Twenty-plus years of documenting the South's vernacular art, visionary environments and traditions….plus modern art exhibits, Faulkner and Eudora, and This Week's Various. Welcome.
I’ve been waiting to visit the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi for a long time — both because I’m a fan of George Ohr’s pottery, and Frank Gehry’s architecture. This is a pic I took of the damage done to Gehry’s work-in-progress in 2005, just after Katrina:
I finally got to see it all (much of it is still in construction):
A view from the top floor of the main building:
Beside the building in which visitors enter, there are a couple more buildings with their own theme:
I had a wonderful talk with a docent in the other space about Newcomb Pottery, then we talked about Gehry and his spaces. She’s also a fan, but the acoustics in that particular gallery were just awful. We had to stand close together in order to be able to hear one another — although we were the only two people in a gallery that wasn’t particularly large, we couldn’t carry on a conversation at what should have been a perfectly fine distance in most other spaces.
Among the Gehry quirks and preferences she told me about, she said that he didn’t like the walls to be littered with caption cards on the walls for each work of art, as it is in most every other museum.
The main building had these models of the architecture on display:
It’s Spring Break week here in Alabama, so we’ve been on vacation (so many wonderful things!) so regular postings will return on Sunday — but I’m back in time to put together this:
As always, unless otherwise noted, all pics here copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Ask me before using in any fashion. Thank you.
— It sounds as though the Alabama Music Hall of Fame will stay closed another few months and that its building and property may be sold to afford it the opportunity to move into what will hopefully be a better location/facility.
— Dark Rye: Whole Foods’ online magazine, “brings together pioneers of unconventional ideas to explore the edges of the creative life.”
— Bill Traylor artworks at the American Folk Art Museum in NYC: “Bill Traylor was a master of composition. He used simple forms and shapes in often marvelously complex figurations. Traylor called his narrative works “exciting events,” and they reveal the artist as a gifted storyteller.”
— The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded “From the Piedmont to the Swamplands: Preserving Southern Traditional Music” by the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC. “The project will preserve and make accessible online up to 3,019 hours of sound recordings and 4,500 related photographs dating from the 1920s to 1980s, documenting the traditional music and musicians of the southeastern United States.”
Hotels we’ve stayed at in the last couple or three months:
Hilton Hotel, Lafayette LA
Hyatt Place Hotel, Memphis TN
Hampton Inn, Tupelo MS
Hyatt Regency Hotel, New Orleans LA
Shug in particular loved being able to see the Superdome from here so well, in fact, we walked down to it and Champions Square:
Both boys were mystified by the elevator systems here that had no buttons to push; they swiped our room key and it guided us to which car to take, which was usually ready for us almost instantly:
Doubletree Hotel, Kenner LA — Av had business in Metairie so we decided to save money and stay at this airport hotel rather than stay in the CBD another evening and pay for parking again, and the boys thought it was a great idea once they split a Doubletree chocolate chip cookie:
— Cast iron skillets in the shape of each state, made by a studio in Wisconsin. Texas is $2000, Louisiana is $350.
— Selma Pilgrimage, this weekend, and not to be missed. More at the M’ry Advertiser.
— Of course Shopsin’s had interesting thing going on with his Frito Chili Pie: mac and chipotle, chorizo chili, curry potato and chickpea…the list goes on.
— The Tuscaloosa News reports that Demopolis native Jim Rogers, investment writer and commentator, gave a speech at Bama in which he “encouraged students…to travel and learn about other cultures to better understand the world and their own country.
When Zhang asked the last question during the question-and-answer period that followed, she prefaced her query by telling Rogers he was well-known in her native China.
Rogers commended her for studying at UA, saying her education went beyond the classroom and included experiencing such things as Tuscaloosa and Dreamland.
When Zhang told him she didn’t know what Dreamland was, Rogers reached for his wallet, called her to the stage and gave her $50 and directions to go eat at his favorite barbecue restaurant.
“I would take you there for lunch myself, but I have to leave for Birmingham,” said Rogers, who noted that after he completed his first trip around the world, he went to Dreamland before going home to Demopolis to see his mother.
— The LA Times writes about the 50-year, $50 billion Louisiana master plan that “envisions sluices in the Mississippi River’s levees to allow sediment to flow into the delta again and restore land. It calls for the large-scale restoration of wetlands and erecting levees from Lake Charles in the west to New Orleans in the east.”
— Biscuit Love food truck, debuting next month in Nashville.
— The Southern Poverty Law Center released Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve and they find that “The 51-state report card told a disturbing story. Across the country, state history standards—the expectations about what students learn and teachers teach—routinely ignored or over-simplified the struggle for African American civil rights that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. The farther away from the South—and the smaller the African-American population—the lower the expectations for significant coverage. Too often, we found, the movement, when it is given classroom time, is reduced to lessons about two heroic figures—Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks—and the four words, “I have a dream.”
The guidelines mention Alabama, Florida and New York standards as a starting point.
— The Washington Post just ran an AP piece for Passover with recipes for matzo brei shepherd’s pie, and Passover sliders with caramelized onions. I like the sound of this three-hour pre-Pesach walking tour in the “Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, including a stop at a shmura matzo factory, an Israeli sorbet shop, an Uzbek bakery, a Yemeni market and a kugel shop.” It’s a Noshwalk, and there are something like 35 different ones with all kinds of different cuisines.
The last time we were in Montgomery, I wanted to take pictures of the Maya Lin-designed monument at the Civil Rights Memorial Center, by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Av’s been inside a couple of times; once in the ’90s when he was there with a group of black, and Jewish teens with the program Operation Understanding. The idea is that they learn about each other during the year, and during the summer, do a tour of Jewish and civil rights sites in the South.
Here, the Maya Lin-designed monument:
The SPLC describes it this way: A circular black granite table records the names of the martyrs and chronicles the history of the movement in lines that radiate like the hands of a clock. Water emerges from the table’s center and flows evenly across the top. On a curved black granite wall behind the table is engraved Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known paraphrase of Amos 5:24 – We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
My sweet grandfather, z’l, had a cousin who was a state trooper during the civil rights era and stood in the schoolhouse door with Wallace (who goes unnamed here):
This cousin was on duty at the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma. And he investigated the synagogue bombing in Gadsden. The list goes on and on; he was everywhere.
But I came along much after that, and I only knew him as my PawPaw’s cousin and best friend. And when my sweet PawPaw was in the hospital, this cousin held Av and me in rapt attention for hours, telling as you can imagine the *most* interesting stories as an Alabama State Trooper in those days…being as how he had witnessed so many of these events first-hand.
We haven’t gone since we had the boys, but for years Av and I attended the annual memorial service at Mt. Zion for Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in Philadelphia MS. We also attended the trial of Edgar Ray Killen in 2005. That’s an interesting story for another day.
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