Letters From Here

“It just went down. Everything in Birmingham is going down.”

One obvious exception would be what Mr. Minter calls the African Village in America, and the amazing fabrications he has raised to fill almost every square foot of his consolidated half-acre holding.

It is, by some reckonings, one of the nation’s most extraordinary and least-known sculpture gardens. Here’s a room-size re-creation of the Birmingham jail cell that held Martin Luther King Jr., surrounded by six concrete Dobermans.

There’s a monument to those murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, including 26 pairs of flea-market shoes (“I got them for a pretty good price,” he said) and the raging rubber head of Jesse Ventura.

And everywhere else is welded iron and hand-painted biblical signage and bric-a-brac to overrun a landfill. It seems all but inevitable that Mr. Minter will eventually raise a memorial to the Boston Marathon bombing, although the only clear patch of lawn lies behind the twin towers.

The African Village also stands among the most endangered art environments: Mr. Minter serves as the site’s artist in residence, curator, docent and groundskeeper, and he just turned 70.

His installation represents one of the last great “yard shows” in Alabama, said Emily Hanna, curator of the African and American collections at the Birmingham Museum of Art. This coinage describes the culturally distinct and sometimes visionary home displays of the South.

Related article here.

The best chapter in “The New Mind of the South” (the title of which is taken from W.J. Cash’s seminal 1941 survey, “The Mind of the South”), concerns the city of Atlanta, a booming metropolis straining at its seams, where whites are a minority and the poor still get short shrift. Thompson doesn’t live there anymore, and when she tells you about the traffic, the sprawl, the free rein given to business interests and the racial mistrust that scuttles every attempt to create vibrant public spaces, you can hardly blame her. Yet she’s still invested in Atlanta, still finds memories on many street corners and still believes that it constitutes the most genuinely “biracial” city in the nation. She understands it deeply enough that when she resolves this chapter in an indictment of the Atlanta’s “pretense,” the result is a magnificent and stinging piece of writing.

The history of the “South” and what it is to be “Southern” cannot easily be separated from its horrific legacy of abject cruelty and malevolence against African Americans… of slavery, lynching, segregation, Jim Crow laws and lasting prejudice. In this sense then, to be a “Southern” artist is to have then at least a partial association with these things. When I say association, I do not mean that Eggleston is a believer and a proponent of these abhorrent actions and mindset. I am sure that he is not. I simply mean that by reflecting these environs in such an atmospherically complex and “pure” way, the artist is then also representing the ugliness and legacy of this place for all to see. One simply can’t separate “Southern” from this history. It is the massive elephant in the room at minimum and at maximum, it is much of what it is to be “Southern”.

William Eggleston: Before Color is then surely a tour into this menace and heinous history and into the “Southern” legacy.

Here are John T. Edge’s top ten dishes of the year—from lardo-wrapped fish to one hell of a tomato sandwich

This strikes me as pretty embarrassing — something that should have been written in a notebook, not in public.

I think this has been going for some years now. But interesting overview.