A lot to unpack in this group show about untold Southern narratives.

Bottom line: An ambitious show, but with too many curators, artists, participants and ideas in the mix.

There’s no denying the South, maybe more than any other region, suffers from its share of stereotypes and false perceptions. The Zuckerman Museum of Art exhibit “Hearsay” purports to tackle such falsehoods, largely by suggesting that rather than some uniform, homogeneous place, the South is a diverse, ever-changing mix of vastly different people and experiences.

That contention may not be a lighting bolt for most residents of the 21st century South, and it doesn’t prove a particularly illuminating notion as it is tackled in “Hearsay.”

Visitors to this muddled show will find works, both artist-made and curated from the community, showing how the presence of groups including Iraqi immigrants, African-Americans, American Muslims, gay men, Cherokee Indians, rebels and pioneers have defined the region.

The exhibition draws its title from nontraditional storytelling that exists outside historical record: oral history, artist interpretation of history and the other very individual, noninstitutional ways in which information is conveyed. The stories told in “Hearsay” range from the story of a gay Georgian, Crawford Barton, whose Super 8 home movies have been appropriated and interwoven with contemporary video footage by the art collective John Q. In “Take Me With You,” John Q creates a romantic look at the liberating exodus of this Southern outsider as he journeys to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Alternative storytelling of a more winking sort comes in a quilt created by Kennesaw State University professor Robert Sherer titled “Heirloom” that documents the stories he’s been told of Marietta’s famous and infamous residents buried in its cemetery. They include the little girl victim of the crime that sparked the lynching of Jewish businessman Leo Frank in 1915 and the interment in 1996 of an even more notorious child murder victim in a local cemetery, JonBenet Ramsey.

Not without some element of camp and smirking, Sherer unmasks the sordid side of Southern life, though the full spectrum of his mission is probably better told in the catalog essay accompanying the exhibition than in the cotton quilt whose dead and buried figures have been rendered — egads — in blood.

Moving into a more contemporary vision of the South, photographs and quotes assembled by citizen journalists in the Photovoice project tell the story of Clarkston and how its community has seen the town change over time as the largely African-American population has been replaced by an influx of immigrants from every corner of the world.

“Hearsay” mixes the more knowing, strategic perspective of artists, the vantage of non-artists and historical documents that attempt to evoke a forgotten past. A small exhibit-within-the-exhibit shows how the discovery of type from a long-gone Cherokee newspaper printing press in New Echota — the last capital of the Cherokee Nation — has inspired a host of Southerners to create artist books resurrecting the typography of these native Georgians. “Hearsay” exhibits those books, but also historical documents from Kennesaw State’s rare book collection showing maps and newspapers documenting the Cherokee experience and legacy.

Though there is undoubtedly some relevant take on the South and its complexity for everyone in this far-ranging show, “Hearsay” often suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. The three curators include the Zuckerman’s director of curatorial affairs, Teresa Reeves; associate curator Kirstie Tepper; and the director of interpretation at Kennesaw State’s Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books, Julia Brock. That triumvirate gives the exhibition a neither here nor there divide between a contemporary art exhibition and a history center exhumation in what can often feel like a surprisingly cursory look at the South’s diversity.