November 2017 • Page 2 of 2 • Deep Fried Kudzu

November 15, 2017November 19, 2017

Rag Bologna and Hoop Cheese

The Jefferson Country Store outside Demopolis, Alabama — Hoop Cheese, Souse, Rag Bologna

Inside, an old store with wooden floors and glass coke bottles, Moon Pies, boiled peanuts, chips (your choice of Golden Flake and Zapp’s), Little Debbies, cans of Manwich and salmon…there’s probably some 10W30 and windshield washing fluid in there somewhere — you name it. And they’ve got this grill area for making hot ham & cheese, fried bologna sandwich or Conecuh sausage dogs…

If you’re there after the grill closes, there’s always rag bologna (called that because of the cloth sleeve) and hoop cheese with the red wax in the fridge

If you pick up a copy of the latest Southbound (it’s published by Atlanta Magazine and comes with their subscriptions), they ran one of my pics of the Simmons-Wright Company country store in Kewanee, Mississippi

but the most interesting part isn’t the outside but the inside

November 10, 2017November 15, 2017

Theatre Marquee, Tilework

Found in Jackson, Alabama:

November 9, 2017November 15, 2017

This Year’s (so far) Best Exhibit: Christenberry

Last year was an *amazing* year for exhibits, and my top two were Hunt Slonem Antebellum Pop! at the LSU Museum of Art and Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors at the Frist. This year, I’m thinking the Mobile Museum of Art’s Christenberry: In Alabama might be tops:

The signs, the sculptures, the woodwork, the ephemera, the furniture, the paintings, the photography…just this incredible all-encompassing (or as all-encompassing as one can wish for) look at Christenberry’s world…

“The Palmist Building is in my consciousness, has been most of my life as far as I can remember. It was on the way in the forks of the road, literally between grandparents’ houses — grandparents Smith and Christenberry — so we’d have to pass it. Especially when we lived in Tuscaloosa, we’d make that trek almost, if not every, weekend to visit one or both of these families. It was a general store run by my great-uncle, Sydney Duncan, my father’s mother’s brother — she was a Duncan… Then my next recollection was it becoming the Palmist Building.” — Bill Christenberry, cited in catalogue ‘William Christenberry ART & Family’ at the Ogden, 2000

Tornado Table, 2016

Providence Church, 1976

Southern Tree, November 20, 2004 — German ink on laid paper

Alabama Box, 1980

Entrance to B.F. Perkins’ place near Bankston, Alabama 1988

November 6, 2017November 10, 2017

The Only Sure Thing

If we live a good life, we get to say that we met a certain number of people who were blissfully “one of a kind” — in one day, one day!, sweet Wade Wharton introduced me to his friends Tat Bailey, Bill Wilson, and John Farrer who all fully met that description.

The ridiculous part of this is that each of those men — each a close friend of Wade, was in his own right an incredible artist, and had an unmistakable, strong personality, undeniably a “one of a kind”. John was a sculptor with big public commissions. Bill was a poet, a pique assiette artist. Wade, well, Wade had an art environment and made all kinds of sculptures (when he wasn’t woodworking or making silly things from gourds). And Tat. Where to even start (with the covered bridge he built, his stonework, or what?).

I was thinking of Tat today and found this on Vimeo:

“he got more friends than anybody in this country. And he’s done more to help more people than anybody, any one person or any dozen people that I know of.”

The Only Sure Thing from Western Kentucky Photojournalism on Vimeo.

Here, just three the images I took from some of the visits I made to Tat’s home. What an incredible, incredible human being.