Contemporary art in the South is heavily influenced by visionary folk art, but the influence is too often limited to the use of folk motifs in the service of an uncritical primitivism or a regional academicism. Callahan McDonough, whose work is well-known in Atlanta through her participation in the Atlanta Women’s Art Collective (AWAC) since the ’70s, has developed during the last few years the language of visionary art into a personal style that avoids both atavism and imitation. She has learned from folk art the double vision that overlays the symbolic universe of myth and religion with the