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.
We usually try to make our annual trip to Av’s personal Mecca: Lockhart, Texas, and this year, he and Shugie hit the big three (Black’s, Smitty’s, and Kreuz).
While those two were collecting the finest smoked meats in all the land for our sampling later on, Shug and I decided to spend more time exploring downtown.
Many of my friends growing up considered themselves whatever we called latchkey kids, but I was a library kid. They were my free, public babysitter where I could entertain myself very happily for hours. Grateful for that experience, and while I know people who don’t enjoy that environment (let’s face it, library atmosphere depends a lot on the architecture and interior…coziness) but I’ve maybe never met one I didn’t just love.
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Then and only then can the dish be enjoyed to its fullest: inhaled violently upon a stale Triscuit, whereupon it is kneaded through the esophagus into the boiling vat of bourbon stored in the stomach, at which point it will disintegrate and disperse throughout your body over the course of the football game, giving you an extra pleasant glow and a reminder to go back to the tailgating tent when you leave the stadium midway through the third quarter when the pimento cheese is unguarded and vulnerable.
The Georgia Trust has released its 2022 list of Places in Peril
Sanford Biggers mentions inspiration from the Gee’s Bend Quilters in this interview at the PBS News Hour
The Advocate on the new A. Hays Town and the Architectural Image of Louisiana (here at Amazon) book by Carol McMichael Reese
Baton Rouge architect Kevin Harris in an interview said Town considered the complete home — exterior, furnishings and landscape — as his professional responsibilities. He would tinker incessantly with paint colors, with materials, sometimes tearing out complete walls or fireplaces that didn’t suit him.
Harris recollected in one of the book’s interviews how he accompanied Town on a walk from his Stanford Avenue home to the LSU lakes. They walked to a stake planted by the lake; Town pulled it up and on a string was a moldy picture frame, meant for part of some home’s furnishings.
“Do you think it’s ready yet?” Town asked Harris. “What do you mean?” Harris asked. “I don’t think so either,” Town replied, re-submerging the frame.
‘Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe’ catalog (here at Bookshop, here at Amazon) with essay by curator Katherine Jentleson at the High (the exhibit is through January 9) “…the great visionary Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982), painter, sculptor, doll-maker, environment-builder and Christian…Rowe is the fourth great American outsider artist to receive a major catalog since 2007, after Martin Ramírez, Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum. May the trend continue.”
The Bryant’s Grocery historic marker, Money MS, 2016
The latest, three-year-long federal investigation by the Justice Department into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till is now closed and no charges were filed. In this piece in the Washington Post, a note that’s particularly interesting is that the case was opened after the book The Blood of Emmett Till (here on Amazon, here on Bookshop) which was so groundbreaking because it included the interview with Carolyn Bryant (who made the accusation against Till) and they found:
But Justice Department officials said Monday that when the FBI questioned Bryant about those alleged statements to the book’s author, she said she did not make them, and the author’s interview tape and transcripts do not show her making such statements.
and
“Although the professor represented that he had recorded two interviews with her, he provided the FBI with only one recording, which did not contain any recantation.”
For hundreds of years, Louisiana Creoles have perpetuated Choctaw tradition by adding filé to their gumbos — a hefty pinch tossed in after the dish has cooked produces a thick broth and an aromatic finish. It’s still readily found in Louisiana gumbos, but hardly anyone harvests sassafras and makes their own filé. This cultural loss is what beckons Fuqua to Kisatchie each spring: to advance an Indigenous ritual, once venerated and now teetering, found at the very origins of the dish we know today as gumbo.
The new Walter Anderson: the Extraordinary Life and Art of the Islander available here at Square Books.
After receiving her BFA from the University of Mississippi, Fussell began working as a server at a diner, a job she held off and on for the next twenty years while making quilts; running both a gallery and a textiles studio in the small town of Water Valley, Mississippi; and raising two sons. “I didn’t learn a whole lot [in college] that l later practiced,” Fussell said, laughing. “What I’ve done artistically has come from what my mom taught me about craft, what my dad taught me about what we would consider ‘fine art’ or whatever, and the work ethic that I got from being a waitress.”
Another New York gallery, Nicelle Beauchene, will be showing four works by Mattie Ross (1903-97) and Rachel Carey George (1908-2011), two quilters from Gee’s Bend, Ala. These works date from the 1960s, around the time of the civil rights movement. A number of Gee’s Bend quilters were a part of the Freedom Quilting Bee where, said Ms. Beauchene, “they would meet, they would plan their protests and their marches, they would gossip, they would sing.” She added that “so much amazing history” was happening “when these quilts were being made.”
Over the course of the past half-century, residents of Monroe–West Monroe have come to expect that roast beef po’ boys, French fries, and hamburgers served in many local restaurants will be accompanied by white Styrofoam cups filled with piping hot brown gravy. Ask three locals what to do with that cup of gravy and you’re likely to receive three entirely different responses
Michelle Browder’s The Mothers of Gynecology monument in Montgomery named in Artsy’s Best Public Art of 2021 list
Um, the Untold Story of Sushi in America at the NYT is wow and I’m sharing that during a tiny window this summer when I felt safe eating indoors, I discovered a sushi restaurant inside a gas station in Jasper, Alabama named Bayou Fresh and when I feel safe for us to all eat indoors again, this is going to be one of the first places we go. They don’t serve alcohol in the restaurant but if you want something, you walk into the store, grab whatever, voila.
When I was in college, I went on a date with a boy who as a gift brought me the latest Reba McEntire cd just to set a good tone. At the NYT, It’s a Good Time to be Reba McEntire, and this quote from Kristin Chenowith:
“I’m an Oklahoma girl, and where I come from, there’s Jesus Christ and then there’s Reba”
I heard about The Outlands, the new book with unpublished William Eggleston photographs, and wondered why my local library didn’t have a copy, then realized: it lists at $450 for the three-volume set.
We made Jerusalem Kugel with an Israeli friend this week // Muddy Buddies — Puppy Chow too, for the first time ever // I can now say the boys are post- bar mitzvah and so happy and proud of the great job they did // Shugie won the school spelling bee again this year // Hope you have really great plans for winter break. I’ll post more often between now and the end of the year // Sending lots of love! xoxo!
I was thinking lately of Floyd Shaman, the late sculptor. He was born in Wyoming and studied under Robert Russin, known for several large-scale public pieces including those installed at the Department of Energy in DC, the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, the Hyde Park Museum in New York, Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania and the University of Wyoming.
“I don’t really know if my art is any good,” he says. “That’ll all have to be sorted out in a hundred years.” Discussing the legendary Mississippi folk artists, Shaman gives me a short lesson in the origins of true artwork. “I’m a University trained artist,” he says. “I could do folk art, but it would be a fraud.”
and
Shaman was commissioned to create pieces for a church, including an altar on which he sculpted The Last Supper in bas-relief…”They were one of the more pleasant clients I’ve had”, he says. “They actually called me and said; ‘are we paying you enough money? Should we give you more?’ I said; ‘no, that’s fine.'”
This is the work of his that we have, just a little over 20″:
found him for sale years ago for an astonishing $50…I guess they weren’t familiar with his work
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