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.
Last spring, I had the opportunity to visit sculptor Christopher Fennell at his studio in Birmingham. The workshop is on a site housed along with a few other artists…a terrific ragged, rough landscape with industrial remnants.
(another artist:)
Other images of the area:
This was my first time meeting him; previously I knew his work through his 2017 Light Tree in downtown Huntsville AL. A great touch is that he says that the lights are in the power grid so that when the city lights come on, the sculpture automatically lights up too.
These are not at all the only subject of his installations. Below, I was able to see his “The Artists’ Fire” made from boards with self-portraits by student artists at the 2009 Magic City Art Connection:
I don’t see this one listed on his site but I photographed this work of his in Birmingham in 2011:
A list of other installations — he does a healthy variety — at his website here.
Alex Chinneck intalled twisted street lights in Bristol and designboom earlier this month named them among 2024’s best public art projects.
This is Werner Reiterer’s brass chandelier hanging outside the 21C Museum Hotel in Cincinnati, pic from our 2016 visit:
…and this is Pieke Bergman’s Totally in Love, from our 2016 visit to the 21C Lexington, Kentucky:
Other artists doing street lamp style sculptures include Chris Burden’s 2008 Urban Light, installed at the LA County Museum of Art. LACMA says it is “unofficially adopted by Los Angeles as a symbol of the city and is indisputably the most popular artwork on campus.”
Never missing a chance to visit the Besthoff Sculpture Garden behind/aside NOMA . This piece, Jim Hodges’s Craig’s Closet , is placed there in front of the museum. It will be on view through June 30, 2025:
This is the new sculpture, Elmgreen & Dragset ‘s “Maybe (Not)” — you know them from Prada Marfa and nowadays they’ve opened something somewhat similar (but actually populated) in Thailand, K-BAR
Ugo Rondinone ‘s The Sun — I saw his Seven Magic Mountains again in October in Las Vegas. Beyond.
Mr. Stella, a formalist of Calvinist severity, rejected all attempts to interpret his work. The sense of mystery, he argued, was a matter of “technical, spatial and painterly ambiguities.” In an oft-quoted admonition to critics, he insisted that “what you see is what you see” — a formulation that became the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement.
The Art Newspaper’s podcast “A Brush With” episode with Elmgreen & Dragset came out about a week ago and is available here .
Made a visit to the New Orleans Museum of Art late last month; my favorite exhibit was actually Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art (through Feb 10) mainly because of this incredible chandelier by Fred Wilson
We are pleased to inaugurate our new global headquarters in New York with a monographic exhibition showcasing five of Fred Wilson’s Murano glass chandeliers. Installed hanging from the 7th floor gallery’s 19-foot ceiling, these works span fifteen years and are being shown as a group for the first time.
Speak of Me as I Am: Chandelier Mori, Wilson’s first chandelier, was made in 2003 when he represented the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale. Since then, Wilson has continued to experiment with Murano glass design elements as his chandeliers have evolved over the years as vehicles for the artist’s meditations on blackness, beauty, and death.
I was taken with this display of American liquor flasks, many of which might have been suited also for the Rebellious Spirits: Prohibition and Resistance in the South exhibit going on now through January 5, 2025 in another part of the museum.
and from the Afropolitan exhibit, this Incredible Hulk lunchbox coffin by Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah where these bespoke boxes are a popular way to celebrate one’s interests in Ghana.
…always enjoy seeing the NOMA collection of Palissy Ware — the most I’ve ever seen in one place was last year’s Antiques & Garden Show in Nashville which will be taking place again beginning January 31.
Dezeen did a feature on an actually somewhat attractive and certainly sure to be a landmark watertower for a town in Sweden. It’s designed to last for centuries, is made of concrete, and supported by nine columns. Called “the wave” it has that feel, especially from different sightlines.
I just saw that Rachel Feinstein’s ‘The Miami Years’ is on at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami through August 17, 2025, so plenty of time to drop by, still. Of course there’s a lot of talk since Art Miami is finishing up right now. At Gagosian:
Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years spans almost three decades of work by the artist and explores Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approach encompassing sculpture, painting, video, performance, and installation. The exhibition reflects on themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and abjection, foregrounding Feinstein’s examination of societal factors that shape human behavior and female identity. It includes the museum’s commission of site-specific painted mirrored wall panels spanning 30 feet—a work that probes Miami’s contradictory image and reflects the artist’s interest in scenography and artifice.
I was taken with her Facade exhibit last year at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah. About it, SCAD wrote:
In Façade, New York-based sculptor and painter Rachel Feinstein lays bare the underpinnings of the fantasy realms she so often constructs. Painted panoramas, large-scale sculptures, and 40-foot-long wall-reliefs from across her decades-long career come together to form a labyrinth that shifts between reality and illusion.
Each work featured in this multidimensional installation is an amalgamation of aesthetic and conceptual references, ranging from fairy tales and religious myths to art historical 18th-century European craft and 20th-century American kitsch. With a heightened awareness of the power that accompanies storytelling, Feinstein also draws inspiration from personal memories of her frequent childhood trips to Disney World, her college degree in religion and philosophy, and her upbringing in 1980s Miami. The artist reconfigures these source materials, bridging time periods and spanning a variety of materials to fabricate idyllic landscapes and decadent genre scenes that convey twisted tales of her own device.
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from a visit in 2012
Popes Museum Preservation, the nonprofit for Pope’s Museum, received a Vibrant Communities Grant from the Georgia Council for the Arts for FY 2025.
from a 2017 visit
The Tennessee Williams home in Columbus, Mississippi reopened last month after $300k+ in renovations/updates.
RaMell Ross’s exquisite 2018 documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” took in only $112,282 at the box office, but it got him the chance to direct his first dramatic feature, “Nickel Boys,” with a budget of more than twenty million dollars.
They put Nickel Boys at #1 on the list for this year.
Hosted a fab Friendsgiving last month with 24 friends!
Thanks in part to a $1M USDA grant, Auburn’s Rural Studio Front Porch Initiative and University Outreach is working with the City of Selma to bring more affordable housing options there.
Apple stack cake, an Appalachian specialty, at an Alabama grocery store — this is the new Food City in Owens Cross Roads (Huntsville area) that also has a bar inside.
Definitely approving of the cheeseballs
and more cheeseballs
and a bar
Walter Burley Griffin’s Cooley House in Monroe, Louisiana is the only Prairie style architecture in the state on the National Register’s list.
If you miss V. Richard’s in Forest Park, the recipe for their Savannah shrimp salad is here and the chicken salad recipe (the one with apples) is here. The pimento cheese with peppers and pecans? Here.
From the Modern: Crossing the threshold into Sunset Corridor, one is transported into a slightly nostalgic yet alien parallel realm, where simultaneous feelings of displacement and familiarity invite exploration. The path through the exhibition is linear, yet the unfolding narratives ebb and flow. Stories of technological innovation, rebellious acts, adaptation, and resiliency emerge. By blurring the lines between fact and fiction, past and present, consciousness and mind-altered states, in Sunset Corridor Freeman and Lowe provide a new lens through which to examine humanity’s ever-changing relationship to itself, its innovations, and its surroundings.
Closer: Erin Dailey’s Abstractions at Play exhibit at the Frank Lloyd Wright Rosenbaum House in Florence AL is up through December 28 this year.
Artnet asks readers what work gives them chills — thrilled to see that someone answered with Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, which I saw at The Frist in 2016 (still one of my favorites) — and another reader mentions Ceal Floyer’s ’Til I Get It Right (2005) which repeats the mantra we all need, I’ll just keep on/’til I get it right, from Tammy Wynett’s ‘Til I Get it Right.
Had a terrific time at our new Birmingham Ballard Designs last month meeting former Chief Floral Designer at the White House, Laura Dowling. Above, Margot Shaw of Flower Magazine introduced, and Helen Ballard, founder of Ballard Designs also spoke.
The store was set up for the audience, with food and drinks. Faux flowers from Ballard were mixed in with fresh blooms, and that’s what Laura worked with to show us an arrangement while she was speaking with us of her philosophy on design and how she came to work at the White House.
Laura spoke beautifully and some of my morning garden club friends came too.
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