Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
BMCM+AC is pleased to host the community release party for the 2026 Burnaway Reader: MYTH. Burnaway is a non-profit magazine of contemporary art and criticism from the American South and the Caribbean, published online weekly and in print annually. Through its editorial program and cultivation of emerging arts writers and journalists, Burnaway connects the region’s diverse creative communities and develops exchange between Southern art, and the national and international art audiences. This reception event will celebrate the publication of Burnaway‘s annual print reader. The event is free and open to the public. Copies of the Reader will be available for purchase, and Burnaway editorial staff will offer remarks about the project.
About the Reader:
The Burnaway Reader is an annual print publication that features long-form essays, interviews, artist projects, and other stories related to the magazine’s three annual themes. After a brief period of print publishing from 2013-2014, Burnaway revived the Reader in 2019 with an ambitious new format and scope. Each year, the Burnaway Reader creates a physical record of the organization’s online publishing and provides an opportunity to commission ambitious new, print-exclusive projects.
Steeped in oral tradition, community narratives across time, and the avenues in which fiction becomes fact, the texts from the 2026 Reader MYTH expand on how historical belief and current events merge and are translated into contemporary archetypes for art and artists across the South and the Caribbean. Essays consider three themes that focus on characters and beings that lie parallel to landscapes and individual ecosystems, from the physical sensation of a haunting that translates to a ghostly artistic presentation to conceptual art that is playful and deceives initial perception. The artists, works, and practices found in this volume are larger-than-life, existing as variations from a stereotype and nuanced understandings of the Ghost, the Trickster, and the Siren.
Within this volume, writers speak in further detail on: a Japanese American artist in Kentucky who creates three-dimensional body sculptures; re-remembering a photograph from South Carolina that expands on memory as an active process, and aperture as critical in the region; the Black aural archive of 1970s and 1980s video works by Phillip Mallory Jones; a Durham-born, Miami-based artist who created and plays in a parafictional women’s basketball league, inspired by Ernie Barnes; the Jamaican myth of the River Mumma as explored through mixed media works; a Nashville monument that investigates restorative nostalgia; and a lens and text-based artist project by Houston-based artist Debra Barrera.
Existing between the space occupied by periodicals, academic journals, and art objects, MYTH covers thirteen states plus the Caribbean, and is carried by public and private universities, large-scale institutions, DIY spaces, private collectors, and a thoughtful, curious cultural audience.
Ọmọlará Williams McCallister, Fishers of Men, 2016, braided and knotted muslin scraps, size variable. Photograph by Chris Myers and image courtesy of the artist.
The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph by Leslie Rodriguez and courtesy of Centennial Park Conservancy, Nashville.
Still image from Ryann Sterling, Feeding The Consciousness, 2022, film, collage, and archival footage. Image courtesy of the artist.