Deep Fried Kudzu

Before George Rodrigue painted the Blue Dog, he painted Aioli Dinner, dated 1971, of a group of people who met monthly at a different home each month. This one is set at the Darby House Plantation, and Rodrigue included some of his family members, including his grandfather and uncle. Wendy Rodrigue, George’s wife, wrote about the painting here.

What’s immediately apparent is that this is nothing like the later paintings of his (though a lot like the other paintings of his with people as subjects) in that the colors here are not vibrant. Once you focus on the subjects, you see that each man has a bottle of wine, there are some kids around and younger men who are doing the serving, and women in the back who prepared the meal. One of the older men is the one who made the aioli. These gatherings are part of the Creole Gourmet Societies that were most popular 1890-1920; the Trappey family tried to revive these gatherings back in the 1970s, but apparently they never regained their popularity.

This was a real club, so Rodrigue had photographs to go by. And almost every person in the painting is identified by name. For instance, the man closest at the head of the table is Leon Loze, and next to him to our left is Jean Courrege (the grandfather).

The artist later did variations on the painting, increasing the color and contrast. He loved this painting and always had it priced higher than other paintings in his Lafayette gallery because it took him so much time to paint — about six months — and because he knew it was especially important. In 2001, he even included Blue Dog in one of the Aioli Dinner paintings. He later gave the painting to his sons, who put it on loan to NOMA, and it’s today at the Ogden.

We Stand Together by George Rodrigue at the Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA:

Gravy and Biscuit Cancelled this Week
Baileyton Methodist Church, Baileyton AL, 2023.

For over a year now, there’s been a Vadis Turner sculpture outside the Frist in Nashville. I haven’t taken a picture of it (it’s here and pictured below at her Insta) but we’ve got ’til January 2029 to view in person. I’d love to see one of her works picked up by the Besthoff Sculpture Garden in New Orleans.

 

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A post shared by Vadis Turner (@vadisturner)

I did get to see her works at her She Drank Gold exhibit in 2023 at the AEIVA in Birmingham:

She’s from Nashville and so interesting (and wonderful!) that she has had a residency at Yaddo twice.

They still exist.
Rotary Pay Phone
Mandeville LA, 2023.

Cemetery Monument
Oneonta, Alabama, 2023.

A bit of a rewind — I’m thinking of a couple of exhibits from a couple of years ago at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Barbara G. Haines
Exhale an Atmosphere: Blosme

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Carlyle Wolfe Lee
Marking Time

She has an exhibit at Spalding Nix in Atlanta this summer and SouthSide Gallery on the Square in Oxford this fall.

At The Brooklyn Rail, Ralph Lemon: From Out of Space by Allison Carey on the show at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Leading with the Sorites Paradox (when does a heap stop being a heap?), the author brings up the image of Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Mississippi, the initial setting for the Emmett Till tragedy. She writes:

But to me, the gradual decay of this grocery store is quite loud. By letting the earth slowly reabsorb the remains of the store, the traumatic histories of this space, and a lack of resolution, remain at the forefront. To tear down the store would be an attempt to obliterate the past; to replace it would be an attempt to write a new story altogether; to conserve it would confine it within the past. This subtle process of decomposition continues to take new forms, albeit slowly, rejecting finality.

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I’ve been photographing the Bryant Store in Money, Mississippi since at least 2005. These aren’t all the visits I’ve made, but shows a progression.

2005:

2011:

2016:

2018:

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Google Street View, January 2024:

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In November last year, the barn where Emmett Till was beaten was purchased to be opened as a memorial site.

I read Wright Thompson’s The Barn (available here at Bookshop / Amazon) — highly recommend.

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The museum — called the Intrepid Center — as I visited it in 2013:

There’s also an interpretive center / library now across the street from the Tallahatchie County courthouse, which has been preserved as a museum.

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Thinking back to Allison Carey mentioning the Sorites Paradox: it’s crumbling, but preserving, saving — seemingly so much in such a state of flux. There’s more structure in understanding…and what’s disappearing is actually adding.

This is a bit of a rewind to a tour of Sloss Furnaces — I’ve taken classes there twice now and recommend, in fact one time I was able to bring a group and we did a custom project with one of the resident artists, which was just an incredible experience.

Choose a good day to explore and take pictures…maybe overcast a little for best lighting …and enjoy. xoxo

Here, a little rewind of the Thornton Dial exhibit I, Too, Am Thornton Dial at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge — this was up in summer 2023 when I visited last (and really wanted to get to again last week, as they have a Marc Chagall exhibit going on).

Oh, and one more thing: this museum regularly shows some really terrific exhibits. Starting mid-September this year, they’ll hang The South’s Most Elusive Artist: Walter Inglis Anderson, and  a really impressive set of shows in the past, including one of my favorites of all time:

Hunt Slonem: Antebellum Pop! from 2016

From the 2023 visit for Thornton Dial:

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from a 2009 visit to her home in Kosciusko

“L.V. Hull: Love Is a Sensation,” the exhibit about L.V. Hull and her art environment opened March 20 at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson

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a pic of the sign I took in 2006

The Ted’s Frostop in New Orleans will be demolished to make way for Tulane housing but the neon sign and the restaurant itself will survive as a tenant in a new development.

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By W. Ralph Eubanks at Oxford American: A Way of Seeing the Mississippi Delta
Landscape photographs as evidence of the region’s past and present inequities

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It’s a very abbreviated Various this week — I’ve been on spring break with both boys the last two weeks, one for Bama and the other for the high school calendar, but we did enjoy a long weeked with the boys together in New Orleans. More on that soon. I hope you’ve had a really terrific week and are looking forward to more beautiful spring weather. xoxo!