Month: August 2011

The first public screening of “The Help” in Mississippi (it’s nationwide on August 10th) was last weekend at the Malco in Madison.  It was a fundraiser for the Baptist Town Community Development, Inc. for revitalization of the 100-year-old neighborhood in Greenwood.  Robert Johnson once lived there, and several scenes from the movie were filmed there.

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The Detroit News ran a story about the Heidelberg Project entitled, “25 years later, ‘outsider art’ vision still fuels fame, furor on Heidelberg Street”

In part:

And visitors come by the thousands — 200,000 plus a year from all over the world, according to Guyton’s wife and project executive director Jenenne Whitfield. Such visitors would ordinarily steer clear of such a blighted Detroit neighborhood, said John George at Motor City Blight Busters, a nonprofit that fights abandonment on the west side. But Heidelberg is different. “Suburbanites cruise through Heidelberg, cameras snapping, eyes big as saucers,” George said. “Then they pull over and actually get out of their cars.
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For his part, Guyton, 55, is not surprised by the reaction. “The art is a medicine,” said the art school dropout. “It helps you forget your fears and takes you back to your childhood. It makes you laugh. It makes you happy.”
Some might think the academic art world would be dismissive. It’s not.
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Harvard University art historian John Beardsley, who knows Heidelberg well, links it to the Southern custom of found-object yard art, which itself connects, he said, to the African tradition of decorating graves with objects sanctified by connection to the deceased.
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Hoping to expand this mission, the project plans to build a $1 million arts complex on Heidelberg Street. The House That Makes Sense Center — named after a plan to carpet a house with pennies was abandoned (its foundation wouldn’t take the weight) — will include classrooms, project offices, gallery, gift shop and the Heidelberg archives.
Just last week, Michael Kaiser, head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., stopped by to advise on developing a donor base for a capital campaign.

“The Heidelberg Project is a fantastic community organization,” said Kaiser, “really a model of how to serve the community in an interesting and artistic way, and how to empower people within that community.”

The project has celebrated its 25 years with gusto, mounting a show at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, throwing a Family Fun Day and erecting 25 of Guyton’s painted car hoods — a fitting canvas for a Detroit artist — in front of sites including the Max M. Fisher Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. The hoods will be up through August. And just hitting bookstores is a new children’s book from a Boston publisher, “Magic Trash: A Story of Tyree Guyton and His Art.”

All of this constitutes what John George at Blight Busters sees as inspiring pushback against urban decay and neglect, a hopeful counterpoint to the defeatism that often shrouds Detroit neighborhoods like Heidelberg pockmarked by burned-out houses and empty lots.

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Penuin hired tatoo artists to design book covers.


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The Sunday Telegraph in Australia has just a terrific article about Nelle Lee, including her answer as to why she’s never written another book.

Homemade mayonnaise.  It somehow impresses people if you make your own, but I think those are the people that don’t know how easy it is.  This makes a bit more than one cup:

1 egg
splash lemon juice
dash salt
1 cup oil — you can use vegetable oil or olive oil (I like olive oil)

Above: put the egg, salt, and lemon juice in the Cuisinart and process.

Add the oil in a stream until you have…mayonnaise!  It’s the world’s best mayonnaise.  So fresh and so light.

To make tartar sauce, just add in some dill, a little pickle (this is all to your liking!).  Terrific:

Oh we found the most wondrous place — it’s a few miles off 20/59 going west, not too far inside Mississippi, in Kewanee.  It’s the Simmons-Wright Company, and it’s been open since 1884.

Yes, yes, yes.

Besides all this goodness, it’s something of a small grocery store.  We loaded up on juice (should have gotten hoop cheese!) and some crackers, and it was back on the road.

The 1895 Causeyville General Store is only about twelve or so minutes from here:

Last week, the USPS released lists state-by-state of post offices they are considering closing.  One of the ones in Mississippi really got my attention, because it’s been in the news this year, largely due to a gentleman from Columbus, Mississippi that now lives in Colorado — he’s upset about the mural in the downtown post office of his old hometown.  His position can be found here.  He’s written to the ACLU, newspapers, the SPLC, and other people and organizations about getting the mural removed.

Well, WPA murals (actually these were done by the Section of Painting and Sculpture, an arm of the Treasury) are one of my favorite things — I’ve taken pics of most of the ones in Alabama and a few in MS.  This one, ‘Out of the Soil,’ was painted in 1939 by Beulah Bettersworth, from New York.  She painted a farmer plowing in the forefront, with a cotton field and people picking, along with a church, gin, and mill.

If you’re into this kind of thing: she was hired to paint the mural in the Indianola post office (she called it “White Gold in the Delta” as it depicted the cotton crop) after Walter Anderson determined he couldn’t do it, due to poor health.

Here’s a pic of it from 1980, before the clear acrylic (which makes it so hard to photograph) was put on top:

Photo: Library of Congress HABS MISS,44-COLUM,23-4. Thank you. 

Mr. LaNier “proposes showing the piece at the public library or Mississippi University for Women during Black History Month or housing it at a black-history museum, rather than at the public post office where it invokes “painful memories” of “racial intolerance.””

The idea is that the artist painted generally what she saw.  The paper noted, “of the handful of patrons polled at the post office Friday morning, most found the setting a historically accurate depiction of the rural Mississippi of the time.”  Some had passed through the post office without ever noticing the nearly 16-foot-wide mural.


Annie Jeffries, a lifelong Mississippi resident, looked at the painting for the first time on Friday.


“It’s very nice,” she said. “It shows where we came from — how we all had to struggle to be able to survive. I know about that because I grew up here. It’s my home. We did such as that; we picked cotton.”


But also:
The post office has that letter and documents from the era on file, including an unnamed note about the mural, possibly written by the local postmaster at the time the artwork was delivered. “Lots of blacks offended,” the note mentions.


The unnamed reviewer also points out the mural isn’t perfect. The mule in the painting, for example, has a cow’s tail, and the plowman’s harness isn’t exactly right. Still, the note says the work was “pretty good for a Yankee woman who never saw the South end of a northbound mule.”

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Despite Lanier’s objections to the piece, and mixed reactions to the mural by post office customers on Friday, all agreed the historic mural depicts a time that is long past, but shouldn’t be forgotten.


“I don’t (see it as racist) because we all had to do it in order to survive — not just the blacks. I see nothing racist about it,” said Jeffries, who is black. “People leave (the South) and want to change certain things, but you can’t forget that part because it’s a part of your life. That’s your beginning.”

If the downtown Columbus post office is closed, that adds a whole new element.