School Bus Graveyard
Check in, make donation for artists at office
Alto Georgia, 2017.
This Week’s Various
library in Oakman, Alabama
The New York Public Library has calculated its most-loaned books of all time, and The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats comes in at number one. To Kill a Mockingbird is #5. BTW, the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Miss houses the Ezra Jack Keats Papers and Archive, and includes …manuscripts, typescripts, sketches, dummies, illustrations, and proofs for 37 books written and/or illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats. Also included are his personal papers, personal and professional correspondence, fan mail and artwork from children, photographs and childhood memorabilia. Complementing the artwork created for children’s books are numerous examples of his easel art, dating back to his high school years.
In April, the winners of the EJK Award travel to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to accept their prizes at a luncheon honoring Ezra Jack Keats. The event, part of the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival, is hosted by the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at The University of Southern Mississippi.
The NYPL is also issuing special ‘The Snowy Day’ library cards.
Vogue with Chicago’s upcoming Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit, Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, opening February 29, and gives mention of a Simone Leigh face jug — and here at Hyperallergic are pics of more of her pieces.
The first king cake of the season, from Caluda’s via our friends at King Cake Hub, and everybody loved
Two Lives in Photography: Maude Schuyler Clay & Langdon Clay at the University of Mississippi Museum, through February 15.
From Christie’s: ‘A new world in my view’: the art of Sister Gertrude Morgan (the video is fab and narrated by Ben Jaffe) — they’re presenting three of her pieces at their Outsider Art sale on January 17.
a home Rosa Parks lived in, Henry County AL // a pic I took in 2011
Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words book available from the LOC and elsewhere in conjunction with the exhibition by the same name in the Library of Congress Jefferson Tower.
Until recently, Rosa Parks’s personal papers were unavailable to the public...the civil rights icon is revealed for the first time in print through her private manuscripts and handwritten notes. Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words illumines her inner thoughts, her ongoing struggles, and how she came to be the person who stood up by sitting down.
E.V. Day – Divas Ascending is on view at the Memphis Brooks through July 5, 2020:
Artist E.V. Day has repurposed costumes from the New York City Opera archives to make Divas Ascending, a series of sculptures that transform familiar icons of women’s empowerment and entrapment into new objects that confound conventional readings of these clichés. Using tension to suspend, stretch, and shred garments and to create forms that the artist likens to futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions, Day has created work that transforms rigid symbols into a range of emotions: anxiety, ecstasy, liberation, and release.
Joe Minter’s African Village in America, Birmingham AL // a pic I took in 2006
There’s so much talk about why use one term or another, and in one of this week’s emails, the Outsider Art Fair in NYC describes why they continue to use use “Outsider” in their name:
4) OAF is unlike any other fair. While we appreciate all kinds of art, we make a distinction between works mainly informed by other art and art history from those made by self-taught artists with completely non-academic backgrounds. We use the term outsider art, coined in 1972 by British scholar Roger Cardinal, and the name bestowed upon our fair twenty-eight years ago by our founder. Other terms like self-taught, art brut, vernacular or visionary, all have their place, but we prefer outsider art because an overwhelming majority of people recognize the term and understand what it implies.
The wall of the Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore, from a visit in 2006
Her Spirit Made Concrete: Now celebrating 25 years in Baltimore, AVAM is a reflection fo the woman who created it in Baltimore Magazine.
“Even in the beginning, I never would have given so much of my heart and my mind to something that was just about hip, cool art,” Hoffberger says. “I want to share with people what gets you through life and inspires you, rather than, ‘This is by so-and-so and sold at Christie’s for whatever.’ I think it’s too late in the world to just be about visual stuff. A lot of people do that really well, but it was never my interest.
found this week in Warrior, Alabama
The Chef Restoring Appalachia’s World-Class Food Culture: A coal fortune is fueling the revival of a cuisine it nearly destroyed and I was approx 99.9% sure this was going to be another article on Sean Brock (btw, did you know he’s a fab photographer too? Seriously.) but nothing against Sean, but fabulously… it’s on Travis Milton.
…he left, even shedding his accent. Countless Appalachians have done the same, creating a kind of diaspora, a brain drain. Milton and Nicewonder hope to reverse that, to redefine a region known for poverty, branded as hick, and defined by its dying coal industry as a thriving culinary destination. In truth, though, Milton says, it’s not so much a redefinition as a return to a past that went unappreciated and is almost lost.
In Tupelo, took the boys to Killer Cereal — a cereal-only restaurant. There are several in this genre around and it seems like a super-easy concept, too. Shugie went with the Bates’ Cuckoo Cocoa Bowl (Cocoa Pebbles, Cocoa Puffs, Krave Chocolate, whipped cream) but they also have a create-your-own with choice of two cereals, a mix-in, and a milk with option of a topping. PS are Cocoa Pebbles just brown Rice Krispies? They taste like nothing.
St Andrew’s, from a visit in 2013
Reading about James Agee this week, and never realized that after his dad died when James was 7 or so, his mom moved them to the campus of St Andrew’s School in Monteagle, and it was Father Flye there who mentored him and where he flourished in writing.
Below, Samuel Barber’s composition from Agee’s Knoxville: Summer 1915 in A Death in the Family which is **one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.**
This is Renee Fleming performing:
Anyway, hi from Alabama
At the NYT: A Painter Resurrects Louisiana’s Vanished Creole Culture: Andrew LaMar Hopkins celebrates the rich contributions of 19th-Century New Orleans in his folk art style (and drag) on Andrew LaMar Hopkins, who also goes by Désirée Joséphine Duplantier. His folk art paintings depict in particular the lives of free Creoles of color in the 19th C. They’re available at Nadine Blake’s gallery on Royal Street and — among others — on view at Dooky Chase. A dozen of his pieces will be at the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC beginning January 24.
In 1830, the moment in time Mr. Hopkins is fond of using for many of his creations, free Creoles of color in New Orleans owned some $15 million of property in the city. Mostly French speaking, these artisans, shopkeepers and artists were in no small part responsible for the look of the French Quarter — its ironwork, decorative plaster, its architecture and fashionable shops. Like white Creoles, some owned slaves, and some later fought for the Confederacy. Despite many laws restricting their rights they played a significant role in civic life. It’s a big story rarely told.
Neither the New Orleans Museum of Art nor the well-heeled Historic New Orleans Collection has mounted an exhibition…
Last Day Gospel of Christ Church, Akron AL, from a visit in 2013
APT premieres Alabama Gospel Roots January 18 at 8:00p, with groups from around the state recording at APT’s Madison Avenue Studio in Montgomery.
a Dale Chihuly sculpture at the Clinton Museum and Library in Little Rock, from a visit in 2006
Chihuly at Cheekwood in Nashville from April 25 – Nov 1, 2020.
one of the Amistad mural selections, pre-restoration, at Talladega College in 2007
Talladega College opens its new Dr. William R. Harvey Museum of Art on January 31, home to the restored Hale Woodruff Amistad murals.
From Architectural Digest: Photographer Douglas Friedman Makes His Home on the Range in Marfa, Texas
Pretty empty in the stands when we went to the Nov 23 Bama v WC game. Which, yeah, WC, but still.
At SI, Unexcused Absence: Why is College Football Attendance Dropping?
Florida isn’t alone—and plenty other schools have it much worse. From 2014 to ’18, attendance across the FBS fell by 7.6%. Last year, on average, 41,856 fans went to games. That’s the lowest turnout since 1996; even major programs like Ohio State, Virginia Tech and Ole Miss suffered declines of greater than 5%. The NCAA has yet to release its full report on 2019’s numbers, but pictures of nearly-empty stadiums, from big to small programs, popped up every fall weekend on Twitter…
above, a pic I took last month in Austin
From KUT, an interview with John Langmore in Photographer Made It His Mission To Capture East Austin’s ‘Essence’ Before It Disappears
above, the Zapp’s scene last month when we were at Best Stop in Scott LA
Zapp’s has a new flavor, Evil Eye, “subtle with mild heat, yet bursting with flavor.”
above, the hoecake at Hog Leg Barbecue in Arab AL
Cornbread’s Connection to Barbecue from the Houston Chronicle
In a travelogue from 1853, “A Journey Through Texas,” New York-based writer and architect Frederick Law Olmsted lamented the ubiquity of cornbread as the main sustenance of Texas and the American South: “I made the first practical acquaintance with what shortly was to be the bane of my life, namely, cornbread and bacon.”
above, the Temple Theater in Meridian MS, where Jimmie Rodgers played, and where his funeral took place in 1933
At aeon: How an American country music pioneer entered African mythology
In 1933, the US country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers died of tuberculosis. Just 35 years old and at the peak of his career, his demise left a legacy of a life and career unfinished. This installment from the US animator Drew Christie’s Drawn & Recorded series, which tells little-known stories from the annals of modern music history, recounts the improbable story of how, in death, Rodgers would go on to inspire not just luminaries of American music, but also the Kipsigis peoples of the Rift Valley in Kenya – whose folk music found its way back to the US decades later.
Yes to They Like that Soft Bread at Bitter Southerner:
In the mountains of East Tennessee, folks have a particular fondness for a sandwich that’s spent a few seconds in a Fresh-O-Matic steamer. Knoxvillians know that soft-bread love in their bones, but nobody seems to know exactly where it comes from. Chelsey Mae Johnson aimed to find out.
Outside Knoxville and environs, the Momma Goldberg’s chain that started in Auburn and is now… a lot of places… steams their sandwiches.
above, St Lucy at a St Joseph’s Day altar at St Cletus Catholic Church in Gretna LA, from a visit in 2012
I’m Obsessed with Saint Lucy’s Extra Set of Eyes in this Renaissance Painting by Alexxa Gotthardt at artsy
the extra-hot at the original Prince’s in Nashville
Kim Prince opened Hotville in in Los Angeles last December, after doing a hot chicken popup there the last couple of years. With that last name, you know where she got started. The NYT reports.
found in Bourbon, MO last month
Have a fun weekend, friends! xoxo!
Ritz-Carlton St Louis, and some Route 66
Our next overnight on winter break was St Louis — I think I’ve maybe been once but unsure, and I know the kids haven’t been. We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, which is technically in Clayton, Missouri. It was such a great stay, in most part to the hotel being decorated so beautifully for the holidays.
My fave R-C bathrooms are the ones in which they’ve done them in all white/grey marble like this one and the one in New Orleans. If I can ever line things up to renovate my bathrooms at home, at least one of them is going to be like this (there’s a part of me that also wants to do one of them as an ***all-red bathroom*** like my Aunt Helen had — the entrance to it was even long red beads. Also: she had an orange kitchen. She had indoor grass in one of the bedrooms. She kept the plastic on the furniture because it was soooo fiiiiiiine. She was, to child-me, a design goddess.). But back to that, um, bathroom, yes to timeless marble, though I’d rather they’d have done a marble facing on the bathtub:
There was a small balcony.
Elevator bank
We were there on Christmas Eve, and the main restaurant was serving a prix fixe holiday supper. We just wanted simple food, so we ate in the Lobby Lounge which was a terrific setting. There was living room type seating and it was just the right balance of comfortable and nice.
If I lived in St Louis and wanted to take my kids for holiday pics, I’d most certainly come to the R-C for lunch or supper and take advantage of all the decorations for a great setting.
It was all decorated beautifully — and the centerpiece was this fab gingerbread snowglobe
We got to the arch too late in the day for a tour, and Ted Drewes closed early for the holiday, but the next day we got to see some pretty great Route 66 signs:
Gardenway Motel, Gray Summit MO
Sunset Motel, Villa Ridge MO
The Bourbon, MO water tower
Jesus, King of the Road in Cuba MO
Wagon Wheel Motel, also on Route 66 in Cuba, Missouri
Drive-Thru Prayer
Drive-thru Prayer
Decatur AL, 2011.
21C Museum Hotel, Louisville
Over winter break, we took a big trip, and our first overnight was at the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. This is our fifth 21C ; Bentonville is our fave. The room here is nice but pretty vanilla, and Labor and Materials is the big exhibit going on soooo, but there was plenty going on anyway…
In the museum, our faves:
Daniel Jackson, The Thousand Yard Stare which is an imaginary self-portrait of the artist “slicing vinyl records and drinking beer while a crow rests on his shoulder”
Virgil Marti’s Landscape Wallpaper which is screen printed fluorescent and rayon flock on paper utilizing blacklights
Camille Utterback and Romy Achitv’s Text Rain, which drops video letters on people but it’s actually the words to a poem by Evan Zimroth
outside, the super-fun 21C pomegranate Lincoln limousine — and if I had any sense, I would have asked the valet about getting a ride because the boys would have just eaten that up
also, outside, Serkan Özkaya’s David sculpture, which the 21C brought here from Istanbul
And
We visited The Brown Hotel, which was lovely (and from where the Hot Brown originated)
and decided to have supper across the street from the 21C at Mussel & Burger Bar which was delicious
There was also a delightful 80s sweater sighting the next day at Nord’s Bakery
Okay! Next stop: St Louis and Route 66
Decomissioned
Old police car at the Shack Up Inn, Clarksdale MS, 2005
Ombre Walls
Lobby
Elyton Hotel
Marriott, Autograph Collection
Birmingham AL, 2017.
This Week’s Various
several Purvis Young works at the Main Street Gallery in Clayton, GA, from a visit made in 2014
At the Washington Post Magazine: Who Should Get the Artwork of Purvis Young?
Lawyers, collectors, ‘voodoo stuff with a cut chicken head’: The extraordinary tale of a beloved painter — and the people who wanted his art.
When he died in 2010, he named Lovest and 12 of her daughters and grandchildren as the main beneficiaries of his will. He left hardly any cash, but he did leave 1,884 artworks. Lovest assumed a sale would eventually be arranged and her family given its due. So she was surprised in 2018 to learn that a judge had let lawyers take all of the art to satisfy a half-million dollars in bills racked up on Young’s behalf. Her family hadn’t gotten a cent — or a single painting.
and
A Cuban Santeria priest named Silo Crespo acted as Young’s manager. According to Moos, Crespo told her that Young deserved a $30,000 or $60,000 base salary, plus commissions. When Moos balked — Young’s pieces sold for a few hundred or few thousand dollars, which she shared with the artist in an industry standard 50-50 split — Crespo put Santeria curses on her family. She hired a priestess to remove them: “I had to have the gallery cleaned. I had to do all this voodoo stuff with a cut chicken head.”
The Guardian with ‘The Michelangelo of kitsch’: the restoration of outsider architect Bruce Goff who was the architect of two designs in Mississippi: the WC Gryder house in Ocean Springs and the Emil and Charlotte Gutman house in Gulfport (since, destroyed by fire).
Think about the menu at Mobile’s SOCU, particularly the desserts:
Hennessey Peach Cobbler
Church Lady Banana Pudding
Yesssss.
Via ArtNews: Outsider Art Fair Will Spotlight Children’s Artworks from the 1930s at Upcoming New York Edition
from a visit to Dooky Chase
Lolis Eric Elie writes Leah Chase’s enduring legacy and independent spirit remembered on this Twelfth Night for the LA Times:
It’s easy to let legends slip away and become just that — an accumulation of stories that paint a two-dimensional portrait of a person who, like all people, was more complicated. But to fully appreciate Chase’s legacy, let alone learn from it, we need to keep in mind that her independent spirit was the bedrock of who she was.
The ‘Modern Southern’ meal at the James Beard House on Jan 24 by Jim Shirley of Gulf Coast restaurants Great Southern Café, The Bay, Farm & Fire Southern Pizzeria, North Beach Tortilla Co., The Meltdown On 30A, and Ji Shi Kitchen, Seaside, FL will include, just in part:
Black-Eyed Pea Hummus with Smoked Choctawhatchee Bay Mullet Dip with Chicken Skin
Heritage Pig Cheeks-in-a-Blanket
Smoked and Fried Apalachicola Oyster with Chicken Fat Bread and Collard Green Aïoli
Blood Orange Pie with Cornbread Pudding
A short Various this week. I guess we’re all just starting to get back in to things for the new year. BTW, my older son broke his arm in two places this week during PE, so would deeply appreciate some sweet thoughts going his way. Lots of love! xoxo!
H.D. Gibbes & Sons, Learned MS
We visited the H.D. Gibbes & Sons store in Learned, Mississippi in 2017, and have been meaning to get back since. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, they serve supper (steaks, seafood — on paper plates, and they just take cash or check) and six days a week they’re a regular country store. The food there is supposed to be amazing and I am all about it. It’s on my list to finally do for supper in 2020.
Freezing
Starting to freeze over, Mississippi Delta, 2004