Deep Fried Kudzu

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.

Years ago, if you were to call Eudora Welty, chat about the weather, what’s on sale at the Jitney (Jitney #14), mention the state of the garden or an offer of lunch at Bill’s or the Mayflower…

and you dialed that number today, someone at the Eudora Welty House and Garden would pick up.

It’s the same number, still.