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The juror for this issue, Michael Rooks, the Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art, is one such person. I first had the pleasure of working with Michael in 2010 when he first arrived at the High. Over the past thirteen years, he has embedded himself in Atlanta’s art community, and his knowledge of what is happening in Southern visual culture is extraordinary. As he always does, Michael gave a great deal of consideration to his final selections. This may be the most diverse and interesting group of painters yet to be assembled from our annual review of artists working in the South. The issue is a testament to the fact that outstanding artists of all backgrounds and aesthetic viewpoints are busy at work in every corner of the United States.

This issue is also a testament to the fact that for many emerging artists the figure reigns supreme. For those who keep track of these things, you will remember that the early 2010s was the time of “zombie formalism.” It was a moment when many artists were producing a type of painting that privileged process over all else. To be sure, artists got very creative in ways that they made paintings. Fire extinguishers, photographic processes, metallurgy, and a host of other tactics were used to make paintings that “seemed” like art but ultimately lacked any substantive content. Galleries bought into the trend and collectors went along for the ride. The moment ended…

There is always a convergence and divergence among the stated intentions, strategies, and output of artists selected for New American Paintings. This is one reason NAP is so successful. While its pages present ideas that have been given voice across the country, they often emanate the local, demonstrating the enduring influence of our subjective differences on widespread modes of expression. As a result, over the years NAP has traced the rise of the glocal in American contemporary art—a visual creole for communicating ideas, navigating differences, and building new relations. Through this synthesis of the local and global, artists make sense of their place in the world by critiquing its values, reappraising its history, and celebrating difference that, perhaps implausibly, aggregates in community.

In this issue dedicated to the American South, the likenesses among applicants correspond to a few basic categories relevant to materiality, figuration, identity, technology, language, and mythology.

The intrinsic value of found or repurposed materials is central to the work of Jamele W. Wright Sr. and Lauren Rice. While Wright’s use of materials is related to the Black vernacular experience and the bridging of the past and present, Rice’s materials are “functionless artifacts” that have been rehabilitated to form a cryptographic language of the future. Stacy Lynn Waddell employs materials in her work that call into question issues related to social values and hierarchies. Her research-based practice seeks to locate intrinsic meaning obfuscated by the extrinsic qualities of materials such as gold, foregrounding the struggle represented by…