Deep Fried Kudzu

One of the best-known photographs from Walker Evans‘ time in Birmingham for the FSA is this:

Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama
Digital ID: (digital file from b&w dup. neg.) fsa 8c52874 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c52874
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsa-8c52874 (digital file from b&w dup. neg.) LC-DIG-ppmsc-00239 (digital file from print) LC-USF342-T01-008253 (b&w film dup. neg.)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

For a number of years, the business at 1928 Vanderbilt Road has been known as River Fish Market, and the building just this year was torn down.

From October 2025:

…and now.

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From a Christie’s sale of this image in 2018 originally from James Agee’s own collection:

Roadside Stand near Birmingham is rich with so many of those essential visual qualities that most interested Walker Evans. The ample inclusion of signage and of the written word in this image is a shining example of Evans’ unique presentation of rural American society of this period…

In the exhibition catalogue for the retrospective held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000, Jeff Rosenheim suggests that this very image may have been the first taken by Evans during his trip to the American South with James Agee in 1936. Early images from this project documenting this region do indeed include heavy emphasis on roadside signage and storefronts along small-town main streets. The rest of the duo’s trip, eventually centering on Hale County, Alabama, would ultimately lead to the images of the Burroughs and Tingle families and environs, subsequently included in the collaborative book by Agee and Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published first in 1939. (Portraits from that series can be found in Lots 23 and 119.)

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Ah, I actually don’t generally enjoy this but couldn’t help but wonder what it would look colorized, and this is how it turned out (if this is cringe to you, I promise it is to me too…but…still.). Now I can make out so much clearer the girl in the background, the cannas in bloom…the chairs behind the facade and the bicycle…

The striping on the watermelons is a little too elaborate/imagined here, but you can really take in how well done the fish painting is over the opening. This is part produce stand, part fish market, part come-see-us-about-moving-a-house. And the “honest weights, square dealings” is just perfect.

You’ve heard of Little Free Library, but have you heard of…

Free Blockbuster box
Hattiesburg MS, 2025.

Lucky Rabbit in Hattiesburg is *always* changing around — pics from August ’25:

We all know why this was necessary

Peach Park
Clanton AL, 2025.

Current Affairs Magazine has a piece on Kenny Hill’s art environment in Chauvin, Louisiana

A Vanished Artist, a Disappearing Coast, and the Garden Left Behind

Kenny Hill walked away from his extraordinary sculpture garden 26 years ago. Today, the Louisiana community that saved it is fighting their own battle against disappearance.

This is the one I think of every day. Every single day. My favorite. We were just there earlier this year — some pics from that and other visits we’ve made over the last almost-twenty years:

From the article:

Then, one day, when Errol was driving Andrew back from school, they spotted that faded yellow firefighter jacket bobbing down the road. It was Kenny, carrying only a rucksack on his shoulder.

“My Dad pulled over and asked him what was going on, and he explained that he’d been evicted,” Cuneo recalls.

He told them he was heading to Arkansas, where his brother lived. They offered to buy him a bus ticket, or even help pay the rent, but he refused, promising to send a letter when he arrived. It came in the mail two months later: Kenny had made it, over 300 miles away, on foot. That was the last they ever heard from him.

Almost all of my Chauvin Sculpture Garden pics are here.

Through the end of August, The First has Tate, UK, International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams on. Some highlights:

Jean Miro, Women and Bird in the Moonlight

Paul Delvaux, Sleeping Venus

Salvador Dali, Autumnal Cannibalism

Mark Rothko, Untitled

for the Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven exhibit (also on through the end of August), there was this room for All the Flowers are for Me (red). The red in this particular cube is to reference South Asian wedding dresses, tied in with Agha’s narrative about the maginalization of women worldwide.

above, Intersections (Gold), which is encaustic and thread on laser-cut paper

A Flood of Tears (Gathering Storms), made of upholstery needles, bugle and hematite beads, braided cotton, wool, steel, and glass. From the label:
The materials in this monumental installation are socially coded and suggestive of women, craft, and the handmade. Each one is meaningful. Take, for example, the needle. Primarily used for sewing, it is a tool that can create and mend but can also hurt. Through hundreds of hanging needles and threads, Agha evokes the pain of women whose art and labor have long been considered inferior.

People are naturally so drawn to her light/shadow works that are best suited to display in a room with nothing else on the walls, but A Flood of Tears was really so much more powerful for me. There’s something about the uniformity, the spacing, the monolithic look that is so many individual pieces forced into similarity. All the stories.