Auburn University is an R1 university in east-central Alabama—a region rich in all forms of creative expression—visual arts, music, food, literature, and fashion. Established in 2024 by The Jule, The Auburn Forum for Southern Art and Culture is dedicated to institutionalizing object-based research and museum-enhanced pedagogy by investigating the American South. Additionally, the university’s growing art collection, including the Imprinting the South Collection, features numerous artists from and influenced by the South, providing ample opportunities for The Jule to collaborate with faculty, artists, other museum professionals and peer institutions.
The focus of the 2026 iteration centers around the exhibition “Sew Their Names: Quilting, Creativity, and Activism,” on view at The Jule Museum from Tuesday, January 20th, 2026, to Thursday, July 2nd, 2026.
9:00 a.m. – 11 a.m. ~ Drop-in quilting workshops with the Mt. Willings Quilters | First Come, First Served
Break/Lunch at your leisure
2:00 p.m. ~ Welcome and Poetry Reading | with Cindi Malinick, Executive Director of The Jule, and Nicole Sealey, Poet-In-Residence
2:15 p.m. ~ Session I: Sew Their Names | facilitated by Nikki Silva, co-host of the award-winning podcast The Kitchen Sisters Present
Participants: Judge Susan Walker and Rev. Dale Braxton
3:00 p.m. ~ Break
3:15 p.m. ~ Session II: Noah Purifoy, Bill Traylor & Lowndes County| facilitated by Elijah Gaddis, Ph. D., Auburn University
Participants: Leslie Umberger (Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum), Darby English (Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History, University of Chicago), Es-pranza Humphrey (Assistant Curator of Collections at Poster House, New York City)
4:15 p.m. ~ Break
4:45 p.m. ~ Session III: A Conversation with Exhibiting Artists from “Sew Their Names: Quilting, Creativity, and Activism” | facilitated by Nikki Silva
Participants: Mercedes Braxton, Charlie Lucas, Wini McQueen and Yvonne Wells
Nikki Silva (right), half of The Kitchen Sisters radio production team, has worked with Davia Nelson (left) for more than 40 years creating hundreds of stories for NPR and their Webby award-winning podcast The Kitchen Sisters Present.
They are the creators of the duPont-Columbia and James Beard Award-winning NPR series Hidden Kitchens, the two Peabody Award-winning series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project. They are also the creators of The Hidden World of Girls, an NPR series that explores the lives of girls and the women they become. Their latest project, The Keepers, is about activist archivists, rogue librarians, collectors, historians, curators — keepers of the culture and the free flow of information and ideas.
Mercedes (left) and Dale Braxton (right) are lifelong Alabamians whose shared commitment to service, education, and community has shaped their lives together.
A native of Mt. Willing, Alabama, Mercedes Braxton dedicated 25 years to public education, beginning as an elementary school teacher for grades 2–6 before serving as a supervisor for two primary schools. Now retired, she continues to find joy and reflection in reading, gardening, cooking, and especially sewing and quilting, a practice that has long supported her creativity and well-being.
Dale Braxton, born and raised in the Black Belt community of Hayneville, Alabama, is a respected leader and advocate for faith-based and global engagement. Grounded in strong family support, he earned degrees from Athens State University and Auburn University and went on to serve as President of the National Convocation of the Christian Church in the United States and Canada. His international travels to Africa and Central America reflect a lifelong dedication to unity, service, and cross-cultural understanding—a commitment he and Mercedes continue to share.
Elijah Gaddis is the Hollifield Associate Professor of Southern History and African American Studies at Auburn University. Professor Gaddis specializes in material culture in the 19th and 20th-century South.
Charlie Lucas was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1951. One of fourteen children, Lucas came from a working-class family and learned many skills with his hands. He left school as a teenager and learned to support himself with various jobs in construction, trucking, and as a handyman.
In 1984, after a debilitating back injury, Charlie turned to his hands and his imagination. He began making sculptures from discarded wire, scrap metal, and other assorted materials. Today, Charlie’s recognition in folk art circles has spread all the way to Europe, where he traveled in 2011 with collaborators Mr. Imagination, Lonnie Holley, and Kevin Sampson to create a found object installation for the 54th Venice Biennale.
Es-pranza Humphrey is the Assistant Curator of Collections at Poster House in New York City. She received her BA in History from the University of New Haven and her MA in American Studies from Columbia University where she examined American history, literature, and culture as it interacts with countries across the globe.
Yvonne Wells was born in 1939 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She is known for her intricate narrative “story quilts” rendered in a personal style that uniquely melds geometric abstraction with bold figuration.
Wells’ work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska; Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama; Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina; and Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, among others.
Leslie Umberger is Senior Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C. She has long focused on artists who navigated autonomous artistic paths, often in the face of significant oppression or personal challenge.
Umberger is the lead curator for an exhibition on view in SAAM through July 12th, 2026 entitled Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work and is part of the curatorial team reinstalling SAAM’s collection galleries throughout the museum.
Susan Russ Walker retired in 2022 after 26 years of service as a United States Magistrate Judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery. She served as Chief Magistrate Judge from May 2008 to February 2017.
Judge Walker has collaborated since 2018 with a Black church in rural Lowndes county, Alabama, to restore an antebellum church building constructed by enslaved workers and pastored by her great-great-grandfather, a slaveholder. The restoration is a truth and reconciliation project that seeks to tell the history of the Southern church’s support for slavery and for Black resistance.
Darby English, Ph.D., is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He served as adjunct curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art from 2014 to 2020 where his projects focused on collections and acquisitions research.
He is the author of seven book-length publications and was the 2010 recipient of the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the oldest such prize in the United States. Currently, his research focus is Noah Purifoy, and he is finalizing a short book on ego, otherness and habit in intellectual work with art entitled, Uptake.
