Courtney Adair Johnson

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I geeked out on the Highlander Folk School this past year. One of my dear friends, Dr. Megan Jordan, started working as a Mellon ACLS Foundation Fellow there and inspired me to dig into their history as she helps develop the original Grundy County site. We visited and toured the area with one of her colleagues. They showed us the gardens, histories, and stories of the area and community. 

 

I like to dig in archives. The Highlander has a few rich online archives; as I searched through them, I became interested in publications, titles, and drawings, as well as pictures of people in the buildings and of the land of the original Highlander Folk School, located in Grundy County, TN. 

 

There are some great photographs of Septima Clark and Martin Luther King Jr in the Library (now the main building). Oh maps, we all love some maps. I took screenshots of songbooks with titles such as Songs of Field and Factory Labor, Songs for Workers, and Songs of the Soil. A Guide to Community Action and other pamphlets caught my eye with their bold titles and hand-drawn fonts. 

 

Highlander Folk School was born from the need to help coal mining workers gain rights in the 30’s. Highlander evolved and expanded to burgeon, strengthen, and serve the US labor movement, civil rights movement, and environmental movement. Early on, care for people and the land were the Highlander's guiding principles.  Food, song, and other cultural arts were its tools.

 

I took the images and began overlapping them, layering with photographs I took while visiting the Grundy County property. I then added color, bright pinks and yellows, teal and purples. Some images look very abstract; others show important imagery layered to add to the story. I also created watercolors of some of the publications and drawn imagery I had found in the archives. Once photographed, I changed colors to see how I could modernize it, give it new life, and learn from it.