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.
Beth Lipman’s Flowers, Bread, Chalice and Sticks — she had an exhibit at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts a few months ago, and her exhibit at the Hunter just closed last month. This piece is in the permanent collection.
Robert Rauschenberg, Opal Reunion — on the museum label, one of the people giving this gift was listed as Mrs Olan Mills. Turns out Olan Mills was based in Chattanooga. //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
No photography is allowed in any part of the museum.
A nice, small museum, the strongest element of their permanent collection is undoubtedly the Native American basketry, with some images here.
Other notable pieces: Thomas Moran ‘A Glimpse of Long Island Sound from Montauk’ 1907 Mary Cassatt ‘Woman Bathing’ 1891 Grant Wood litho ‘In the Spring’ 1939 John Singer Sargent ‘Wooded Landscape’ 1883 Robert Henry ‘The Brown Wrap’ 1911
— Laurel, Mississippi is best known in the larger art world as being the home of Mark Landis, the now-famous art forger who duped 50+ museums. In this 2013 New Yorker piece (one of the best on this topic), The Giveaway by Alec Wilkinson, the Lauren Rogers is mentioned, as Landis had gifted “Nymph on the Rocks” ‘by’ Everett Shinn to the museum in 2003. When Landis offered more works but never delivered, George Bassi, museum director, went searching for him — Mark Landis lived in Laurel, after all. There were doubts about him. About the art.
The Shinn stayed in the museum’s vault until 2008. By then, Bassi had heard a sufficient amount about Landis that he thought it was time to confront him. When a member of the staff told Landis that he believed the piece was fraudulent, Landis said he wished he had known that when he bought it. “He made it sound like he’d been duped,” Bassi told me. Sometimes, through the window of his office, Bassi would see a director from another museum on the sidewalk, waiting, it turned out, for Landis. An official from a museum in Kentucky flew in to meet him. Another one came from Florida. As a means of establishing his credentials, Landis sometimes dishonestly raised the name of the Lauren Rogers Museum in letters. He wrote the director of a museum in Chapel Hill, asking “if the museum would consider the gift of Weidlingbach, Egon Schiele, oil on panel, 12 x 9 ½ in. I bought this at Christie’s, New York in 1986.” He went on to say, “I hope you are familiar with our museum here, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art. It was founded by my mother’s family.”
Mark now takes commissions (of non-copyright material) and donates a portion of the proceeds to NAMI for mental illness awareness.
— And big +++ to the museum for their provenance research project. They are looking into the history of 11 pieces for which they have incomplete ownership accounts to make certain they’re not Nazi-stolen artworks. Other museums do this, but not all make it quite so prominent. Nice.
Every summer, and if I’m lucky, every summer forever, I take a day to visit the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. When I first visited, it was called the D-Day Museum but in 2003, Congress gave it the current designation. //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
Enter the main building, part of the experience now is that you receive your dogtag and begin your ‘journey’ in a Union Pacific Train Car to get a sense of what your soldier went through. This portion is optional, though, and what I like to do is time it so that I get my ticket and head straight over to the Solomon Victory Theater for the 4-D film, ‘Beyond All Boundaries‘.
Every year, I see people bringing kids in for the film. It’s wonderful — immersive, so informative — but not geared for children as there are graphic and understandably heartbreaking scenes. If you have children under, let’s say 15 or 16, I’d give this a pass. But if you’re an adult, don’t miss it.
There are spaces in the museum in which I feel so close to my late grandfather, who fought in the Army during the war. To myself: PawPaw, thank you for helping save the world. //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
El Anatsui is Ghanaian, and based in Nigeria. He makes these metal cloth sculptures by joining the aluminum bits that are discarded from the necks and tops of liquor bottles (from the museum label:) ‘to form a glittering textile in the tradition of the strip-woven cloth made by men in West Africa for more than one thousand years. Anatsui describes how, for him, the dynamic, fluid forms of these works suggest a universal yearning for liberty and freedom.’
“Art is like a bright star up ahead in the darkness of the world…. [It] is a guide for every person who is looking for something. That’s how I can describe myself: Mr. Dial is a man looking for something.” —Thornton Dial
When the internationally renowned Alabama artist Thornton Dial, Sr., passed away at the age of eighty-seven in late January, he left behind a body of work that has transformed American art. Despite his lack of formal training, Dial took the art world by storm with his deft fusion of painting and sculpture, leading one art critic to declare that his work marked the end of so-called “outsider” art when it was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2000. The courageous manner in which Dial confronts oppression and records perseverance inspired the title of his critically acclaimed retrospective Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, which the High exhibited in 2013.
The High’s memorial exhibition, on view February 13 to May 1, 2016, presents a selection of Dial’s exuberant drawings and symbolically rich paintings that the Museum has collected over the past twenty years. Today, Dial is represented in museum collections across the country, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
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