Category: art

After visiting with Mr. Shankerman in his downtown department store in Clarksdale (he also sang Elvis songs for us as a sweet bonus) and he was so kind and generous with our boys, we kept on to Memphis, where it was Corky’s for supper just because we haven’t been to Corky’s in years and I think Shugie’s never been. Our top two there, I think, are still Germantown Commissary and Central.

We asked if it would be okay if we shared this platter (for one on the menu) and it was the perfect size for Av and me.

We stayed at the Memphis Marriott which is just the basic big city, vanilla Marriott. It was fine.

Av was working in Memphis, so the boys and I decided to have a museum day. We Ubered over to the Children’s Museum of Memphis where they have just opened their gorgeous, restored 1909 Dentzel Grand Carousel.

From there, we took another Uber to the Brooks Museum

We played outside…

…and the little cafe has a nice place to read, snack, and play with building pieces

Thrilled to see these William Edmondson pieces. Above, ‘Courting Lady’

and here, ‘Ram’

Roger Brown ‘Clouds over Alabama’

David Bates ‘The Cat Man’

A selection of Carroll Cloar pieces (yesssss)

…but while there’s a large space for William Eggleston photographs, I really wished for a more immersive experience than just linear picture, picture, picture (the step/step/turn mode of display). It seems the Brooks should be Mecca for anyone with any interest in his work as Memphis is where he was born, and where he lives now. There should be features on everything from his Warhol-crowd years to the video work and the new synthesizer music. Places to sit with piles of his books. His place in the popularization of color photography as fine art. The ‘Elvis at Graceland’ project and how that turned out.

If you’re obsessed with ‘The Red Ceiling‘ and have all the feels from the inside of the freezer and the side of that gas station and, hey, The Tricycle, you’re wanting/expecting a love letter from the birthplace of the OG Colorist.

Some Eggleston love from the National Portrait Gallery:

One of the largest collections of William Edmondson‘s art is at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens in Nashville, and last month filmmaker Mark Schlicher spoke there about the artist and the fundraising he’s doing to finish his documentary entitled “Chipping Away: The Life and Legacy of Sculptor William Edmondson” that he’s devoted work to over five years. (Trailer below)

William was born to Orange and Jane Brown Edmondson sometime in the 1870s — perhaps December 1874 — in Tennessee, and was born and died within a three-mile area. His parents were freed slaves who had been at the Compton Plantation (now Green Hills) in Davidson County, continuing to work there after emancipation as sharecroppers.

William moved into the city of Nashville when he got older, and suffered a leg injury from a railroad job. Unemployed, he started making tombstones for sale using old railroad spikes and hammers to make shapes.

Smithsonian Magazine August 1981 published a quote from him about the inspiration:

‘First He told me to make tombstones; then He told me to cut the figures. I do according to the wisdom of G-d. He gives me the mind and the hand, I suppose, and then I go ahead and carve these things.’ 

In 2011, I visited Mount Ararat cemetery in Nashville, though it’s known that very unfortunately all of Edmondson’s work is no longer extant there. Further, it’s no longer known where in the cemetery he is buried. Nashville dedicated a park in Edmondson’s honor a few years ago and commissioned Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley for sculptures.

In 1935, Sidney Hirsch, an art faculty member at George Peabody College for Teachers found Edmondson’s place and was intrigued, telling his friend Louise Dahl-Wolfe about it. She worked for Harper’s Bazaar and thought it worthy of a feature, but William Randolph Hearst did not want to feature it in the magazine. She showed pictures of the work to Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of MoMA, and William Edmondson became the first African American artist to have a solo show there, in 1937.

Besides angels and animals (one of his lions was sold by Christie’s in January 2017 at $511,500), he began to sculpt famous people like Eleanor Roosevelt. He even sculpted Sidney Hirsch at one point, and that piece is in the collection at Cheekwood. Note: though Cheekwood has many pieces of Edmondson’s art, they don’t keep it on permanent exhibit. Their current exhibit calendar is here.

Above, one of Edmondson’s eagles I photographed in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The last time I visited the Edmondson exhibit at Cheekwood — which was a few years ago — they did not allow photography. 

As an aside, Sidney Hirsch himself was a renaissance man in his own right: he was a  model for Auguste Rodin (!) and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. He served in the Navy. He studied ancient languages. He was a member of Vanderbilt’s Fugitives group of poets and other creatives (Robert Penn Warren was one member), and he was a playwright with varying degrees of success.

Edmondson achieved a certain amount of celebrity after the MoMA show, but had little interest in it, and cared less about the positive or negative criticism of his work. During his lifetime, the art never commanded appropriate market prices.

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His ‘Boxer’ c. 1936 set a new world record for his work and for Outsider art when it sold for $785k in 2016 at Christie’s.

“Chipping Away: The Life and Legacy of Sculptor William Edmondson” is slated for a Spring 2018 release, fundraising to complete it here:

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

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.