I know of modern art (not a fan), Surrealism (ehh, it’s okay at times), and people like Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh (all more than a bit strange, if extraordinarily talented), but Southern art? What was this, debutantes at their inaugural ball and close-ups of grits? Obviously my Yankee mind was too naive to decide what to make of such a category, but The Ogden succeeded in showing my know-it-all New Yorker eyes how much depth Southern art can contain and what emotion it can portray.

Knowing quite well my own naivete when it comes to art of any kind, much less the Southern variety, I try to nestle comfortably into a plastic chair within a small theater on the third floor, preparing to learn the reasons behind the creation of Southern art and what it depicts through a fairly short film, narrated by one Morgan Freeman. What I got from the, I’ll admit, only 10 minutes I sat through it was that Southern art is basically, overall, an expression of the connection between a person and a distinct lifestyle and the land they live it out on.

Far from my imagined Southern belle-and-fattening foods scenario, the third floor of The Ogden displays oil colors blended together to portray a mix of bright and subdued hues of the South, the harshness of poor Southern life during The Depression through black-and-white photos, and depictions of what the French Quarter used to be before boas and beads. Particularly striking is a photo obviously trying to catch and intensify every crease and line on a face older than it should be from a life of hard labor in the sun as the mouth sucks back on a cigarette, and just as stunning are photos depicting ‘80s nightlife in the form of dive bars created from shanties you couldn’t imagine to contain more than termites feeding off the dilapidated wood. Moving into the gallery of works by Will Henry Stevens, bursts of color contrast aggressively but beautifully with the black-and-whites.

The third and fourth floors of the museum contain more of what I usually consider first-grader art, otherwise known as modern art. But pieces such as "Drapework," a stunning piece of canvas adorned with bright and pastel colors, and the intricate oil-on-canvas works depicting marshes, lakes, and wildlife make a browse through these floors for a modern-art-hater like myself worth the time, especially with the laughs a painting with Jesus, Elvis, and Robert E. Lee with halos around their heads creates. Even the oversize rocking horse made of linked metal and covered with yarn, beads, strewn necklaces, and more makes me pause for more than a few minutes to try to figure out if the discombobulating streams of materials were placed with a purpose as I finish up, thankfully, without running into a painting entitled "A Man and his Pick-Up Truck."