February 2025 • Page 3 of 4 • Deep Fried Kudzu

February 11, 2025February 1, 2025

A Chin of Gold

This monument in West Blocton, Alabama includes an excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s The Moon

Hickory Hill Cemetery
West Blocton AL, 2010.

February 7, 2025February 11, 2025

This Week’s Various

As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.

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How Things Work: The Parade of Life, Thornton Dial exhibit, AEIVA, Birmingham AL, from a 2022 exhibit visit

At the Observer: Andrew Edlin Explains how the Outsider Art Fair Helped Establish a Market for the Genre

Too late for this year, but for going forward: sending a valentine through Valentine, Texas

On view through March 2 at the California African Amerian Museum in LA: World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project

George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. In the early 1900s, he built his “Jesup Wagon,” a moveable school to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—including organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and plant-based medicines and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservation. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings. World Without End explores how contemporary artists and thinkers working today engage with Carver’s ideas and interests. Alongside contemporary artworks by thirty artists and artist collectives, the exhibition includes Carver’s rarely seen paintings, drawings, laboratory equipment, and notebooks. Both the exhibition and its forthcoming catalogue, which includes previously unpublished material documenting Carver’s life and work at Tuskegee University, reframe and center Carver’s lasting impact on art and science.

Here’s more about Carver’s Jesup wagon, why it’s called that, and today’s Jesup wagons.

Through May 10, Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice from LA’s Hammer Museum is on view at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston. From ArtNews:

Brandon Ballengée’s “MIA” series (2020), including MIA Black Driftfish, MIA Redface Moray Eel, and other missing species, addresses the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill still palpable in Gulf waters. Ballengée, who is also a scientist, identified 14 endemic fish species that have not been sighted since the disaster. He then painted them in crude oil collected from both Deepwater Horizon and the Taylor Energy oil spill, still ongoing off the coast of Louisiana. To make the oil malleable, he had to mix in Corexit, the same chemical dispersant BP used to clean up the 134 million gallons it spilled in the Gulf. Arguably, this substance is as toxic as the oil itself. So to prevent off gassing of the works’ noxious media, Ballengée sealed his “ghost species” between sheets of glass.

Tailgating in the Grove, 2006

This piece today at Salon on tailgating sets forward that the first-ever instance of tailgating was for people watching the first battle of Bull Run — the Battle of Manassas — July 12, 1861. Preferably, let’s keep the term to sporting events. I imagine that throughout history, blood-thirsty curious humans have thought that while watching something awful happen, they still had the forethought to imagine they might get hungry. BTW, the crowd expected the North to win handily, but nope. Also, the spectators caused something of a traffic jam which impeded troops getting where they needed to go next.

The first-ever American tailgate took place on July 21, 1861. However, it wasn’t a pre-game function. Instead, residents of Washington travelled via carriages and buggies to Virginia, where they convened and enjoyed a hearty feast while watching the first major battle of the American Civil War: the First Battle of Bull Run. Some spectators even yelled out words of encouragement to their preferred side. All of this occurred far from the battlefield, of course.

Per The HISTORY Channel, Union Captain John Tidball reportedly saw a “throng of sightseers” and peddlers “in carts loaded with pies and other edibles.” According to the American Battlefield Trust, the food was less for celebratory purposes and more a necessity, considering that the spectators travelled more than seven hours by carriage to Manassas Junction. Still, the gathering was filled with much rumpus as spectators also drank copious amounts of wine and whiskey.

What I’d really like to tailgate? Steeplechase.

February 27 – May 25, the LSU Museum of Art will exhibit Golden Legacy: Original Art from 80 Years of Golden Books

A Man Looking for Something: Drawings by Thornton Dial is on at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts through April 27

(not in the auction) Ram, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, from a 2017 visit

At Kovels Antique Trader: A Vision in Stone: William Edmondson’s Masterpieces Command Top Prices at Auction
Case Auctions’ Winter Fine Arts sale saw remarkable results for the celebrated outsider artist, with his “Lady with a Bustle” sculpture leading the way at $268,400.

Waffle House Vistas at the Georgia Museum of Art through July 1.

Hope you’re enjoying a fun week! xoxo!

February 6, 2025

Westbrook

W.L. Westbrook Store
Spring Garden AL, 2011.

February 5, 2025February 2, 2025

Elvis and Stepless Transmissions

If you know the operating plans for Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi, would you message me? Do they plant to be open during Elvis Week going forward?

Leslie and I visited Paul MacLeod at Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi back in 2011 — an experience! I brought Paul a gift and he gave me a lifetime membership card.

Weeks before we went, I tried to think of what I could bring Paul that he wouldn’t possibly already have in his Elvis collection, and I came across this promo for the Audi A4 in Australia. I bought the promo piece on eBay, had it shipped to the US and he was so tickled with it!

I hope hope hope they still have it on display. This is the Elvis commercial that ran in Australia to promote the Audi’s stepless automatic transmission: