Hale County is connected to three major twentieth-century artists: Walker Evans photographed the area in 1936 while he collaborated with James Agee on the 1941 book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". Since the 1960s, artist William Christenberry, born in Tuscaloosa, has been photographing various structures in Hale County as part of his multi-media artistic investigations. More recently, Hale County has become the home of the nationally recognized Auburn University Rural Studio, an architectural outreach program founded by architect and artist Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth. It is also the birthplace of Eugene Sawyer, the second African American mayor of Chicago. In 2019 the film "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" by artist RaMell Ross was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, poetically addressing the region's shift in demographics and the power of intra-community authorship.