The Whole Drum Will Sound – drawn primarily from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Permanent Collection – celebrates strong female voices in abstract art in the American South. In French author Amin Maalouf’s book, In the Name of Identity, he writes, “A person’s identity is not an assemblage of separate affiliations, nor a kind of loose patchwork; it is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” The artists included in this exhibition cannot be categorized solely upon their gender or regional affiliation. The facts that they are female, or Southern or that they create through abstraction are just elements of the patterns upon the drums that they sound. This exhibition seeks to find resonance among these artists, and to trace a trajectory of abstraction in the South through the rise of female voices in the visual arts.