Month: January 2014

As always, unless otherwise noted, all images here copyright DeepFriedKudzu.  Interested in using any? Contact me first. 


The Times-Pic gets to Domenica‘s king cake:
A beautifully messy oval roll, split sandwich-style and filled with salted caramel, fresh bananas, toasted pecans, mascarpone cheese and caramello, topped with a praline glaze and garnished with gold leaf. The bananas stand out as the sweet note against the strong salted caramel. The impressively extravagant filling is bolstered by a sturdy, crisp crust: in fact, we broke a plastic knife during the feeding frenzy.

—
The Huntsville Museum of Art has extended its exhibit of Cal Breed’s glasswork to May 4, citing how well it was received by the public.

—

Above: we found this at the RC and Moon Pie Festival in Bell Buckle, TN

It seems as though North Koreans have their own version of Moon Pies, and they *love* them.

—
From MPB: at age 81, Leo Welch releases his first album
Good things come to those who wait, but 81 years is a long time by any standard. Leo Welch’s first recording, authentic Mississippi gospel blues with a hill country bent just hit the market this week. It’s produced by the label Big Legal Mess, an imprint of Oxford-based Fat Possum Records.

But things nearly went astray. Bruce Watson is the owner of Big Legal Mess.

“His manager called the office and, you know, said, ‘I got a blues guy.’ And basically one of the interns was like, ‘Well, we don’t really do Blues anymore.’ ‘Cause we really don’t.”

The reason for that is simple.

“You know all the blues guys… we worked with the best of the blues guys in this area and there’s just… all of them a dead basically. There’s not anymore left. And I really thought we’d never make another blues record. And, you know, he showed up in my office and it was like, ‘Yeah, we’re making another blues record.’ “

Sabougla Voices avail here.

—

Above: close-up from a king cake from Paul’s in Picayune

Finally, a king cake festival!

—

Above: I had to try it (2010)

Alton Brown’s latest podcast includes a visit he made with the chocolatiers at Olive and Sinclair in Nashville:
“Southern food kind of defines itself by using what we had access to, be it collard greens, bacon, things of that nature,” Witherow said. “We try to do the same thing. We have access to bourbon barrels, so we age cacao in bourbon barrels. We have access to smoke houses so we smoked cacao for certain products.”

And not to take the wind out of any sails, but don’t regional foodways define themselves by what they had/have access to?  Local cuisine = shaped by what’s on hand.

BTW, their bars are available at Whole Foods.  The new Whole Foods in New Orleans opens next week, and the kinds of programs they’re implementing, incl working with Liberty’s Kitchen, sound wonderful.

—

Above, this Wedgwood mantle appears at the site

Very nice: the Birmingham Museum of Art is now part of the Google Cultural Institute, and it feels so good to see a Bill Traylor.

—
The ‘lost’ Johnny Cash album, ‘Out Among the Stars‘ will be released in March.

—

Above, one of the works that will appear at the gallery; I photographed this one in January 2012 at Wade’s home

The ‘Wade Made: Works from the Hands, Heart, and Mind of Wade Wharton’ exhibit at Union Grove Gallery on the UAH campus will be Sunday, February 2 from 2-5p.

—

Above: water spillway at Clarkson Covered Bridge in Cullman County, Alabama

Our cousin, James Salzman (author of Drinking Water: A History, and prof of Environmental Law at Duke), was interviewed on NPR Weekend Edition: Americans Prefer their Water Clean, but not Pure:

Well, it’s called distilled water, sure. It ends up actually not tasting very good. It’s funny actually – for Aquafina and Dasani and actually the major bottled water brands, that’s actually tap water that is passed through very fine filters. It’s called reverse osmosis. And then the water actually is too clean to taste good. So, in the industry they call it pixie dust – they put some minerals actually back into the water to improve the taste.

SALZMAN: Well, I mean, what’s clean water, right? I mean, the water that we have out of our tap is clean. The water that we have out of bottled water is clean, right? The question is do you want water that has no contaminants in it all, which would be distilled, or water that’s safe to drink? And the fact is we could certainly treat water if we wanted to, to the point where there’s nothing in it, but we wouldn’t be willing to pay the cost.

—
Rarely am I thinking of convention speeches weeks later, but this one I read, by Rabbi Rick Jacobs, in part on the concept of ‘audacious hospitality’ given at the URJ biennial last month was pretty terrific.

Oh, and Sabine Parish, please don’t let all this be happening, that there’s a teacher in your midst bullying a student for religious (or other) reasons. From the Times-Pic.:
The parents and the child assert that his sciences and social studies teacher began proselytizing the sixth-grader after he enrolled last August. The child says the teacher, Rita Roark, told the class that Buddhism is “stupid,” questioned if the student “has to be raised Buddhist” and suggested he “change” his faith.

For example, the final question on one of Roark’s science tests was: “ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _______ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’…

—
My friend Fred Scruton (amazing photographer) has an article in the latest Raw Vision (#80), ‘Apocalypse at Niagara Falls: Prophet Isaiah Robertson‘:
…Robertson is a parishioner – not a preacher – at the Mount Erie Baptist Church, and its three-storey sanctuary is the site of his “first prophesy” – that The Jubilee (a year of forgiveness and redemption) began in 2006. Originally hired by the church to simply sheetrock and panel the walls, he recalls that a guest speaker at an outdoor spiritual revival event could sense there was a person with the gift of prophecy in their midst…

—

Above: a pic of the MIL Lounge from a couple of years ago

Kermit Ruffins is closing his Treme Speakeasy after Mardi Gras.
The restaurant is generally open every day except Tuesday from noon til. Ruffins does everything from “going to get the garbage bags to cooking up food to hiring the bands to paying everybody.” He typically cooked red beans, cabbage, stewed rabbit, meatloaf and potato salad over a three hour period every day, leaving the frying of frog legs and shrimp to his employees. He also performs at the Speakeasy on Sunday evenings at 6 p.m. (though he’s taking off Feb. 2 to watch the Super Bowl).

About him taking over Ernie K. Doe’s Mother-In-Law-Lounge, he said:
“The Mother-in-Law is quite easy,” Ruffins said. “I order my liquor and hire a couple of bands. And I don’t have to cook.”

BTW, the new name is ‘Kermit Ruffins’ Treme Mother-in-Law Lounge’.

—

Above: the rotunda singing, 2008

The 16th Annual Rotunda Singing (shape note) in Montgomery will be February 1.

The 23rd Annual Festival of Negro Spirituals will also be February 1, at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Baton Rouge.

—
The WSJ on food festival pageants this week.
Janelle Johnson, 26, current Asparagus Queen first runner-up, is working to ensure that the pageant continues. Ms. Johnson, who is single, is the first unmarried contestant in the pageant’s history. In June, she will move into the role of queen coordinator. She lately has begun a contestant outreach campaign, partnering with local farmers and businesses to create incentives for female employees to apply.

And she hopes to ramp up the amount of asparagus trivia in the competition, adding more questions like “How much can an asparagus stalk grow in a 24-hour period?” (Answer: 10 inches.)

—

Above: at the Bankhead Museum in Jasper, AL, Tallulah’s address book is opened to the contact information for Tennessee Williams

The Daily Beast runs an excerpt from Flappers: Six Women of A Dangerous Generation (published this month) on Tallulah Bankhead.  You know this, but our girl from Jasper ran off to NYC and had a really big time.

—
Weaver D’s in Athens is closing again, again, again, or maybe not.  It’s almost as if Ronnie Marchant (famous for his perpetually going-out-of-business furniture sales, and ‘everwhatchaneed!’ in B’ham) is in charge of marketing.  Again, the Red and Black has an article about how dire the future of the restaurant is.  An advertising major at UGA is trying to help things with meat-and-two-plus-a-drink $8 promotion for students on ‘Automatic Saturday!’ but there needs to be some kind of permanent shift.

With each time Weaver has announced he was about to close, the public has responded. But there was a drawback. After hearing that the restaurant could close soon, some people believed that it actually was closed – which doesn’t help get them inside.

“They ask, ‘Are you closed?’ when I answer the phone,” he said. “I say, ‘Get closed out of your mind.’ The first time, we said we might have to close if we don’t receive community support. Come on out here and save us. I threw out the lifeline.”

—
The subject of ‘teaching to the test’ has blown up in Mississippi after someone with an anonymous blog titled ‘TEACHING IN A MISSISSIPPI DELTA CLASSROOM‘ (which has since been deleted, but that’s what Google’s cache is for) posted video, as the C-L put it:
In one of the videos, a young teacher is advocating for a class presentation project that her mentor says must end.

“When they started with all this state stuff and that this school’s got to do this or we’re going to take over, you’ve got to be a D school, you can’t be an F school,” she said. “Before all that happened you could go in there, you could take time…”

AND (prepare to shake your head in disgust after reading this, in the direction of several agencies):
In another video, the young teacher says her mother also is an educator and is able to incorporate creative lessons into her classroom despite the MCT2 testing constraints; she wants to do the same thing.

But the mentor says her mother probably doesn’t teach in a poor district and that the two can’t be compared.

“If I could give them a little taste of what they would get if they came from a different demographic …” the younger woman says before she is cut off by the mentor.

“Well they didn’t come from a different demographic,” the mentor interrupts. “So they’re not going to get a little taste. The little taste they’re going to get right now is that we have got to get ready for tests.”
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1 http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1 there’s one more video at the C-L too.

Flavorwire had a story last week about Edith Wharton’s dogs and the pet cemetery she had for them:

Literature has its dog lovers: John Steinbeck wrote about traveling with Charlie, Virginia Woolf found comfort in dogs throughout her life, preferring mixed breeds to purebreds, and Emily Brontë was so fond of her dogs that she used to sketch pictures of them. Perhaps you’ve seen Grasper, from life, her portrait of the small Irish Terrier the family owned when the eldest of the famous sisters was a teenager.

But Edith Wharton’s love of her dogs really eclipses all others. Her passionless marriage to her husband, Teddy Wharton, may have had something to do with the fact that Wharton’s dogs served as both her companions and her children — but her love for her canine friends went deeper, even, than that.

Also last week there was a story about the owner of a pet cemetery in Iowa who was in legal trouble for burying horses, when according to the state, they are post-mortem ‘solid waste’ and must be put in a landfill of some sort.  From USA Today:

But states like Iowa might not be keeping pace with how Americans believe their pets should be treated — even after they’re gone, said Donna Shugart-Bethune, executive administrator of the International Association of Pet Cemeteries in Atlanta.

“People treat pets like their family,” she said, and they want the same burial services “they’d want for their human family members.”

(since the story, the cemetery owner lost his appeal)

Even at Fort McClellan around Anniston, there is a pet cemetery set up decades ago:

An aside about Fort McClellan: the POW murals at Remington Hall there were painted by German prisoners during WWII, and a couple of years ago the murals were put on The Alabama Historical Commission and the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation’s ‘Places in Peril‘ list. A document with photographs of the murals is here.

Also, there’s a 196-foot-long snake effigy at Ft. McClellan, and a talk given by Dr. Holstein from JSU about it is available here.  Another piece from the Journal of the Alabama Academy of Science:
In 2007, JSU staff and volunteers began the investigation of the Skeleton Mountain Snake Effigy, lCal57. This serpentine stone pavement and several other associated stone features were mapped in detail and photographed. It was apparent that the stone structures required a considerable amount of labor to construct and that the serpentine pathway was well planned in order to maintain its relatively uniform size. It also appears the effigy may not have been totally finished by its builders, since the probable “head” is somewhat detached from the serpentine “body”. Based on comparable data from other prehistoric stone wall sites in the Southeast, and ethnographic data documenting the importance of the serpent symbolism in Native American art and mythology, ARL researchers believe prehistoric peoples constructed this stone structure sometime during the Woodland or early Mississippian time periods. Likewise, they believe a small horseshoe-shaped structure, a linear stone wall, and the detached head were constructed by the same prehistoric populations…

Below, from our visit to the eagle in Putnam County, Georgia, which has been made into a state park:

Thanks to the sudden snow/ice storm (snow was predicted for South Alabama (!) not central today), it took Av 3.5 hours to get what’s usually a six-minute drive from Shug’s school to Shugie’s preschool.  In the meantime I put on two pairs of socks, yoga pants under jeans, a giant sweatshirt, coat, and scarf, and walked almost three miles (which really wasn’t that bad, but the icy spots were a little scary) to Shugie’s preschool to make sure one of us was able to get him.  Sure enough, Av and I arrived at almost the same time.  Then, we had to ditch Av’s Acadia before we were able to get home and walk the rest of the way, as we live, well, atop a mountain.  What an adventure!

This summer on our way to Lockhart, Texas, we passed this giant watermelon water tower in Luling:

Luling is also home to the annual ‘Watermelon Thump‘ and of course, the Watermelon Thump Queen.

While I did my share of pageants when I was little — this one I brought home from Atlanta — I still remember trying to pick it up when they announced my name:

…ah, I wish I’d gone further as I got older and competed for titles I would’ve *dreamed of* like Miss Lecompte Pie (me + pie = yes!), Miss Hot Tamale (uh, yeah!), Miss Biscuit (I would have gotten to actually make biscuits!), Miss Vidalia Onion (tears of joy!) and others.  However, I wonder if I might be one of the only girls who were a Miss Merry Christmas and Little Miss Easter (seriously – part of my prize, besides the trophy and crown, was picking out a real live bunny, who I named ‘Charlie’) who went on to receive her Sisterhood’s Light of Torah award as a grownup.  But winning the festival in Luling sounds *wonderful*.  All hail Queen Watermelon Thump!

Also, there isn’t a pageant at these next two festivals, but the world needs a Miss Slugburger and a Miss RC and Moon Pie too.

Well, back to water towers — these, my favorite water towers in the universe — we found them in Ruleville, Mississippi:

*This* is my favorite spot at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson: viewing Hystercine Rankin’s 1992 ‘Parchman Prison’ quilt in this space:

Hystercine Rankin received a National Heritage Fellowship from the NEA in 1997 and worked with the Mississippi Cultural Crossroads in Port Gibson (she passed away in 2010).

When we visited the Crossroads in PG again this summer, I noticed that they had a bio on her which read in part:
“Her family’s oral history states that her great-great-grandmother was part Indian and partnered an African slave. This man and his eleven- and twelve-year-old sons were conscripted into the Confederate Army to dig trenches, carry water, and gather wood.  All three of them were killed during the siege of Vicksburg in 1863.”

The bio further tells of her father’s murder in 1939, and the memory quilt she made, ‘After My Father’s Funeral’.  That particular quilt looks to be on the market currently at $18k.

Hystercine is also featured in the book ‘A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and their Stories‘.

Here, some other images from the Mississippi Cultural Crossroads from our return visit this summer:

The following quilts are for sale:

Let’s bring summer back, shall we?

As always, all images here copyright DeepFriedKudzu, unless otherwise noted. Interested in using one? Contact me. Thanks

Above, tamales from Doe’s in Greenville

In this month’s Smithsonian Magazine: How the Hot Tamale Conquered the American South
My first food memory—besides crying over a mouthful of Tabasco-drenched crackers my momma had sprinkled on the floor to deter my fondness for rat poison—is biting into a spicy tamale at Doe’s Eat Place (a renowned steakhouse, now with several locations throughout the South, owned by the Signa family, who got their start selling tamales) in downtown Greenville. It was like dreaming with my eyes wide open—moist, rich, filling and delicious—and I’ve been in love ever since. I eat a dozen in a sitting whether at Doe’s, where, wrapped in parchment rather than the more usual corn husk, it’s merely a warm-up for the gargantuan steaks, or at a spot like Scott’s Hot Tamales, a tiny white shack on the edge of Highway 1 serving only tamales and soda. I’ve flown all the way from my current home in Maine to Greenville to satisfy a sudden, overpowering tamale craving, lying to my family and friends that I’d really come all that way just to see them. I would do practically anything for a Delta hot tamale…

Calvin Trillin on Delta Tamales in The New Yorker, and I love that someone has the title ‘Biscuit Boss’ on their business cards.

—

Above, Dockery Farms

‘Blues Musicians in Unmarked Graves Are Finally Getting Some Respect‘ from The Daily Beast:

The problem gets occasional publicity when a rock star steps in and buys a tombstone for a blues great. Janis Joplin bought the headstone for Bessie Smith. John Fogerty and others paid for a monument for Robert Johnson. And more quietly, local blues societies have labored for years to locate the graves of their heroes and place headstones on unmarked plots.

As head of the Killer Blues Foundation, Salter has been searching for lost heroes of the blues for more than a decade and raising money to put headstones on every unmarked grave he can identify. In the past decade, his foundation has laid 22 headstones, with four more almost ready to be installed.

—

The exhibit Wade Wharton had been working on and so excited about — I still have a voicemail from him talking about it on my phone — will take place now as a tribute to him. UAH’s Art and Art History Department will open ‘Wade Made‘ on January 27 in the Union Grove Gallery; a reception will be February 2 from 2p-5p, and the show will run through March 21.

—
When an Abita Springs congregation needed a new church building, they thought they might find one the needed repair that they could bring in from the Delta.  Instead, they found what they were looking for in Nova Scotia and it cost only $9000 to move it down.

—
True Detective on HBO.  Yes.

—
On mint juleps, from William Alexander Percy’s autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee:
…I remember Mother would be in white, looking very pretty, and would immediately set about making a mint julep for the gentlemen — no hors d’oeuvres, no sandwiches, no cocktails, just a mint julep. After the first long swallow — really a slow and noiseless suck, because the thick crushed ice comes against your teeth and the ice must be kept out and the liquor let in — Cap Mac would say: “Very fine, Camille, you make the best julep in the world.” She probably did. Certainly her juleps had nothing in common with those hybrid concoctions one buys in bars the world over under that name. It would have been sacrilege to add lemon, or a slice of orange or of pineapple, or one of these wretched maraschino cherries.

The glass immediately frosted and you settled back in your chair for a half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss. Although you stirred the sugar at the bottom, it never all melted, therefore at the end of the half hour there was left a delicious mess of ice and mint and whisky which a small boy was allowed to consume with calm rapture.

—

Above, a 20k home in Hale County

The February issue of Fast Company:
The Heart of Hale County: For 20 Years, young Design Idealists Have Descended on this Sad and Gorgeous Place with the Best Intentions. What Have They Wrought?
That’s fodder for a slew of upbeat dispatches–but what does it add up to? I asked dozens of designers and architects who have worked (or still work) there and in other social-design contexts how they judge success. Most replies acknowledged how frustrating it can be to try to answer such questions definitively. But in Hale County, at least, the irrefutable responses involved personal stories: This person got a house; that person got a job. On an individual level, for sure, design and architecture have changed lives in this place–definitively, and for the better.

Pull back, and it gets harder to gauge the impact.

—
The pull of Crystal Bridges is great: a NJ Frank Lloyd Wright home has been purchased by the museum and will be moved to its grounds in Arkansas.

—
Toni Tipton-Martin who created The Jemima Code project (a collection rare cookbooks written by black authors) will speak at the UT Austin Food Lab’s Women and Food Symposium this weekend.

The Jemima Code, an upcoming book and pop-up exhibit, focuses on the 150 cookbooks that are a part of Tipton-Martin’s personal collection of 300 rare, African-American cookbooks.

“My goal is to make sure that African Americans — women in particular and cooks in general — take their rightful place among the role models in the culinary industry,” Tipton-Martin said. “When they do that they will be able to be the voice that touches all those areas that I work in, whether it’s social justice, food insecurity, health and nutrition.”

—
‘What Mrs. Fisher knows about old southern cooking, soups, pickles, preserves, etc.‘ is available at Open Library, free.  It was written by Abby Fisher in San Francisco, published in 1881; she previously had been a slave in Mobile.

—

The Times-Pic is doing a ‘58 King Cakes in 58 Days‘ feature.  Here’s a recipe they ran for king cake pie.  Who wants to be the king cake baby sitting at the top of the king cake milk punch at Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House?

—

Above, Choctaw in Natchez

On the market in Natchez: 1856 The Towers ($2.9MM), 1885 Keyhole House (Queen Anne extraordinaire, $1.19MM), and 1836 Choctaw ($790K, now pending).

—
Japanese Suntory (which I didn’t know was a real company; I thought it only existed in the movie ‘Lost in Translation’) makes plans to purchase Jim Beam.

—
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is being built right now in Atlanta.

—

Above: chicken from Gus’ in Memphis

All Things Considered gives us a little piece on King Ranch Chicken, and the NYT discusses comeback sauce.  Austin has been blessed with the opening of Gus’ Fried Chicken.

—
Demolition can go forward on the old Dixie Brewery building after all.

—
‘Scottsboro Boys: The Fred Hiroshige Photographs’ exhibit is open now at the Paul R. Jones Gallery of Art in Tuscaloosa, through February 21.

—
With a menu that includes: pickled andouille, hoppin john with potlikker, fried chicken that you can order ‘Nashville hot’ (with a side of buttermilk for an extra $3), catfish (that can also go Nashville), Memphis BBQ spaghetti, boudin, hot brown, and grilled pimento cheese, you can tell Boston’s State Park is trying to bring in a big swath of Southern food.  How well they pull it off I’m not certain even after the Boston Globe piece, but if they’re going to all that trouble, they should consider offering Zapp’s or Golden Flake rather than Utz.

—

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis won’t be reopening in March as planned — it will be April, and the director says that’s to better familiarize the employees with the new technology and exhibits.

—
The ‘recently unearthed’ short story by Zelda Fitzgerald, ‘The Iceberg’ is here at The New Yorker.  As they put it, ‘The tone is lighthearted, winking, and ironic, and the story seems to presage some of the tensions in Zelda’s own life: between independence and entanglement with a man, the twinned and, sometimes, conflicting desires to write and to be admired, and the pressures of a search for the right kind of self-expression.’

—
Why are so many Mississippians moving to Sunflower County?  If you said Parchman, sigh, you’re right.  The ending of conjugal visits at MS prisons made it to the NYT this week.

Know what, beauties?  We need plenty of reality (see this snippet above from the census people) but let’s keep the lovely things going on as the main course.  Thus, Good Stuff Happened Today. If that doesn’t fix things, flip through this slideshow of tiny people, and then top of off with this, and play it loud:

—
Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta will now be raising chickens on its roof.

—
http://video.pbs.org/viralplayer/2365142620
It appears as though ‘Independent Lens’ on PBS will present ‘Spies of Mississippi‘ on February 10.

—
Members of the Cherokee Nation, who have a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, may request seeds from the Cherokee Heirloom Seed Project. From CNN:
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker explained the seeds’ lineage to CNN. “This strain of seeds came with us on the Trail of Tears,” he said…

“They have been preserved and grown every year before that, and they are the basic foods G-d gave us that we grew long before the contact with Europeans,” Baker continued.

The seeds available through the Cherokee Heirloom Seed Project possess unique traits that have long made them valuable to the Cherokee Nation, said Baker. “[The seeds] have specific properties to them that are resistant to drought and they are part of our history, culture and heritage and they mean a great deal to us. The big seed companies are genetically engineering and coming up with seeds that are drought tolerant, that we possess naturally.”

—
Ending this weekend, and interesting as to how this exhibit was displayed (no labels for individual items; the collection presented as large environment) : “Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values” at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center

—

Above: something we saw at the RC and Moon Pie Festival in Bell Buckle, TN

Cheerwine barbecue sauce exists.  And so does Moon Pie moonshine.  Do satsumas belong in gumbo?

Friends, so terribly sad to share with you that our great friend, artist Wade Wharton of Huntsville passed away this morning.

AL.com is updating the story, as the circumstances are very distressing.

Hard to know what to do or say right now — just in such disbelief — have been talking with the family all this morning and there is so much love in the world for the genuinely wonderful human being and spirit of Wade Wharton, a gentle creature with so much creativity and warmth and ohmygosh just one of the most terrific laughs G-d ever put into anyone.

Wade loved people and we all loved him right back.  We’ll love him forever.

I will update with funeral arrangements once they are made.

Several months ago, a call went out from the Vulcan Park and Museum for residents to bring items for an upcoming exhibit, ‘Vulcan Keepsakes: Iron Man Memorabilia from the Birmingham Community’ which is up now through September 7 of this year.  This is the 110th year since Vulcan was cast and became the world’s largest cast iron statue.

Av and I brought three different items, and they all made it into the show (it isn’t every day you can tell someone visiting your home that alas, the empty spot on the wall is because you loaned your art to a museum):

This is a painting by Melissa Gay that I commissioned several years ago as a Chanukah gift for Av. I only asked that she have Vulcan holding a Chanukah menorah but was so tickled by how wonderful she made it:

This set by Peyton Glanton, that I purchased when she had her ‘I Would Fall For You Anywhere‘ show at Naked Art in Bham:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/deepfriedkudzu/11935782443/player/4b93aa4306

And we stood in line for a loooong time when the LEGO store first opened here, so we could get the special Vulcan set they made for this opening:

Not ours, but my friend Charles Buchanan made this Elvis-inspired block print Vulcan:

…and this ‘corrected painting’ from John Lytle Wilson:

Scott Thigpen:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/deepfriedkudzu/11935969504/player/33b0aa2746

https://www.flickr.com/photos/deepfriedkudzu/11935763533/player/a1a7a8e2f4