You don’t have to be obsessed with nuts and bolts to appreciate the renderings in the 1920 Bethlehem Steel Co. Bolts, Nuts, Rivets catalog. They’re finely detailed and geometrically perfect, floating on their hand-drawn backgrounds. They don’t make catalogs like this any more.
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Wind power today usually means alternative energy, but there are those who harness it as a source of personal expression: The whirligig makers. Vollis Simpson ran a machine shop, did heavy equipment repair and was involved in moving houses. In retirement, he started tinkering with odd parts he had lying around. And he started making whirligigs. Big ones. His original whirligig park, in an out-of-the-way field in out-of-the-way Lucama, North Carolina, was the world’s most spectacular concentration of these wind machines. Simpson died in 2013, but the whirligigs were preserved and relocated to a dedicated park in nearby Wilson, where they
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Sculpted muffler figures represent one of the great roadside folk arts, but 2D representations of exhaust pipes and related auto parts are often just as imaginative. The ominous figure from the former E&T Mufflers in Chicago is the greatest example of art on a shop sign I’ve even seen in the wild. Here’s that one again, another image from the same location, and a bunch of other delightful renderings from the underside. Back to Muffler People: The Last American Folk Art.
Continue readingBecoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, by Philip J. Deloria. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 336 pages, 221 color illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 9780295745046, Paperback, $34.95. Mary Sully’s story is a saga of identity, from her signature artistic project — 134 iterations of what she called “personality prints” — to her name, which was actually Susan Deloria, to her ancestry, which gets complicated quickly. Indian and Anglo, it included tribal leaders and a military officer who slaughtered tribes. There is also a famous painter in her lineage and, not surprisingly, a lifelong struggle to find a place for herself.
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Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Lowdown Southern Odyssey, by Jonathan Williams, photos by Roger Manley & Guy Mendes. Institute 193, Lexington Kentucky and New York, 352 pages, 100 color images and 80 black and white , 2019. ISBN: 978-1732848207. Hardcover, $45. It’s a shame this book wasn’t published as intended in the 1990s. Not only would its author have still been alive, but so would most of the artists he encountered on his travels across the back roads of the South. Inspired by William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Williams, poet, publisher and lover of the vernacular, undertook a series of
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Rosehill is the largest cemetery in Chicago, and one of the most beautiful. In part it’s the setting, with its ponds and mature trees. But it’s also a function of the many wealthy people buried there. One thing rich people are good for is leaving behind beautiful mausoleums and monuments. At first glance they can seem to represent an excess of egotism, but over time they become objects of beauty that justify the original hubris. Rosehill Highlights(Hundreds more below) Founded in 1859, the site was supposed to be call Roe’s Hill after the farmer who sold the city the land.
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Calling muffler people “the last American folk art” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. If you accept a fairly rigorous definition of folk art, much of what is called folk — whether art, music, or craft — isn’t. That is, it’s not made by artists working from within a communal creative context, artists whose roots are in local or regional traditions more than in mass culture or eccentric visions. To say that Bob Dylan was never an actual folk singer or Howard Finster a folk artist does not diminish their talent or even their authenticity
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Like many mainlanders, I suspect, I always thought of Hawaii as beaches, surfers, tropical foliage, Diamond Head, and not much more. But it also is home to thousands and thousands of rock carvings, with exceptional concentrations cut into the lava on the Big Island. Their age isn’t known with certainty, but some could be close to a thousand years old, with the most recent being from the late 19th century. The petroglyphs’ meaning is uncertain. The accounts that have come down to scholars came via not-always reliable messengers (i.e., westerners who recorded what they think they were told by native
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The Puako site, which is only a few miles from Waikoloa, has nearly 4,000 documented petroglyphs, some likely to be at least 800 years old. There are some fantastic groupings of anthropomorphic figures here. Some carvings have been lost to construction and fire-fighting activities, and the whole site is set within a dense forest of invasive kiawe trees. Some of the surviving carvings have been damaged by human activities, in some cases vandalism, but also by being loved too much. Taking rubbings or making casts harms the petroglyphs. But the site is still a remarkably concentrated instance of human creative
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The Pu`u Loa petroglyph site is in a more-or-less middle-of-nowhere section of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It was a popular destination, however, over the hundreds of years when its 23,000+ carvings were being created, and it remains deservedly so today for visitors to the park. The site is especially rich in cupules, where umbilical cord stumps were placed to ensure health and long life for babies. It appears many family members made the trek to this location to perform that ritual. Much of the information on this and my other Hawaii pages is from the highly recommend Spirit of Place:
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