MYTH: The 2026 Burnaway Reader

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, the Siren.

Within this volume, writers speak in further detail on:

• a Japanese American artist in Kentucky who creates three-dimensional body sculpture
• 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
  
• 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.

Current and Former Stockists of our Reader include: Atlanta Contemporary, Birmingham Museum of Art, Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, For Keeps Bookstore, Mississippi Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Secret Riso Club, Wendy’s Subway, Whitney Museum of American Art.