I’ve known about, and visited a certain monument at the Harpersville Garden of Memories cemetery in Shelby County, Alabama for several years now, but has had me perplexed for a while, and it’s time to put some research time in.
It’s a large, old cemetery, with some newer monuments in the back, and some nice features like this stacked rock enclosure in the earlier section.
This is the graveshelter. At first, I was trying to figure out if it was — rather than an open-sided graveshelter like so many others — some sort of mausoleum. I’m convinced that it is a barrel-roofed empty space covering graves in the ground.
Above, it appears as though this end has the opening to the inside that’s been filled in. Below, the opposite.
The plaque in view below reads:
Restored 2005 by Mary Louise Moore Lamkin Great Great Grandaughter (sp) of the Rev. Lemuel C. & Orpah Byrd Moore
The inscription reads:
To the memory of the deceased whose names are inscribed beneath this monument
erected and piously consecrated by their surviving relatives
Rev LEMUEL MOORE born February 13th 1761 departed this life October, 1826. ORPAH, consort of Rev. Lemuel Moore born August 13th 1772, departed this life March 24th 1823
MARTHA MOORE, consort of M.E. Moore, departed this life August 24th 1823 Aged 30 years
By whose side sleeps her infant daughter SARAH ANN
They all left assurances of their peace with God. Let then the doctrines of the immortality
of the soul and of the resurrection of the dead cheer the
hearts of the mourners who come to ??? at this tomb
That’s really as far as I can read because the rest of it is at least partially covered. I’m going to contact some other historians to see what I can find, and if you have information, please contact me.
Ack, I’m so behind on doing a TWV and updating in general (tons of updates coming, but I def want to get this posted, even if it’s not everything! xoxo!)
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Margaret’s Grocery, from a visit almost 20 years ago
We were thrilled to get the word that the Kohler Foundation would be restoring Margaret’s Grocery in Vicksburg, but then came the word that they won’t be, and it’s not 100% clear yet what happened.
“Gee’s Bend often gets mythologized as if it lives behind us,” Russell shared during a press preview of The New Bend at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea, continuing, “I think it’s really important to understand that the Gee’s Bend quilters are creating in the world right now alongside every single [artist] in this room.”
Is there is a piece of Southern outsider art that was too meaningful to part with?
In my studio I keep a piece by Leroy Person, a sculpture made out of broken chairs that he carved and used crayon to color, next to a postcard of a Brancusi sculpture. To me there is a very clear connection between the two artists.
I also have a little carved figurine that Howard Finster gave me. It was a piece he had carved — whittled, he would say — for one of his children or grandchildren, before he had his ecstatic vision that set him on the course of becoming an artist. But he recognized my interest and the friendship. I’ll keep it forever.
The new Elvis movie trailer
Looks from the Chloe AW22 show that featured Gee’s Bend designs
The drawn-out fight pitted a best-selling American literary icon against the descendants of filmmakers who had produced an acclaimed movie that was nominated for an Oscar for best picture and that Lee herself professed to love.
also in the NYT:
Harper Lee Estate Told to Pay $2.5 Million in Dispute Over ‘Mockingbird’ Plays
The estate is contesting an arbitrator’s ruling that it had been too aggressive in limiting productions of a 1970 adaptation of the novel as Aaron Sorkin’s new staged version came to Broadway.
I once — for whatever reason (actually I think it was a day I had lunch at Maggie’s Diner) — stepped into the Howard & Linton Barber Shop in Tuscaloosa in 2011, and asked to take this pic
The Tuscaloosa News reports
…the contents of the late Rev. Thomas Linton’s barbershop planned to populate a future civil rights history museum in Tuscaloosa, amounts to, unscientifically speaking, a lot.
and After racists threw food and garbage on Autherine Lucy as she attempted to enroll at UA, she was brought to the shop to get cleaned up. On “Bloody Tuesday,” June 9, 1964, when activists attempting a peaceful march, to protest the segregated courthouse, were beaten by deputized thugs, some ducked into the shop, while Linton himself reported directly to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, helping arrange hospital care and bail money for the 94 people arrested, and the 33 beaten badly enough to require medical care.
Pasaquan, from a visit in 2012 (it’s been restored since)
MPB Radio on the Emmett Till’s family members who met in Jackson to ask the state AG to bring murder charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham.
The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, 2012
I missed this from May, but:
The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi is pleased to announce a major donation of 50 artworks by Los Angeles-based, advocate and collector Gordon W. Bailey. The transformative gift features African American artists Leroy Almon, David Butler, Richard Dial, Thornton Dial, Minnie Evans, Roy Ferdinand, Sandy Hall, Clementine Hunter, Charlie Lucas, Juanita Rogers, Sulton Rogers, Welmon Sharlhorne, Herbert Singleton, Willie White, and Purvis Young; Native Americans, Silas and Bertha Claw, Betty Manygoats, Elizabeth Manygoats, Wallace Nez, and Lorraine Williams; and Southern potters, Burlon Craig, Cheever Meaders, and Lanier Meaders.
In the late 90’s, an art dealer named Bill Arnett visited Gee’s Bend and was captivated by the artistry he saw. Another master quilter, Mary Margaret Pettway, remembers when this stranger showed up in town wanting to buy her mother’s quilts.
Mary Margaret Pettway: He bought quite a few quilts. But what he wanted was the old raggedy quilts.
Megan Thompson: To you, they’re old and raggedy.
Mary Margaret Pettway: I promise you they were.
Megan Thompson: But to him?
Mary Margaret Pettway: Apparently they were gold.
Megan Thompson: Arnett bought hundreds of quilts and curated an exhibition that became a sensation. The New York Times called them, “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
Africatown, by Mobile, the community established by West Africans in 1860, who were on the last known (illegal) slave shipment to the US:
World Monuments Fund (WMF) includes Africatown on the 2022 World Monuments Watch to highlight the need and opportunity for authentic, community-led preservation and storytelling.
I wish the audio here was better, but this is Horton Foote being interviewed about Carson McCullers
Another winner was Brett Ratliff of Kentucky, who co-produced documentary “Bright Morning Stars: The Johnsons of Hemphill” (which won the inaugural Boone Docs Film Festival Judge’s Award) and I wish wish wish there was a clip I could show, but it’s about (from Appalshop:)
…the story of Mabel and Gwen Johnson as they navigate the post-coal world in Eastern Kentucky. Faced with unspeakable obstacles, they pulled together and started a community center and a bakery. The film is the first in a new series entitled Bright Morning Stars from filmmaker Ethan Payne documenting contemporary Appalachian folkways.
Okay, and because I love when things connect all over the place, it’s the co-producer of Bright Morning Stars — Ethan Payne — who did:
and Lonnie’s ‘I Went to Sleep’ which was filmed in part in Joe Minter’s art environment
…and look at beautiful Hilda at 4:45 in the clip. When I was at Joe’s a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about Hilda’s voice and I have some of her voicemails to me that I’ll neverrrrrr delete just so I can listen to her.
Among those presented with the AIA’s 2022 Architecture Award:
I grew up weekends on Smith Lake on a Chaparral (which was beyond cool) and always thought of pontoon boats as the Family Truckster of the water, but then Robb Report says “hey how about this Bennington 25 QX Sport?” (which is btw almost $400k, Lawd!) and also, a reminder that it’s time to put the boat back in the water.
Anyway, I’d maybe rather have a Modern Shed DW (Dwelling on Wheels) and have it at a lake and then a backyard and then the boonies, though their pricing is the “let’s play around and get your dreams in here, then once you’re fully heart-invested, we’ll talk $$” model, so no idea of cost…
When he was done cooking, Mr. Benton took a paper plate of meat, potatoes and cornbread and settled back into his chair. “I prefer it to foie gras, to be quite honest,” he said, staring through the campfire smoke to the nearby river. “It’s even better out here.”
A performance of the Appalachian spiritual Bright Morning Stars
What’s been done to The Great Gatsby now that it’s no longer protected by copyright, from The Guardian. James West, emeritus professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald notes in his study that he researched 34+ new print editions released in the last year and found:
“17 editions dropped Fitzgerald’s dedication to his wife, Zelda: “Her name has been erased – a serious problem … because she was Fitzgerald’s muse. She was partly the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan.”
…The first edition’s cover – artist Francis Cugat’s painting of a woman’s eyes hovering over an amusement park – is “probably the most famous jacket in all of American literature”, West said, with Fitzgerald particularly wanting it, saying that he had “written it into the book”. It may have inspired details such as Doctor TJ Eckleburg’s “blue and gigantic” eyes.
It appeared on the novel’s numerous reprints, but not on the new editions… Another depicts a couple next to what resembles “a Dodge Charger, the muscle car popular during the 1980s”.
Well, I feel confident that Billy Reid mentioned the woman he’s talking about here is Teh-lay-nay, Tom Hendrix’s great-great grandmother and inspiration for the incredible monument by the Trace that is Tom’s dedication to her, the Wichahpi Commemorative Stone Wall. Teh-lah-nay was part of the Yuchi people, but someone at Magnolia must’ve edited the story for time. Regardless, everyone needs to know this story and pics from a few of my visits are here.
Learned that alma mater just means that one attended an instituion, not necessarily that one graduated from it. Out of the blue, decided to look up where Cormac McCarthy went to college (his alma mater was Tennessee, but he didn’t graduate) after reading the David Shields interview in the NYT where he quotes McCarthy, “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” and PS, Shields says, “In graduate school, I thought Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” was the greatest book ever written. On many levels, I still believe that, but I can’t read it anymore. Proust’s epic now feels to me sort of twee and also not discontinuous enough. I need more comedy, more urgency, more white space.”
Crystal Grill’s mile high pies, y’all.
Chocolate meringue pie, from a 2005 visit
and 2016
Ralph Blizard with the Reeltime Travelers, from 2015
If David Lynch had done a promotional video for a steakhouse chain, it might have looked a little bit like this five-minute oddity created for Sizzler in 1991. “Looking at it now, I’m like, ‘Oh, God, were we all in a cult?’” Erickson said. “What makes the video so fascinating to me is that they’re basically equating Sizzler with the idea of freedom and the idea of choice, because you can go to either the grill or the buffet.”
and here it is:
also, I seriously think the new Max Siedentopf campaign with the Gucci GG Monogram in blue has sick Severance vibes
The Mark Landis “Creative Conscience” exhibit at Salomon Arts Gallery in Manhattan is open; among the opening events was a screening of Art and Craft, about his forgeries and how he went about convincing museums they were authentic
The NYT has a new piece on the Venice Biennale: At Venice Biennale, Contemporary Art Sinks or Swims This year’s event is a lopsided affair, with a forceful central exhibition but disappointing national pavilions. Stan Douglas (Canada) packs a punch and Simone Leigh (U.S.) stands out for her aspiration.
Simone Leigh is representing the US (I’m trying to think of where I’ve last seen her work in person, and I’m thinking the Menil Collection, last year, but not at all certain); her work, incredible:
,…Leigh remains most successful in ceramic works such as the large white “Jug,” an oversized reconstitution of a Southern face jug whose surface she embeds with enlarged cowrie shells, and “Cupboard,” whose stonewear shell atop a large raffia skirt builds on surrealism’s African appropriations and Caribbean afterlives.
She’s taken these Southern forms — the face jug, the cupboard which has been mentioned before, taken from the Mammy’s Cupboard building in Natchez:
here, photographed in 2005
and the shells on face jug — here are some in my collection:
really remind me so much, too, of the tradition of shells (though not cowrie in these examples) on cemetery monuments, like this on at Pioneer Cemetery in Greenville, Alabama, that I photographed in 2008:
…and this one, at Pine Flat Methodist Church Cemetery in Butler County AL.
From the site:
Icon & Spirit is a magazine publication that looks at the archetypes of these two themes in relation to art. The publication includes 30 artists and a forward by the writer and community organizer, Robert Gipe. This is a small edition of 150 perfect bound copies. The publication has 100 pages of work. There are two interviews! One focuses on Jenna Garrett’s series “This Holy Hill” and the second is between Joseph Yechezqel and the monk Brother Stephen who met in prison and collaborate in traditional byzantine and contemporary Christian iconographic paintings. Please support the exposure of these artists by purchasing your copy today!
Artists in publication: (I’m linking to a few here incl ones I know, esp Byron Sonnier and Bill Major)
*Do* love a good business bulletin board. Interspersed there with the independent insurance business cards and the realtor cards (the realtors really outdo themselves) there’s occasionally something with real substance. This one is fab. I knew an almost-100lb catfish had to be in at least the Decatur Daily, so looked it up, and it made it all the way to Channel 48 in Huntsville.
Theodore Pride and his 98lb 3oz catfish, caught at Point Mallard
(watch the video. He is terrific.)
K-May Donuts
Athens AL, 2022.
Lonnie Holley is working in clay now — it’s his first show in this medium exclusively, and it began this weekend at Dallas Contemporary.
The show is titled “Coming From the Earth,” and it comes about after the gallery invited him to visit Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico last year. (BTW, the place is a DREAM.) He spent two-and-a-half weeks making things from clay, visited the round pyramids in the area, and studied the techniques of skilled craftspeople.
His works at Dallas Contemporary will be on view through August 21.
Some of Lonnie’s newest music:
Headed to the Land we were Promised, New Orleans (photographed last month)
Lonnie Holley, Supported by the Power, at the New Orleans Museum of Art (I photographed November 2021)
The excellent, excellent Toledo Museum of Art’s Living Legacies: Art of the African American South exhibit closes May 1. It was not yet up when I was there this summer, but the TMA is a world-class museum and this will not disappoint, I promise. Go if you can.
…features 24 works, from large-scale assemblages and mixed media sculptures to paintings, textiles, and works on paper acquired from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Artists represented are Leroy Almon, Thornton Dial, Thornton Dial, Jr., Richard Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, John B. Murray, Royal Robertson, Georgia Speller, Henry Speller, Luster Willis, and several generations of women quiltmakers, including Louisiana Bendolph, Mary Elizabeth Kennedy, Jessie T. Pettway, Lola Pettway, Lucy T. Pettway, Martha Pettway, Rita Mae Pettway, and Florine Smith, as well as Estelle Witherspoon, one of the founders of the Freedom Quilting Bee. In recent years, these artists’ innovative practices have received overdue recognition throughout institutional spaces and in the larger cultural discourse. This exhibition will celebrate their crucial contributions to a broader understanding of American art as well as their enduring legacies.
PS: Joe Minter sends everyone his love. Saw him last month and will get by again next week. xoxo!
Since I posted a good-natured monument from the Athens AL City Cemetery yesterday, I wanted to go back and post more pics from from this really interesting cemetery. There’s one monument that mentions someone killed from a tornado (back then, called a cyclone) and this was the one in the Birmingham area that day, deemed to be an F3, that killed 25 people:
Harriet Emily Pryor
beloved wife of
Robert Joseph Lowe
Born Sept 13, 1866.
And Francis Pettus Lowe
Their infant son
Born March 2, 1901.
Wife and Child
Killed in the ruins of their home by the
cyclone which destroyed it, Monday morning,
March 25, 1901.
The pic above is when I photographed it in 2008; here’s how I found it in January of this year:
This family story is pretty incredible, and includes politics and family members being born just before, and just after, parents passing away. Harriet’s husband, Robert Joseph Lowe Jr, was the son of (obv) Robert Joseph Lowe Sr, a Private in the 4th Regiment, Alabama Infantry, who died in 1862 when he contracted typhoid during the march to the First battle at Manassas (First Battle of Bull Run).
He, RJL Jr, was born in 1861, so just a baby when his father died. He was a lawyer in Birmingham in 1900 just before the cyclone, and I looked up the house number — that’s an apartment building now. There’s a notation that his and Harriet’s son, the baby who passed away in the cyclone along with her, was named Francis Pettus after the Alabama Speaker of the House (who died March 6, 1901, is buried at Live Oak in Selma, and whose monument is “a tribute of love from the Mobile Bar”). It’s Francis Pettus’ son, Edmund, for whom the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma is named.
In 1910, RJL Jr. was living in Eufaula. His monument there lists him as a Colonel, and he’d married twice more after Harriet’s death.
Caroline Toney “Carrie” Cochran married him in Eufaula April 9, 1902, so just about a year after the cyclone. Carrie’s father was a judge who married her mother at age 53. She was born June 19, six days after her father passed away at age 60, June 13, 1873. Carrie died in 1905.
Her first husband was Henry Melville Jackson, who had been an Assistant Bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.
Carrie’s aunt was Sarah “Sallie” Toney Oates, who had married William Calvin Oates in 1862; he became 29th Governor of Alabama. He enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861, became Captain, then Colonel by the time of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top battle — what won it for the Union was a bayonet charge which forced the CSA back, and was “credited with saving Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac, winning the Battle of Gettysburg and setting the South on a long, irreversible path to defeat.”
By 1864, he was in command of the 48th Alabama and had to have his right arm amputated after it was hit with a minie ball.
He returned home, went into politics, became a US Representative, then Governor in 1894. He’s buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery, and here’s a pic of his monument I took in 2006:
The inscription on this monument states:
“…born in poverty, reared in adversity, without educational advantages, yet by honest individual effort he obtained a competency and the confidence of his fellow men, while fairly liberal to relatives and to the worthy poor. A devoted Confederate soldier, he gave his right arm for the Cause. He accepted the result of the war without a murmur; and in 1898-9, he was a Brigadier General of the United States Volunteers in the War with Spain.”
Some people say “I’d give my right arm…” and this monument points out he actually did.
Skipping back to RJL Jr and his family after the cyclone, after Carrie passed away, he married Josephine “Josie” Burden Larguier, who had been nursing him after a stroke. He died in 1910, fewer than six months after they married, and after his death, their daughter Louise was born.
Nowwww, back to the 2008 visit to the cemetery in Athens:
That monument in January:
Other monuments from January 2022:
More contemporary:
I’ll be doing a series on football-related monuments soon.
Some other monuments that include how the person died (excluding military), like the one above that mentions the cyclone, include this one I photographed in the Italian-Catholic Cemetery in West Blocton AL, this one at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery mentions someone drowning in the Alabama River after “not taking their advice” and “now I warn all young & old to beware of the dangers of this River; see how I am fixed in this watery Grave: I have got but two friends to mourn” and not mentioned but depicted, this monument for Mary Points in Aberdeen MS
We’ve been to New Orleans two of the last three or four weekends — both galas, one of them for a board I’m on, celebrating their 125th year in the city. The first of the two weekends, we stayed at NOPSI for the first time
Shug and I actually took the train because he had come in from a school trip, and I was thinking it would be better/different than just driving in, and we enjoyed it (though next time I’ll be better about packing snacks)
There were a few delays but it was fine — and if we didn’t have a ride or Uber, there were taxis waiting in a queue to take people wherever. On the way, we saw some fun things, like the white cliffs of Epes (think: white cliffs of Dover geologic phenomena), and this huge mass of water lilies.
The boys and I walked and walked and walked the Quarter; we saw the scaffolding at St Louis Cathedral and the sky was too pretty to not act like a tourist and take the usual pics
I made a reservation for the three of us to eat at Donald Link’s new Chemin a la Mer on the fifth floor at the Four Seasons, which is still really new. Alon Shaya’s Miss River is downstairs, off the lobby. Speaking of the lobby, there’s the gorgeous Chandelier Bar:
Loved this areca palm and the air plants around the base
Also, I saw this work by Dawn DeDeaux on the way to the elevators. Her Space Between Worlds exhibit at NOMA was beyonnddddd and definitely my favorite last year.
The entrance to the spa on the fifth floor:
Here, Chemin. The tables at the windows are all only for parties of two, so we sat closer to the middle of the restaurant, but it was still beautiful (and honestly, if you’ve stayed at even the Hilton Riverside or the Westin, this is not a more incredible view to get excited about, so don’t feel left out if you’re in a bigger party).
We started with the baked feta which needed a couple more pieces of bread, but was really, really good and everyone wanted more.
Shugie got the hamburger which he — and I know this sounds odd — described as “really wet” and it slid all over the bun even with out mayonnaise, and was just super messy. This is a fork and knife hamburger, even if you’re a teenager.
Shugie enjoyed his pan-roasted Ora king salmon with beluga lentils, and I have to say, I’m not even a lentils fan and they were delicious.
I had the duck confit with white bean pistou and while the duck was terrific, the beans were just as good, which goes to attest how much skill went into them
Then a couple of weeks later, we were back for the NCJW 125th anniversary gala at the Higgins, which was lots and lots of fun. I’m on their board (thanks to Zoom, meetings are easy) and this was a great way to see some people I’ve only ever met on-screen.
