Deep Fried Kudzu

As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.

Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!

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At Colossal: ‘Architectural Fantasies’ Chronicles Elaborate Creations by Self-Taught Artists (at Bookshop / at Amazon)

A new book forthcoming from Tra Publishing titled Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments chronicles some of the most enduring examples of these vernacular treasures—even if they only now exist in photographs. The vibrant volume is authored by Jo Farb Hernández, Director Emerita of SPACES (Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments), whose work revolves around documenting and preserving one-of-a-kind, artist-constructed places.

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from a 2023 visit

The Laura Pope Forester Museum in Ochlocknee, Georgia Pope’s Museum has a new digital tour guide on the Bloomberg Connects app with content about the history and collection available. This puts it in the company of over a thousand other cultural institutions around the world which serves onsite visitors and others from home and elsewhere. More, and the QR, here.

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Rezin Bowie’s monument in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Port Gibson, Mississippi, from a 2007 visit

At 64 Parishes, Born from a Duel: A history of the Bowie & other knives in Louisiana

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Ragnar Kjartsson’s The Visitors, from a 2016 visit at the Frist in Nashville. I got to see it again this past summer at SFMOMA. My ***fave***.

At the end of March, Adrian Searle will step down as chief art critic at The Guardian; he named one of my favorites, Ragnar Kjartsson’s The Visitors, as the #1 in the list of the Best Visual Art of the 21st Century.

You feel like a guest yourself in this marvellous, immersive multiscreen film. The more often I see it, the more I come to inhabit its rooms. Why is it so compelling and, with its repetitions, so watchable multiple times? The fragility of friendship and love, communality and miscommunication all have a part here.

The title of the work is taken from Abba’s final album, when the band were falling apart. The film’s absurdities and longeurs, the light, and the concentration of all the performers and the repetition of the song is utterly compelling and hypnotic. Youthfulness and idealism feel like a fading dream in the evening’s light. The Visitors is a kind of extended farewell to romanticism, to which Ragnar is both drawn and deeply suspicious of. Writing this, I want to see The Visitors again, immediately.

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from a 2016 visit

Turnrow Books in Greenwood, Mississippi is having its grand reopening March 25 from 4-7p.

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Portrait of Mrs Asher B. Wertheimer by John Singer Sargent at the New Orleans Museum of Art, from a 2024 visit

From Galerie:
Few addresses have shaped art history like Venice’s Palazzo Barbaro. This centuries-old palace, overlooking the Grand Canal, served as the creative epicenter of transatlantic culture during the Gilded Age, where American wealth, European artists, and literary scholars converged. It acted as a living salon, a cultural meeting point, and an atelier for artists and was often dubbed the “American artistic salon” or “Barbaro Circle” for its notable guests. Within its walls, major art pieces were created. Here, John Singer Sargent painted An Interior in Venice (1899); Claude Monet painted 37 works, including Palazzo Dario (1908); and writer Henry James finished The Aspern Papers. Even American art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, who rented the property in summers, fell so deeply in love with the palazzo that she replicated its design for her eponymous art museum in Boston.

Its penthouse is on the market for $8M.

I’m reading Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse now (here at Bookshop / at Amazon)

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from a visit to Kentuck in 2008

Dressed to Thrill: Sculpture by John Petrey March 6 – August 30 at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta

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The hyacinths are up in Huntsville. Hope you’re enjoying all the new pretty coming up and coming out now too. xoxo!

Ohmystars. That’s a garçonnière.

This home is in Washington, Louisiana — the outside stairs indicate the garconniere, the bachelor’s apartment, where people would house their teenage sons upstairs (I bet they absolutely loved this) so that they could enjoy a measure of independence.

With the stairs on the outside of the home, boys could come and go without disturbing everyone in the main part of the house and of course this kept the square footage that would otherwise be taken up with stairs free.

Sometimes, the garconniere was made part of the piggeonier, where the birds were housed, like at Houmas House (I let the Met know that I think they mean Houmas House (not Houmans) for this 1935 Walker Evans photograph).

There’s lots of great information about this feature here from the state’s Office of Cultural Development.

Here’s another not far from the first:

Isaiah Zagar passed away last month and there’s an absolutely beautiful article about him by one of his friends in Philadelphia Magazine here.

We visited his Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens in December of 2023. It’s perfect.

All my PMG pics are here on Flickr.

Hokus Pokus Liquors
Alexandra LA, 2023.

As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.

Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!

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Eggleston’s famous freezer image, a dye-transfer print, from a visit to the Ogden in 2017

At The Guardian: ‘He couldn’t be happier’: celebrating William Eggleston’s incredible photography
A new exhibition brings together new dye-transfer prints of the classically American photographer’s work

When Kodak discontinued its dye-transfer products in the 1990s, the Egglestons began buying up any stocks they could find. They also began a difficult project: deciding which of William Eggleston’s thousands of photos might enjoy a final blaze of color-saturated glory. In the end only about 50 photos could make the cut.

Thirty-one of them are included in William Eggleston: The Last Dyes, an exhibition through 7 March at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York. The show may be the last ever exhibition of photographs, by Eggleston or anyone else, produced using dye-transfer.

and at Aperture:
The Emotional Saturation of William Eggleston’s “Last Dyes”: In the 1970s, Eggleston’s pictures were called “perfectly banal.” Fifty years later, the intensity of color in his dye-transfer prints is rarified and precise.

BTW, the Black Keys’ new Peaches! album (out May 1) includes another Eggleston image.

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An Edmondson eagle on view at the MFAH, from a 2015 visit

The Christie’s Outsider Art auction going on from February 11-27 has final results published; for the most part works seem to have landed in their estimate. Outliers included some Bill Traylors, a very pretty Minnie Evans work, James Castle, this William Edmondson basin — and his seated girl realized almost $230k.

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Alabama Booksmith

Garden & Gun with One of Alabama’s Most Unusual Bookstores is Also one of the Best, on the Alabama Booksmith in Homewood.

“He has read all the books that he sells,” (Ann) Patchett says. “Who does that? There’s no, like, ‘Well, maybe that’s good,’ or ‘I read a good review of it.’ If it’s there, it’s because he wants to sell it. And not only does he know his inventory, he knows his customers personally, so he is truly matching up the person with the book. I mean, it’s bespoke bookselling.”

The New Yorker just posted (I did not see this in the print, maybe overlooked): The Unlikely Success of a Strange Alabama Bookstore.

Almost every single book is signed by the author, books cover-out, Blockbuster Video style. It’s certain I wouldn’t have my special Eugene Walter collection if it weren’t for the Alabama Booksmith.

If we hung out in college, on trips to Birmingham, there’s no doubt you and I visited its predecessor, the Highland Booksmith on Highland Avenue (then maybe a few minutes at Lodestar Books just to be cool). At Highland, the labels on the shelves were embroidered, a detail I thought lent the establishment and thereby me as teenage patron an air of incredible sophistication.

I’ll definitely be there for this:

 

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from 2016; they’ve since moved

Some conversation on Tujague’s (170 years in business this year) and specifically an off-menu dish there, the chicken bonne femme with an incredible amount of garlic. Recipe in the comments here.

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The Tennessee Williams home in Columbus, Mississippi, from a 2017 visit

Blanche Marvin, who was possibly inspiration for Tennessee Williams’ Blanch in Streetcar, passed away earlier this month.

Moreover, she insisted that Mr. Williams had adapted a consoling remark that Ms. Marvin had offhandedly made to him into Blanche’s indelible final line: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” (though her claims are doubted, if considered at all by the Williams scholarly circle)

In 2007, The Times called her “that rarest of things, a bully who is on the side of the angels.”

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At Inside Hook: Fred Minnick’s New Bourbon Book Is a Personal Revelation
How a two-decade quest for a forgotten whiskey saved the spirits writer’s life

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Ernest Hemingway’s Pilar Marlin flag just sold at auction for $170k.

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I’m not certain which of Joe’s pieces are in this particular exhibit; this is a pic from a visit we had in January 2023

The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta has Reclaiming History: Selections from the Tinwood Foundation on view. It includes pieces by Mary Lee Bendolph, Hawkins Bolden, Archie Byron, Thornton Dial, Sr., Lonnie Holley, Joe Light, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Mensie Lee Pettway, and Mary T. Smith.

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A Japanese magnolia bloom displayed at this week’s FPGC (garden club). Sending sweetest wishes for warmer, comfy weeks ahead! xoxo

This is the H. Frishman Red Goose Shoes sign in Port Gibson — I’ve been photographing this sign for a while. This image below is from June 2023 but I’ve been in town since, and several times previously (the one above is from a 2003 visit).

2013:

The store was established by Harris Frishman.

The Library of Congress has these two pics from the FSA with someone selling Goshert’s Household Remedies on the street by the H. Frishman Coca-Cola mural.

A Google Maps view:

Abbeville, Alabama actually has a few different Red Goose pieces:

In the Crystal Springs, Mississippi cemetery, a monument so endearing that Walker Evans photographed it in 1935. These images are from my visit in 2023.

Benson Mott Lockwood was a doctor who died early: he was born in 1870 and passed away in 1896. He’d attended the Beaumont Medical College of St. Louis and his father and grandfather were doctors as well. His great-grandfather had been a judge and was a soldier in the Revolutionary War.

It’s said that everywhere Benson went, so did his dog.

The 1891 here is for the date he married Eunice Miller. Their son, also named Benson, was born in 1894 and died in 1907 after he fell off or was kicked by a horse.

The summer of 2023, I got to finally visit the Eudora Welty House and Garden in Jackson, Mississippi.

Keeping things as Eudora had, there were stacks of books here and there, taking advantage of flat spaces.

Here, pieces of her typewritten works, which she’d…

arrange and re-arrange with sewing pins:

Many weeks I attend the Welty at-home bookclub, and you can register to read along and discuss with us here.

On our trip to Maine this summer, EF, Brent, and I drove past Holy Cross Catholic Church in South Portland, and the mural on the front was striking. It turns out parishioners didn’t love it at first and even had a tree planted to hide it; then in 2020, the tree was taken down.

Artist John Laberge was commissioned to create the piece, and the steel-and-ceramic mural was installed in 1980. This interview with him is helpful. In part:

Here he is, he’s on the verge of dying, on the verge of letting go — and he’s nailed on the cross. He’s in extreme pain. For people to think that should be a pretty Christ — they really [don’t get] the whole idea of crucifixion…

…The committee I worked with said they did not want a pretty aesthete. They wanted a working-class Christ, a regular Joe. The original [committee] and myself were satisfied with the final product but I didn’t give it an A+ — but as it stands, and lasts longer and longer, my admiration for it grows. 

Brent and I made a visit to The Broad in Los Angeles this summer — a big treat was getting to experience Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room, which they let you enter alone (or in very small groups if you prefer) for just one minute, with a purchased ticket. From The Broad:

Yayoi Kusama’s immersive installation Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013) is a mirrored room with LED lights that you can physically enter for up to one minute.

“Infinity Mirrored Room + General Admission” tickets include access to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room and our third floor galleries, which include:

Takashi Murakami Featured Installation
Jean-Michel Basquiat Expansive Presentation
Andy Warhol Expansive Presentation
Roy Lichtenstein Expansive Presentation

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Lots of Jeff Koons pieces in the collection

I’ve seen Koons’ Tulips twice now — the other time was at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas:

There are five Tulips installations total: the others are outside the Guggenheim Bilbao, at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, and one owned by the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation (so in Kyiv, maybe).

The Bouquet of Tulips in Paris is larger than these and serves as a memorial.

Koons’ Balloon Dog (Blue)

Michael Jackson and Bubbles

and they had pieces that didn’t feel SO Jeff Koons, like this of Buster Keaton:

The museum’s description of this piece:

Jim Beam — J.B. Turner Train was the centerpiece of Jeff Koons’s gallery debut of the Luxury and Degradation series. The works focus on the discord between the marketing of alcohol as a luxury product associated with leisure, sex, and sophistication, and the often destructive, ugly, and unintended effects of drinking to excess. The outside appearance and promise of something are in opposition to its interior life and meaning. Cast in stainless steel, each of the seven train cars holds a fifth of bourbon. Koons takes Jim Beam’s collectible decanter train set and turns what the company promoted as a rare collectible object into a truly rare luxury object: an artwork. Inside, however, is the same common spirit available at every liquor store.

Lots of Warhol.

Single Elvis

Twenty Jackies

Ed Ruscha:

Ellsworth Kelly’s Green Blue Red:

A good amount of Basquiat too, including:

Some people were *loving* the Robert Therrien Under the Table, but for whatever reason it just felt like it should have been at the Ashley Furniture HQ. Just not the biggest Therrien fan (it’s me, I like minis better.) — but if you are, The Broad is having a special exhibit of his works going on right now.

Barbara Kruger

Cindy Sherman

Takashi Murakami, Clone X x Takashi Murakami – Astronaut

Jenny Holzer – Thorax

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BTW the Jeff Koons Porcelain Series exhibit at the Gagosian in NY closes February 28 and I’d love to see his Kissing Lovers piece — still thinking of how terrific the Chris Antemann: An Occasional Craving exhibit at Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis was last year.