderson Goin, Elisha Gold, Isaiah Kennedy, Carl Moore, Hank Miles Smith, Mattie Quesenberry Smith, and Amy Renee Webb