Month: January 2025

Back when it was warmer, we took a couple of trips to Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee. Putting together pics here from those plus a visit I made with Anne. What we really want to do: creek dining at the winery!

David Arms Gallery:

Patina Home & Garden:

Lunch at Fox & Locke

Leipers Creek Gallery:

Leipers Creek Gallery has so many really fine works including a good set of quirky/unexpected pieces — like those of P.E. Foster who creates things like this.

So many very interesting pieces here. If you put a visit to Leipers Fork Gallery together with north Georgia’s Timpson Creek Gallery (and there are so many terrific ones, but I love Timpson Creek for our drives out to Ramah Darom) you’d have a lake house set for art and furnishings.

I mentioned creek dining — that’s 100% in our plans for this spring/summer

 

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Head Hunter Beauty Salon
Tuscumbia AL, 2024.

Since August 2023, the 21C Museum Hotel in Nashville has been sold and is now operating as the Bankers Alley Hotel Nashville, Tapestry Collection by Hilton. With 124 rooms, the hotel was built out of what was the Gray & Dudley Hardware Company building. RJL Lodging Trust (with 97 hotels in 2023) purchased from the 21C (operating under Ennismore which is majority owned by Accor) and said that they will keep the art museum space on the first floor and will change the art. Looking at the current hotel gallery of images on the Hilton site, there seem to be a good amount of pieces on view. And the room furnishings look very familiar — this is from my stay in 2018:

Following, a small selection of the art the 21C had on display at that time:

Wim Botha, A Thousand Things Part 190

Walter Oltmann, Armour — btw, his Bristle Disguise reminds me of the spike suit at the Menil (just got to see it again earlier this month).

 

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This Hank Willis Thomas Intentionally Left Blanc

is this (you can only really make it out if you photograph it with flash)

Norbert Brunner‘s You Are Enchanting

Indianapolis will be getting a 21C and that hotel will open in 2028. The 21C Savoy in Kansas City — has just been rebranded to Hilton Tapestry just like the one in Nashville did. That KC hotel had been open continuously since 1888 save two years when the 21C bought it and did a renovation in 2016. Up until then, it was the oldest operating hotel west of the Mississippi.

That will leave 21C with the Louisville, Cincinnati, St Louis, Bentonville, Durham, Chicago, and Lexington locations.

The Sun-n-Sand sign in downtown Jackson, Mississippi has been restored and I got to snap these pics — have been photographing it for several years and thrilled to see it looking so nice:

In 2019:

2015:

2005:

Back then, I wrote on my Flickr:

The Mississippi Heritage Trust put the Sun-n-Sand Hotel on its 2005 top ten list of endangered historic places in the state.

From their website:
Entrepreneur R.E. Dumas Milner launched the hotel in October 1960, naming it after a landmark Mississippi Gulf Coast hotel he owned as well. The hotel was important as a second home for state legislators, especially after the King Edward Hotel closed in 1965. It was moderately priced and within walking distance to the Capitol Building. The legislators could meet informally for meals, entertainment, and legislative negotiations. In 2001, House Ways and Means Chairman Billy McCoy said, “We have passed many important measures because of our conversations after hours in the Sun-n-Sand.”

In addition, its free form, space-age sign recalls the mid-twentieth century Las Vegas style atmosphere and hints at its reputation as the place to party in Jackson. When the legislature legalized liquor in 1965, the Sun-n-Sand was one of the first bars to open in Jackson. One legislative insider remembered that “a year before the state repealed its anti-liquor laws, the place was hopping.… I would go to the Legislature and see some of the lawmakers speaking against liquor … then I’d come back to the Sun-n-Sand and watch them take a drink. They were voting dry and drinking wet.”

The hotel closed in October, 2001 and was boarded up shortly thereafter. Currently there are no plans for the property and it continues to sit vacant and deteriorating. The colorful history of this place will be lost if something is not done to save the building.

So great to see it now! A+ Signs in Jackson did the work. They also did the work on the Mayflower Cafe and the Capri.

This was fun! We went to Culture & Co in Nashville — it’s in the L&L Market on Charlotte Avenue along with a Five Daughters doughnut shop, a taco place, a pasta place, a few other little eateries, and a Masaya furniture showroom plus other retail spots.

One thing that really sets Culture + Co. apart is that you sit at a bar around a conveyor belt that brings all the little offerings from the open kitchen. You just take what cheese / meat / breads / whatever sounds good…and there’s a menu to help sort it all out.

There were dishes like North Country Wagyu Bresaola, Graza Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Black Pepper

Capocolla, castelvetrano olives, crostini

Von Trapp oma, sun dried cherry and pistachio shortbread

Mmmmmm, there were things we liked better than others (though we really liked almost everything) and getting a taste of so such a great variety was terrific. Enjoyed the experience!

Maybe not a once/month kind of place but certainly something different, especially if we have other friends with us next time. Would definitely go again!

May have to figure out how to get to NYC between now and mid-February: Andrew Edlin Gallery in Manhattan has a solo show for the artist, Carroll Cloar: the first in New York in nearly 35 years. The NYT names it among others in What to See in NYC Galleries in January. The works include six paintings on Masonite and eight pencil studies. From the Edlin press release:

By the 1950s, Cloar had settled permanently in Memphis. Close to family and his source material, he always acknowledged his debt to Manhattan, noting, “A seasoning in New York gives the artist perspective, depth, and a long view of the place of his origin.” It was that distance—and the vibrancy and experimentation of the mid-century New York art scene—that empowered Cloar to fully flower as an artist.

— Stanton Thomas, Ph.D.

Carroll Cloar is represented in the collections of museums such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many institutions. We are grateful to David Lusk Gallery for their collaboration on this exhibition.

Welp, ha, not mentioned in the Edlin PR but Eli Manning had Cloar’s Snow Patches and in his Oxford estate sale, the auction company was accepting bids $70k+.

BTW, Dr Stanton Thomas is now the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg FL and Curator of European and Decorative Art at the Memphis Brooks. He put together the Cloar retrospective at the Memphis Brooks that was on display in 2013: “The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South.” It later traveled to the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens and then the Arkansas Arts Center (now Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) in Little Rock.

These next two Cloars were at the Frist’s Southern/Modern exhibit last year. I photographed these two from that show:

A Story Told by My Mother

The Lightning that Struck Rufo Barcliff

Here are three more Cloars. My Father was Big as a Tree from a visit I made to the Memphis Brooks in 2017:

Halloween:

Historic Encounter Between E.H. Crump and W.C. Handy on Beale Street:

Quite possibly the best-known Cloar is Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog in the permanent collection at the Memphis Brooks; my favorite is most definitely his Kudzu at the Mississippi Museum of Art