Freedmen News Watch · October 11, 2026, 1:20 PM CDT
Key Facts
- SOIL photography exhibition celebrates Black farmers’ Southern heritage, generational land ownership (via The Daily Mississippian)
SOIL photography exhibition celebrates Black farmers’ Southern heritage, generational land ownership.
The University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture hosted a heartfelt closing reception for Justin Hardiman’s SOIL photography exhibition, which honored Southern agriculture and generational Black farmers.
The collection was curated by Adrienne Domnick, a Mississippi artist and co-founder of the “AND Gallery” in Jackson, Miss.
Held in Barnard Observatory’s Gammill Gallery on Oct. 8, the event explored Hardiman’s minimalist documentary-style work alongside a “SouthTalk” discussion panel with rice farmer Christi Bland-Miller, Annie and Annette Hollowell of Foxfire Ranch and moderator Jermeria Skillom.
Skillom serves as the Mississippi Delta program coordinator for Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA).
The PHA partnered with SOIL to promote its shared mission to change the misconceptions and narratives of the Mississippi Delta, applying visual storytelling of communities intertwined with the land they cultivate.
Skillom kicked off the panel by establishing the PHA’s struggle to reveal Mississippi’s cultural growth.
“Mississippi is looked at as a horrible place to live, no place to thrive, no hope — but we know that’s not true,” Skillom said.
“With works like SOIL, we’re able to take the narrative of farmers, especially Black farmers, who were traditionally looked at as disadvantaged, exploited, taken advantage of and showing them (in) a different light, to see them with honor, pride and joy.”[1]
Where It Happened
The pin marks Jackson as named in the report, not an exact address. Map data: OpenStreetMap contributors. Street photo (2010): /\ \/\/ /\ from Jackson Mississippi, USA, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
About the Freedmen News Watch
This series follows the news that bears on Black American freedmen and their descendants, the people freed from slavery in this country: citizenship and treaty-rights cases such as the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Freedmen, the Dawes Rolls and Freedmen’s Bureau records, heirs’ property and Black land loss, reparations and descendant-based programs, and the history and memory of emancipation. It covers the hard news and the good news alike. Every passage is quoted as reported and linked to its source, and nothing is generated. The photograph on each post is a public-domain file photo from Wikimedia Commons, credited, and shows a place or monument, not the people in the story.
How to Verify This Yourself
Read the original reporting directly at The Daily Mississippian — that page is the primary source for everything above.
References
- The Daily Mississippian. SOIL photography exhibition celebrates Black farmers’ Southern heritage, generational land ownership. ↩
Investigative methodology: this update was produced by scripts/topic_news_roundup.py from real The Daily Mississippian reporting — not a language model. The quoted text above is verbatim from the source, cited; no analysis or interpretation is added.
File photo: United States Capitol west front edit2 — Architect of the Capitol, 1997. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This image is illustrative and does not depict the people or events in this report.
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