another southern road trip, 2024

This road trip in the deep of winter to the southern states may be habit forming. Last year's road trip was quite focused on the Sargent show in Washington, visiting Jeanette in South Carolina, magazines to USModernist, visiting Elizabeth in Orlando, and the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi. This year, I did visit Jeanette again and spent a couple days with Elizabeth and brought her some papers from Alfred that she needed. But overall it was less focused. Here, again, I am posting a list of the overnight or other stops along the way.

• Fredericksburg, Virginia: after the bucolic ride through horsey Virginia country, the confluence of U.S. Route 17, U.S. Route 1, and Interstate 95 at Fredericksburg was almost more maelstrom than I could handle; I did find the Holiday Inn Express and settled into a yummy catfish and grits at the Orleans Bistro, a walk from the hotel; it was karaoke night at the bistro but I survived and woke refreshed; alas, I lost my beloved Harvard IT Summit 2011 travel mug when I left it on top of the car (I didn't drive away with it still on the roof but it wasn't there when I remembered to go get it after supper)
• Florence, South Carolina: overnight with Jeanette and Wanda, plenty of pleasant catching up
• Beaufort, South Carolina: intrigued with Beaufort, is it just because I like saying "bew-fert"?; the waiter at the Lost Local told me where I might find the Sunday New York Times the next day but City Java & News didn't come through and the Publix supermarket did; I enjoy traveling through the coastal salt marshes between Beaufort and Savannah though I didn't stop in Savannah this year
• Brunswick, Georgia: Main Street in the historic district; good pad thai at Basil Thai with a staff that included Asians, Mexicans, Blacks, and whites
• Flagler Beach, Florida: dreaming of an old-fashioned oceanside motel along the beach highway but ended up at a Hampton Inn in Palm Coast
• Winter Park, Florida: lunch, strolling, and shopping to spend time before getting to Elizabeth's after she did her volunteer income tax assistance sponsored by AARP at a community center
• Orlando, Florida (day 1): got to Elizabeth's before she was home; Capsi looked at me quizzically and then decided I was that guy from Alfred and started jumping and barking
• Orlando (day 2): both Elizabeth and I had a morning zoom; we had an easy day with a visit to the Orlando Museum and otherwise just kind of hung around and chatted
• Orlando (day 3): Elizabeth went to the community center for some more tax assistance and I walked around downtown Orlando, looked at some architecture books at the public library, and then went to the Orange County Regional History Center; the library had a historical vitrine display that included an early accession book; the new performing arts center in Orlando is named for Dr Phillips and I learned at the History Center that he developed the process for pasteurizing orange juice; I also learned that Hannibal Square in Winter Park was the former Black section of the downtown shopping area
• Sarasota, Florida: Ringling Museum of Art, particularly the new Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Art (a small pavilion with a green-glazed terracotta façade, designed by Machado Silvetti)
• Sarasota to Tallahassee, Florida: I wanted to take the blue highways and ended up confused off the interstate around Tampa and discovered a pre-Vatican II chapel (Queen of All Saints Chapel) near Brooksville; I couldn't go inside since the dress code for men required coat and tie, no jeans, no earrings
• Tallahassee, Florida: what a hilly surprise (the seven hills, just like Rome) after several hours of flat coastal territory
• Bainbridge, Georgia: the Quality Inn here somehow reminded me of Mount Vernon (columns and porch)
• Blakely, Georgia: county seat of Early County (good courthouse and square)
• Kolomoki Mounds State Historic Park, near Blakely: the Temple Mound is 50-odd feet high (I didn't make it to Teotihuacán last year but this mound was pretty impressive)
• Columbus, Georgia: the museum was mostly closed for rehabilitation but the Corn Center at Columbus State University had a Lennart Anderson show and several large Bo Bartlett paintings on view; downtown Columbus has a handsome new formalist Government Center that reminded me of Yamasaki and a performing arts center designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer; the symphony here is the second oldest in the U.S.
• Bremen, Georgia: El Morelia Mexican restaurant was just across from the Tractor Supply, near the Quality Inn
• Bremen to Rome: just the beginning of the international city names; U.S. 27 up the western side of Georgia was mostly four lane and divided highway and virtually empty; it was quite a surprise to re-enter the interstate world after Rome, Georgia

Continuing to repeat last year's road trip, at a certain point I quit dawdling and interstated most of the rest of the northward journey. This year, I did a more inland trip, skirting Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Lexington, Kentucky. I stopped at Dry Ridge, Kentucky, because it was getting dark, it was about 25 miles south of greater Cincinnati, and it was just south of Sherman, Kentucky. It also happened to be just north of The Ark Experience in Williamstown, Kentucky. I did go look through the gates to The Ark but it wasn't open and I probably wouldn't have gone in even if it had been. Anyway, I looked around Sherman a bit and took a couple pictures.

I had started seeing snow alongside the road but it was bright and the snow was melting. I skirted Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland, Ohio. One more night on the road, in Painesville, Ohio, and then back to the blue highways in Salamanca, New York, for the last couple hours.

Beyond Bremen, Rome, and Salamanca, I also went through or saw signs for Paris, London, Chatsworth, Florence, Berlin, and Athens, and Ringgold.

Top picture is a church (no sign) in Sherman, Kentucky. The bottom picture is Ca' d'Zan, the Ringling mansion, Sarasota, Florida. More pictures at https://www.flickr.com/photos/56294332@N00/.

Market Arcade, Buffalo

Before heading back to Alfred, I stopped in at Burning Books which didn't have the book I wanted but it was a trip to be in such a politically correct bookshop. Then over to CEPA Gallery on Main Street. CEPA was founded in 1974. CEPA stands for Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art. Right or wrong, I associate CEPA with several artists that started out in Buffalo, e.g., Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Hollis Frampton. Some stayed, some didn't. The CEPA Gallery is now located in the Market Arcade. I didn't know but I love an arcade. (This picture is from the Market Arcade Facebook page.)

["Wrong" as it turns out. It's Hallwalls that Cindy Sherman was associated with while studying in Buffalo. Sorry, CEPA. My car was parked on Tracy Street in the first spot Northwest of Delaware Avenue which means that my car was closer to Hallwalls than it was to CEPA. Galleryhopping takes a lot of research. Right now, I'm looking at Held together with water: art from the Sammlung Verbund (Hatje Cantz, 2007) and there's a section on the performative with an essay on Cindy Sherman.]

talking about art in front of the object

Write as much as possible in the presence of the actual object and return to it if you have second thoughts.
(J.J. Winckelmann, advice to Charles-Louis Clérisseau, quoted in Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson by Hugh Howard (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 62)

Went with Angelica to the Rondanini Palace. You will remember that, in one of my first letters from Rome, I spoke of a Medusa which made a great impression on me. Now the mere knowledge that such a work could be created and still exists in the world makes me feel twice the person I was. I would say something about it if everything one could say about such a work were not a waste of breath. Works of art exist to be seen, not talked about, except, perhaps in their presence. I am thoroughly ashamed of all babbling about art in which I used to join. If I can get hold of a good cast of this Medusa, I shall bring it back with me.
(Goethe, Italian journey, 1786, quoted in "History lessons: imitation, work and the temporality of contemporary art," Art history, Sept. 2014, p. 807)

photo by Lydia Anne McCarthy

as part of her i will be the void series

cultural missteps

Light snowfall in the air, off to the BFA senior shows and then the AU Symphony Orchestra concert. I ran into Lydia at the BFA shows. She had posted a note in Facebook on the listing for a show by Adam Katseff so I had assumed she was in New York City. But there she was, having returned in the last 24 hours. We compared notes on recent trips to NYC: where we stayed (Ridgewood and Bushwick), what we saw (Chris Burden, Mike Kelley), neighborhoods, where we ate. John and Ellen joined us and we sadly got into a bit of Brooklyn name-dropping as John and Ellen groaned. Both Lydia and I would love to live in the City, the art is so exciting and invigorating, so "sparkly" as Daniel said.

And then off to Miller for the concert. The house wasn't open so I took out Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie, my current reading. The next story was "Gentrification" wherein a white guy is living in a black neighborhood, the only white, but they're all just folks. Then the white guy does something that he perceives as neighborly, contrary to the customs of the majority black population. He becomes the unwanted. Culture is so inborn and it is easy to go astray.

Getting an apartment in an affordable neighborhood might very well mean living in a minority-majority area. It would be so easy to be "wrong." As I was walking home, thinking about the carol sing-along during the concert, I contemplated how, for some, singing Christian carols could be wrong. I certainly bristle when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited before Alfred Town meetings or the national anthem is played before village band concerts in the summer. No one from New York City would tolerate that. And I'm a child of the 1960s when those emblems of American allegiance got tangled up in the Vietnam War.

Sherman Maxon

I just finished reading Grand Wood: A Life by R. Tripp Evans (Knopf, 2010). It is well-written and I really enjoyed the telling of Wood's story by a gay art historian. It is written in a popular style, that is, footnotes are relegated to the back and mostly give citations for quotations and other facts.

Wood was certainly interested in young men, both in social action and as art subjects. As is probably typical for his day (1891-1942), it is not clear how much he acted on his homosexuality. After his mother's death and not so long before his own, he married Sara Sherman Maxon. She was a powerful woman and the marriage lasted only a few years and was not happy. Her son, Sherman Maxon, and his wife, Dorothy, came to live with the Woods in Iowa City where they had moved from Cedar Rapids and renovated a fine brick house on East Court Street.

Sherman and Dorothy modeled in 1936 for illustrations from Main Street by Upton Sinclair. "In The Radical, Wood's illustration for the character Miles Bjornstrom, Sherman appears not as Lewis's ragged, disaffected intellectual, but as a caricature of rugged masculinity. Wearing a heavy sheepskin-lined coat and hunting cap, he stands in a toolshed and brandishes a rather phallic-looking wooden baton. With his broad shoulders, muscular neck, and exaggerated mustache -- a feature neither Lewis's character nor Sherman shared -- this über-masculine figure is more Tom of Finland than the bookish Scandinavian of Lewis's novel." (Tripp, p. 223; illustration from ebay)

Sherman and Dorothy continued to live with Grant Wood after Sara left him and moved to New York City. I am not especially pleased that Sherman was a scrounger.

daughter, thought her, water and Sherman Alexie

Doug sent me a link to Sherman Alexie being interviewed by Bill Moyers and I am enjoying his reading of a couple poems: one about Yo Yo Ma's cello and another about Facebook. Now you can guess part of why Doug sent me the link to the interview but it's also interesting to listen to his words about being bi-cultural and bipolar and bi-political. Poetry is sometimes more about words than prose and rhyme is clearly word-y. And that brings back the wonderful rhymes of yesterday's concert of the Penn Yan Community Chorus. These words from the Neighbors' Chorus from La jolie parfumeuse by Offenbach especially thrilled. I loved the rhyme of daughter, thought her, and water.

Was she a very rich man’s daughter
Who showed that she was not all you thought her?
When with your songs of love you sought her,
Were you dowsed with water poured down from above?

shermaniana

I blogged about the Shermaniana exhibit we did at the Amon Carter in 1994, a gift to Milan Hughston for April Fool's Day. Janine Henri suggested that I should do an online version so I've been posting Shermaniana on Tumblr at http://shermaniac.tumblr.com/ for a while. As the caption says, I get distracted and post other stuff. If you haven't tried Tumblr, it's very easy to reblog something.

Wednesday's New York Times had a picture of voters at the Center School in Sherman Township, Iowa. I couldn't find the picture in the online version so you'll have to take my word for it.

The picture of this street sign was taken in Meadville, Pennsylvania when I went out there to see a show in February 2010.

Shermaniana exhibition (1994?)

Elaine Paul put a wonderful postcard picture of the Hotel Sherman in Chicago on a Facebook page (yes, that page). I was teasing back and forth with her about that picture and other things and mentioned the Shermaniana exhibition in the Amon Carter Museum Library when I worked there.

The library reading room had a vitrine or two in which we usually displayed some books or other objects that related to one or more of the exhibitions in the galleries. They were usually pretty high class. As the display was getting stale or the shows were changing in the galleries, Milan Hughston would engage us in a discussion of what should be next. If the discussion wasn't going much of anywhere, I'd volunteer an exhibition of Shermaniana. Milan would giggle and say something along the lines of "I don't think so."

One year (1994, I think), it was mid-late March when we were having the "next?" conversation. I offered the Shermaniana again. Milan laughed. A bit later, I chatted with some colleagues and said we could do it as an April Fool's gift for Milan. On the morning of the first, we traded out whatever had been there and put in the Shermaniana. We waited for Milan's arrival, all but giggling out loud. We were doing the normal morning ritual of coffee and New York Times. Milan got up to go over toward the reading room desk and then started veering toward the vitrine with a "what's this?"

Well, it turns out that Milan loved the Shermaniana show and led several museum staff members over to see it. I had thoughtfully included a few items from Sherman, Texas. After its week's run and the show had been dismantled, we realized that we forgot to photographically document it. Perhaps when I get thoroughly modern and have a digital camera, I will take some pictures of the stuff and recreate it in the digital world.

And that reminds me of the virtual recreation of the Otto Ege manuscripts, one of the highlights of the Banff ARLIS/NA conference for me. http://library2.usask.ca/ege/ During the panel on the Ege reconstruction, I gasped as I saw another leaf from one of "my" books. Manuscript leaves were cheap when I was in grad school; most of my leaves were in the $15 range, some a bit less, none a whole lot more. No gilding, only one face, but lots of lovely writing and some exquisite red-and-blue linear marginalia.