Photograph courtesy of Blair Hobbs
Ruby Turpin spends nearly all of Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” telling herself and others what a good, God-fearing woman she is, how grateful she is that the Lord has made her so.
The dark irony of this—the kind found in so much of O’Connor’s work—is that Mrs. Turpin is, in fact, one of the worst kinds of people: a judgmental racist who looks down on those she deems “white trash.” The only person in “Revelation” who sees Mrs. Turpin in all of her hypocrisy is a young girl named Mary Grace. So enraged is Mary Grace by Mrs. Turpin’s ignorance that she hits her in the face with a book called Human Development in a doctor’s waiting room, catalyzing in Mrs. Turpin a profound, prophetic awakening.
Multidisciplinary artist Blair Hobbs‘s “I Was Mary Grace from ‘Revelation’” (2024) lands upon its viewer with similar revelatory force. Experienced like a vision, the mixed media assemblage gives us Hobbs as Mary Grace as fever dream. The figure floats on a canvas of high-pigment cerulean blue, adorned with sequins and glitter, O’Connor’s famous peacocks and some of her quotes decontextualized in Hobbs’ gentle cursive: “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!”
“I Was Mary Grace” and nearly 20 other works by Hobbs will be on view at Spalding Nix Fine Art from March 14 to May 9 in Birthday Cake for Flannery—curated as part of the gallery’s ECHOES exhibition—in honor of the Georgia-born Southern Gothic writer’s 100th birthday. Viewers familiar with O’Connor’s singular body of work will recognize images, allusions and characters from some of her most well-known stories—Wise Blood, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” and “Parker’s Back.”
Photograph courtesy of Blair Hobbs
The idea for the show was born of Hobbs’s revisiting of some of O’Connor’s most celebrated works after retiring last August from teaching at the University of Mississippi. She found herself re-enchanted with O’Connor’s dark humor, grotesque characters, her meanness, the lunatics and freaks that populate her stories.
“I was reading her in college,” Hobbs says. “I joined a sorority, but Reagan-era sorority girl was not really my cup of tea. My dad had gone to Harvard, and I loved the romance of the academy. But dressing up like Minnie Mouse for a step-singing competition wasn’t really doing it for me. I started feeling depressed, and I really identified with Mary Grace of “Revelation” . . . I was conflicted and found a lot of strange comfort in the intellectual freaks [O’Connor] wrote.”
Photograph courtesy of Blair Hobbs
Hobbs—now a full-time artist living in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband, writer John T. Edge—brings these freaks to life in Birthday Cake for Flannery, her use of craft store supplies such as glitter, paper hearts, and ribbon an intentional juxtaposition, a deliberate elevation of these “feminine” materials to the realm of fine art.
“I’ve always loved sparkly things,” Hobbs says, “majorette uniforms, Haitian flags, twinkly Christmas lights. I get excited in the craft aisles of big box stores where I collect sparkly duct tape, gold leaf, mirrored beads, and shiny papers. In these aisles, I am almost always among women. I never buy stencils, scrapbook stickers—any product that predicts an outcome. Instead, I like to use the craft items in a more subversive way. I don’t think that a portrait of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes, just after he’s blinded himself with acid, is the expected outcome of a Walmart craft aisle basket.”
Photograph courtesy of Blair Hobbs
The pieces in Birthday Cake for Flannery invite viewers not only to engage with what such a subversion might mean in Hobbs’s interpretation of these complicated characters—but also, as O’Connor does in her fiction, with the versions of those characters that might live inside us.
O’Connor’s work asks readers to confront some of the ugliest, darkest parts of Southern life. Hobbs’s feverish, folk-inspired, epiphanic collages bring them glittering, sparkling into the light.
