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.
John Preble’s Abita Mystery House in Abita Springs, Louisiana
Admission is $3. That’s not enough, so make sure you leave with a t-shirt or something else from the giftshop. You’ll see. It’s magnificent.
I took two million pictures and here’s one-one zillionth of what’s going on. You’ll love. xoxo!
This Moshe Safdie building, opened in 2006, is the Telfair Museum’s Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia. While the emphasis here is on more contemporary art, which entirely complements the structure, the strongest part of the museum is in its rotating exhibits rather than permanent collection.
Here, William Christenberry’s ‘Painted Male’ and ‘Painted Female’
Keith Sonnier’s ‘JOB’
Cedric Smith’s ‘Freedom is a Road’
Anne Ferrer’s ‘Hot Pink’
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We spent hours in their ArtZeum space which is geared for children, and the boys played in their large workshop making many pieces of art.
This is the Walden, The Game — and it was written up this week at Hyperallergic
Walden, a Game takes a seemingly absurd premise — transforming Walden: Or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau into a video game — and makes it a surprisingly thoughtful experience about finding balance in life. Players can devote all day to wandering the shore of the titular pond, listening for owl hoots or watching hummingbirds flit around flowers, but their Thoreau character will start to starve, and his firewood supplies will run dangerously low for the approaching winter. Yet spend too much time chopping wood and planting beans, and his inspiration will dwindle, the color seeping out of the digital landscape and the birdsong becoming quiet.
When they first sat down at the keyboard, I thought to myself “knowing Thoreau, this isn’t exactly going to be Mario Kart Rainbow Road” but they enjoyed it.
We were very fortunate to be there just before the end of the Nick Cave exhibit
Of the current and upcoming exhibits listed, I’d most like to come back to see Kahlil Gibran and the Feminine Divine which will be on exhibit through January 2, 2018.
Telfair Museums boasts the largest public collection of visual art by Kahlil Gibran in the United States, donated in 1950 by his lifelong supporter and mentor, Southern native Mary Haskell Minis. This exhibition concentrates on works that capture Gibran’s enduring belief in the oneness of all things, often characterized in his paintings and drawings as the feminine divine.
A super-friendly staff is here to help interpret the exhibits at the Jesse Owens Memorial Park in the Oakville/Moulton area of north Alabama. Though the Owens family moved from the region to Ohio when Jesse was still a young boy, the community takes pride in his accomplishments — and what he was able to overcome when just a small child here.
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Here, the Owens family donated this telegram from the Philadelphia Tribune Jesse received at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. “America justly proud of your outstanding victories we join with the sport lovers the world over who are acclaiming you the world’s greatest athlete.”
Here, a replica of his Olympic uniform. He won four gold medals in those Olympic games, and was the first person to ever do so.
and a track time program from the ’36 Olympics
While many of the items on display are replicas, that doesn’t subtract from the experience
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Adidas also donated items to make up an exhibit on the differences in track conditions and equipment to show that even in Jesse’s time, his 10.3 second 100 meter was less than .4 seconds slower than the more contemporary Carl Lewis…when track technology now plays much more in favor of the athlete, with aerodynamic uniforms and track surfaces and such.
Outside, there’s a long jump area at which visitors can see how far they can go compared to Jesse, and what was most powerful — a replica of the small home his family lived in
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There were two bedrooms — one for the parents (and I imagine where newborns would have slept too)
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and another for the children. A button one may push along one wall activates a recording of one of Jesse’s brothers telling about life here. In this room, the children slept in both directions of the bed, which is why there are pillows at each end. Jesse was the seventh child — and it should be noted that at this time, he went by the name J.C. It wasn’t until the family moved up north that the teacher misunderstood and called him ‘Jesse’.
Jesse’s father was a sharecropper and his mother took in washing, but he was too sick to help much like his other siblings did, as he would fall sick and stay that way for long periods. When well enough, though, he enjoyed running and by high school, was able to turn it into a real sport, and found much success in those years.
Ohio State recruited him although they didn’t have a track scholarship to offer, and he took on all kinds of jobs to support himself and his wife Ruth through the college years. After attaining so much success in the Olympics, for decades Jesse traveled the world giving motivational speeches and served as corporate consultant. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Posthumously, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990.
President Carter said about him:
“Perhaps no athlete better symbolized the human struggle against tyranny, poverty and racial bigotry. His personal triumphs as a world-class athlete and record holder were the prelude to a career devoted to helping others. His work with young athletes, as an unofficial ambassador overseas, and a spokesman for freedom are a rich legacy to his fellow Americans.”
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Only five or so minutes away from the Jesse Owens museum is the Oakman Indian Mounds Education Center, which from the outside belies its striking interior, with its centerpiece being this statue of Sequoyah, with a plaque about his life and the alphabet he developed
…surrounded by case after case after case of arrowheads and other tools
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One thing that especially makes this museum different is that it is actually owned by the local school system.
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Other displays included taxidermy and these hides, but inside there wasn’t as much as one would expect about the moundbuilders and what we know about the mounds they constructed just outside
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Of the exhibits, though, there was one case with a civil war diorama. In fact, its label was a simple typewritten sheet by the author which begins, “Hello, this is Robert Hughes speaking! I made everything in this display by hand, it took three years…”
further, “…The reason for showing a Civil War Display in an Indian Museum is because Native Americans fought on both sides of the conflict…”
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and further along still “…Each figurine, each building, each tree, and everything you see before you were hand made. The tiny soldiers were crafted from one-eighth wooden dowels, solder wore and dental plaster. Each head was carved from an 8mm wooden bead. No two faces are just alike. I have 300 tiny soldiers and other figurines in this display…”
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There’s a road around the property, and just behind the museum is this Copena burial mound. The historic marker here reads:
Copena Indians built this mound with baskets of dirt some 2000 years ago. The Copena name was derived from their use of copper and galena (lead ore) found in their burials along with gorgets and celts. The mounds were a burial site with the dead encased in a plaster of clay covered with layers of soil. The many burial mounds within a few miles are evidence of an extensive cultural center. The perennial springs and fertile lands encircled by West Flint Creek contributed to a large population. The Copena society flourished here for hundreds of years and they raised a variety of domesticated crops. some 17 miles north of here the Tennessee River provided an inexhaustible food supply of fresh water mussels. In the mid 1800’s settlers were buried on the mounds under false stone crypts. In 1924, Smithsonian archaeologists noted three other burial mounds in the areas that were being leveled by farmers.
Atop this mound are graves from the 1840s with box tomb monuments (I don’t go up on burial mounds, but you can see the monuments in this image)
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Another historic marker for this mound:
Rising 27 feet high, this is the largest woodland mound in Alabama, with a base covering 1.8 acres and a flat of over one acre. Built by prehistoric Copena Indians, the mound is 2,000 years old and constructed from earth probably carried one basket at a time from the Oakville pond area, 300 yards to the east. The Copena, named for their use of copper and galena, were prolific mound builders, as shown by the remains of over 20 mounds in the surrounding area. They were primarily farmers and hunter~ gatherers who engaged in ritual burials, with the dead often encased in a putty mixture of clay, ash and crushed shells. They were great traders in conch shells, marble, greenstone, copper and galena, all of which were found as mortuary offerings during the 1924 Smithsonian excavation of the Alexander Mound four miles to the southwest. Although the Oakville mound has never been excavated, it was the center of the Copena society of the Moulton Valley and was used for ceremonials, religious, social and cultural purposes.
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Really looking forward to our next visit to the Dallas Museum of Art — the ‘México 1900–1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde‘ exhibit opens March 12.
The boys are going to be even happier, because Dallas has their favorite area for kids to do their own thing — the Center for Creative Connections — and I’m so happy to see that our regular museum visits, beginning when they were babies, have (so far) completely worked out, because they think nothing of going and always look forward to it. And I love it, because their heads are getting filled with big ideas and they realize how different and wonderful the world is. Aaaaahhhhh.
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Last time, they asked us to go to the Dallas Museum two days in a row (and we did) — they spent *hours* making things
Meanwhile, Av reads with them and I get to see every single thing on display
Stephen Antonakos Neon
Fernando Campana Banquete Chair with Pandas
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Miss Blanche chair by Shiro Kuramata
Though Hunt Slonem’s ‘Antebellum Pop!’ at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge was my favorite exhibit of 2016, Ragnar Kjartansson’s ‘The Visitors’ at the Frist in Nashville was a close second — and it was so beautiful and haunting that it made me cry (not alone), so there’s that.
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Its last day at the Frist is Sunday, February 12.
Done in nine video projections over the course of about an hour, eight screens (the ninth on the veranda) show a musician in a room of an old, shabby-gorgeous New York home playing an instrument and singing with all the others — all in one incredible take. They can’t see each other until the end as they come together on the veranda and then walk down the valley.
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Over and over, the refrain “once again, I fall into my feminine ways” is sung — it comes from a poem Ragnar’s ex-wife wrote.
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From criticisimism:
…Kjartansson made this piece to reflect, as he says, a period of his life coming to an end…
A choir is gathered on the veranda and as the piece crescendoes one resident sets off an ornamental cannon. It’s the 1812 Overture rewritten for some protracted marital strife…
As Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe had it:
The work seems to me to be a generational masterpiece. When it screened at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Manhattan last year, it was a tear-away success. Years from now, it may even be remembered as having helped trigger a change in the climatic conditions of contemporary art.
Aside from anything else, “The Visitors” is a triumph of tone. Alive to the preposterousness of its premise — a bunch of hipster musicians from Iceland squatting in a grand home on the Hudson (shades of the Rolling Stones recording “Exile on Main Street” in a mansion on the French Riviera) in order to perform a repetitive, rather unremarkable song — it somehow transforms latent irony into sincere and open-hearted expression.
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From Art in America:
After you’ve heard the “feminine” refrain about 40 times it seems almost liturgical, evoking a state where sorrow, resignation, acceptance and elation coexist. Near the end, the performers, still singing, vacate their separate spaces to move outside, joined by others from the porch. All of them—accompanied by two excited dogs—parade down the hill directly into the spectacular Hudson Valley landscape, and it’s heartbreakingly gorgeous: a sublime musical troupe in the capital of the American sublime.
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From the John Curtain Gallery in 2015:
Not to miss. If we bump into each other at the Frist between now and Sunday, we can have a good therapeutic cry together, then walk out joyously into the valley (or at least down Broadway). See you then.
We made a visit to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, designed by Gordon Bunshaft
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Here, a display of pens (fountain and otherwise) he used to sign various bills
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…there’s even an animatronic LBJ
Besides the imposing architecture, the interior is stunning — a 4-story view of the glassed-in archives
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The common area can feel quite vast, but there are more intimate spaces for evaluating other exhibits
Here, the missal he used to take the Oath of Office in 1963 — it was a gift to President Kennedy
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Oval Office replica, to 7/8 scale
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But the best, Lady Bird’s cha-cha mod office, with a tiny sign that says ‘Can Do’.
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HBO’s 2016 film ‘All the Way’ on LBJ
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