A group of young people began improvising music and dance together in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the early 1970s. Soon calling themselves Raudelunas, they embraced pataphysics (the ‘science of imaginary solutions’) and organized art exhibitions and musical and theatrical events, and released several recordings of their music through the 1970s. Four of the Raudeluni moved to Birmingham in the late 1970s and founded a surrealist group there, initially called Glass Veal, which also organized several art exhibitions and published periodicals during its fifteen years of activity. Among them were two musicians, Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, who continued to improvise music and to tour nationally and internationally, sometimes with dancers. They too released recordings of their music on LP, cassette and CD—many of them under the name Trans—and were well-connected with other improvisers and surrealists in Europe and North America. While these groups and individuals have mostly sailed under the radar of critical attention, they deserve recognition both for the quality of their achievements and for the creative difference they made with Southern attitudes and with American culture more generally.

Steven Harris is an art historian living in Edmonton who taught at the University of Alberta from 2001 to 2021, and who has written about pataphysics, Fluxus, Cobra, and surrealism: Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s appeared in 2004, articles in Art History, October, and the Oxford Art Journal, among other venues, have been published before and since, and he was co-editor of the International Encyclopedia of Surrealism in 2019, to which he contributed numerous entries. He has also published catalogue essays in Alberta and abroad, including one for the centennial exhibition of Asger Jorn in Copenhagen in 2014. He has interviewed most of the living members of the overlapping collectives in Alabama that he will be discussing in his talk, and his book about them is forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press in 2026 or 2027.

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