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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.
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.
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
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.
from a 2016 visit
Turnrow Books in Greenwood, Mississippi is having its grand reopening March 25 from 4-7p.
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)
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
The hyacinths are up in Huntsville. Hope you’re enjoying all the new pretty coming up and coming out now too. xoxo!
