Baskets - Form and Function

Last week my friend took us on a tour of the contemporary art galleries in Santa Fe's Railyard District. This area was formerly the blighted remains of the Atchison-Topeka and Santa Fe railroad yards.   After years of planning and community input a plan was created in 2000 to breathe new life into this neighborhood.  Today, the Railyard is a vibrant and lively neighborhood of parks, open space, art galleries, retail, and public service buildings that honor the railroad's industrial past. 

One of our first gallery stops was the TAI Gallery where works by Japanese bamboo artists were on display.  While some looked like baskets one could possibly use but wouldn't dare, other creations were strictly sculptures made from traditional bamboo basket-making materials.

The following Saturday I wandered through the Railyard again, this time stopping in the Fleamarket and the Artisan's Market where I met Ericka Eckerstrand, a totally different kind of basket-maker.  Eckerstrand has created a whole line of bags, baskets, and home accessories using vinyl outdoor fabric.   Her sturdy, flexible and waterproof baskets are artful and extremely functional.  The inspiration came to her while working in a shop that makes custom awnings.  As someone who has spent hours wandering the aisles of hardware stores looking for non-traditional uses of materials - sheetrock lathing for bird armatures, for example - her creativity just tickles my fancy. Not to mention the fact that her baskets are far more affordable than the lovely Japanese ones above.

Take a look and click on the pictures to visit Eckerstrand's  website.

Folding Baskets

Sleeves

Swatches of vinyl fabrics

West Texas to Santa Fe

Driving through West Texas is a journey through a forlorn landscape of energy fields - oil, natural gas and fracking.  Pecos, Texas, one of the few outposts of civilization for the energy workers, appears to have more pick-up trucks per capita than anywhere else in the world.  One of thing about these guys and their trucks - they are the ones you want to follow to lunch.  They led us to the best brisket sandwiches ever in a little BBQ joint in Pecos.

It was interesting that when we crossed the border from Texas into Mexico the land changed-not dramatically, but reminiscent of the difference you feel when you cross the Connecticut River from New Hampshire into Vermont.  Still wide open high brush country with dramatic skies - but somehow a little less forlorn, more tinges of green and yellow in the palette.

In all of stops along the way, the only place where it took us three tries to get a motel room was Roswell, New Mexico.  We happened to be into town when there was a big demonstration of new Boeing planes going on, along with a conference. 

Despite its reputation for UFO's, which they capitalize on, the city has two wonderful museums.  The Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art and the Roswell Museum & Art Center.  The latter houses the workshop of Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry.  Goddard fired off his first rockets at Worcester Polytech while he was still a physics student, but he moved to Roswell in the 1930's for the wide open space.  The residents of Worcester were grateful.  The museum also houses a lovely art collection.

Fraulein Bosch had a sluggish morning in Roswell.  We wondered if she had been communing with extraterrestrial GPS units or perhaps was just a bit hungover. Happily she recovered once we left Roswell and got us here to Santa Fe.  With its many one way streets, her services are still needed, but Fraulein Bosch's pronunciation of the many Spanish names is a terrible assault on the language.  Even my gringa ears cringe at her interpretations of:

Buena Vista- BOOON a VeesTAH
Camino Lejp - CammiNO Lee Joe

Our first week here was one of atypical grey and cold, but the sun has returned.  At dusk our adobe-lined street has a silver glow from the naked trees that turn from a dull brown to a silvery glow in those magic moments.  The fast moving grey clouds heighten the drama.

Naked tree are lit with a silver glow at sunset

Land of the Longhorn

I was really glad that this truck was nowhere near me when we drove out of Austin on an icy morning. There were guys throwing sand onto closed highway ramps with shovels, and too many accidents to count.

Tidbits of Texas history

Growing up in New England and living a distinctly bi-coastal life I admit I had no real experience of chicken fried steak – only notions of something horribly fried and greasy.  In Fredericksburg, Texas I learned that chicken fried steak is the direct descendent of wiener schnitzel, a favorite of the German immigrants who came to Texas in the 1840’s.  Traditional wiener schnitzel is made with tenderized veal which is breaded and fried.  Chicken fried steak is beef that is breaded and fried using the oil from fried chicken. Now I know and so do you...

The other really interesting fact about Fredicksburg, TX, a small town 80 miles west of Austin, is that in 1847 the the leadership of this early settlement successfully negotiated the only unbroken treaty with Native Americans.  In order to meet the  terms of the land grant given to German settlers around Fredericksburg they needed access to Comanche land.   Eschewing the typical violent approach to Indians, this John Meusebach, had his men empty their guns before approaching the Comanches.  It worked and over several days the Comanche chiefs and Meusebach hammered out an agreement.  According to the Texas State Historical Society the agreement  "allowed settlers to go unharmed into Indian territory and the Indians to go to the white settlements; promised mutual reports on wrongdoing; and provided for survey of lands in the San Saba area with a payment of at least $1,000 to the Indians. The treaty opened more than 3 million acres of land to settlement.”  It is the only treaty ever negotiated directly between settlers and Native Americans and it was never broken.

Selma, Alabama

Heads up - This is a longer than average posting.

It is a few days after visiting Selma, Alabama and I am sitting in a hotel room in Junction, Texas, 120 miles from the Mexican border. It is supposed to go down to 14 degrees tonight, yet climate change is still considered unreal by many of the good folks of Texas.  My goal for the evening is to write about our visit to Selma - the site of Bloody Sunday in March 1965.  While I am busy looking for video images to go with my posting, David turns on the TV.  On my laptop screen I see tear gas and billy clubs for Freedom Marchers and on TV Barack Obama is giving his fifth State of the Union Address.  A half a century - lots of progress and not nearly enough.  It gives me the chills.

We drove into Selma from Montgomery, following the trail of the famous Selma Freedom March. Along the way there were markers of the campsites. Just before crossing the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge the road is flanked by the National Voting Rights Museum and the Civil Rights Memorial Park. 

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Reverend Hosea Williams: Unbossed and Unbought
John Lewis: When We Pray, We Move Our Feet
Amelia Boynton Robinson & Marie Foster: Don't Let Nothing Turn Them Around

There is a peaceful, almost Asian, feel to the wooden entrance to the paths along the river.

Civil Rights Memorial Park - Footpath Entrance

Down along the footpaths there are several simple wooden memorial plaques to a few of the many who lost their lives in this struggle, both in Selma and throughout the South.  Some names were familiar to me, others were not.

Jonathan Daniels was murdered in Fort Deposit, Alabama on August 14, 1965. The valedictorian of the 1961 class of Virginia Military Institute, Jonathan Daniels was pursuing postgraduate studies when he decided the ministry was the path he wanted to follow.  As a seminarian in training he answered Martin Luther King’s call to the ministry to support racial equality and headed south.  He became involved in numerous civil rights actions. From the Virginia Military Institute archives: “In August 1965 Daniels and 22 others were arrested for participating in a voter rights demonstration in Fort Deposit, Alabama, and transferred to the county jail in nearby Hayneville. Shortly after being released on August 20, Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest, and Daniels accompanied two black teenagers, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales, to a Hayneville store to buy a soda. They were met on the steps by Tom Coleman, a construction worker and part-time deputy sheriff, who was carrying a shotgun. Coleman aimed his gun at sixteen-year-old Ruby Sales; Daniels pushed her to the ground in order to protect her, saving her life. The shotgun blast killed Daniels instantly; Morrisroe was seriously wounded.” Daniels death shocked the Episcopal Church into confronting the reality of racial inequality. Coleman was acquitted by an all white jury.

James Earl Chaney, was murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, along with Michael Goodman and Andrew Schwerner, on June 21, 1964.  They were killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and buried in a nearby levee.  It took multiple prosecution efforts over 30 years to bring only a semblance of justice for these murders.  None of those convicted in the  1967  trial served more than six years. The presiding federal judge was infamously quoted as saying, "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”  

If you want a refresher on Bloody Sunday, the march whose coverage interrupted national television viewing of the movie Trials at Nuremberg and pushed Lyndon Johnson into sending federal troops to protect marchers and ultimately the passage of the Voting Rights Act, here it is:

When we planned our route for this trip and I saw that we would be passing through Selma, I knew I wanted to see this place that was so important in Civil Rights history, especially after I read that the guides in the National Voting Rights Museum were people who had participated in the famous Freedom March.  So I was very disappointed when we walked across the street from the Civil Rights Memorial Park to the National Voting Rights Museum and discovered that it was closed, although the website led us to expect otherwise.

At the Selma Visitor’s Center we learned that the Voting Rights Museum and the Slavery Museum no longer have the funds to stay open 5 days a week. The helpful woman at the Visitor Center suggested that we visit the Old Depot Museum because it is home to a diverse collection of artifacts from all of the peoples who have lived in the Black Belt of Alabama.  It includes some significant Civil Rights artifacts she assured us.

So off we went and, instead of a Freedom Marcher being our guide to Selma’s Civil Rights history, we had Beth Spivey, the sole employee of the Old Depot Museum. Spivey is a self-described “redneck” and is too young to have witnessed Bloody Sunday. Yet she is passionate about her work and, when it comes to preserving the history of Selma and communicating it to the many children and groups that come through the Museum, she is nothing less than a force of nature.  

Spivey collected our money and launched into the Depot's story. Originally it was a munitions factory that supplied arms to the Confederate Army, but the Union Army put an end to that in 1865.  The Depot was rebuilt in 1891 and has served many functions over the years – from train depot to municipal offices.  Our tour started with a look at how the building was when Spivey walked in the door. It had been broken into office spaces with dropped ceilings and dingy display cases - not very appealing. But down at the end of the building the remnants of office space are gone. With the help of a few volunteers and a miniscule budget, the brick walls and wooden ceiling beams were cleaned and exposed to create a space that feels like a museum, not a dusty collection of “stuff.” Large murals by Felix Gaines provide a powerful backdrop to the Civil Rights artifacts in this room.  

Felix Gaines mural, still vibrant, but in need of repair

Why was this the first renovation project she took on?  Why the Civil Rights collection and not the military, Native American or other collections? In her first couple of days on the job Spivey learned that she had to give talks to visiting school groups about Selma’s Civil Rights history. In a county that is 70% Black she had to come up to speed quickly and get it right.  Although she didn’t state it directly I am guessing that the materials and history she found in the Old Depot affected her deeply and informed her action plan.

It is with great passion that she talks about slavery using a real receipt for a teenage slave. When Spivey learned that one of the teachers in a school group had been on the Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, she asked all the students to turn around and thank this teacher. “You need to thank those who have come before you for all that they have done. You need to show respect to your elders.  Everyone has a story that you don’t know.”

MLK's Famous Green Sweater

This is the sweater Martin Luther King wore in his frequent visits to Selma

Parade Violation Tickets

There are hundred of these tickets that were given out in days leading up to the Freedom March.  Anytime 3 or more people of color were together on the street they were fined $200 for not having a Parade Permit.

Picking Cotton

Photo from the Museum's collection

One Bale of Cotton

One bale weigh's close to 500 lbs.

Cotton Bale Scale

Beth Spivey is a woman with energy, passion and big hopes for the Old Depot Museum. We wish her well.

Savannah

Our first night in Savannah we walked by Kobo Gallery and I knew that I had to visit when it was open.  There was a piece in the window that I had to see up-close.  It was a sculpture that I thought was ceramic, but couldn’t imagine how it could have been fired.  The next day I discovered that it was made from wood and, better yet, the artist who made it was in the gallery.  Dicky Stone has started learning about wood from his grandfather and now makes these gorgeous pieces that are hard to describe.  Please click on the image below to look for yourself at his work.

Dick is a gracious and charming man who left college with a degree in English literature. We stood around the gallery and had a far-ranging conversation about Savannah's art world and English literature. It was fun to compare classics that we reread in later life and decided that they really don't cut it.  Stone sent us off with a custom made list of spots to see in Savannah and terrific coffee shops to enjoy.  And so we spent our day wandering through the city’s gracious squares – stopping to look at art, but there was no art-making on my part.  Just fun iphone snaps of yet another lock shop and the most well-used space I have seen in a used bookshop.

If only our wits and hearts could be fixed.....

Phillip Simmons, Master Blacksmith

This was one of Phillip Simmons’ favorite sayings.  Simmons, a Charleston hero, artist and National Folk Treasure, passed away recently yet his rich legacy continues.  

At the age of eight Simmons took an interest in the blacksmiths he saw working in his neighborhood in East Charleston. When he was 13 he was hired by Peter Simmons, no relation, and trained in the art of ironwork.  In 1952 Peter left the shop to Phillip who went on to build and design gates and rod iron works that grace the homes and churches of Charleston and locations around the world, including the Smithsonian. All of his work was done in the shop at the back of his home on Blake Street.  The only modernizing he ever did was to put in a concrete slab floor. After the age of 94 he stopped working at the forge, but trained his nephew and several others in the craft and continued to design until his death at the age of 97.  

Simmon's nephew continues the tradtion.

The workshop and home have become a foundation to honor this man, not just for his artistry, but also for his resourcefulness and importance in the community.  In this photo of his bedroom, the red and gold crown says it all.  It was given to him by children who considered him the King of the neighborhood.  

Simmons not only put his three children and all of his grandchildren through college, but 15 other neighborhood kids as well.  He supported the boy scouts, church groups, trained and helped people too numerous to count.

Ben Ham

Looking through the tourist info about Charleston I saw an article about a gallery that had just opened and decided this was the one place I didn’t want to miss -- and boy was I glad.  I knew nothing about Ben Hamm until I read the article.  

Ben Ham Gallery, 416 King Street, Charleston, SC

Everything about the gallery space is simple and elemental. Scrubbed brick walls and gray fabric backdrops are nothing new in the gallery world.  But here, each backdrop was mounted on richly stained 4x4 columns that complemented the color of the olive wood frames used throughout.  The images on display were all large prints in sepia or black and white.  Hamm, like Ansel Adams, uses an 8x10 view camera, and develops his negatives in the darkroom.  But he then scans the negative and prints it digitally, allowing him to make huge prints up to 74 inches wide on fine art papers that show the detail and drama in ways that Ansel Adams could not do.  These images took my breath away.  The composition, the way he sees line, texture and form in the natural world is one that I aspire to.  It was exhilarating!

Low Country by Ben Hamm

Ham's work is only sold as numbered, framed fine art pieces that start at $1800 so the only thing I could consider was his $75 book.  After hemming and hawing, I left without it, but inspired nonetheless.

The next morning while I was out wandering around Charleston, I thought about going back to buy it, but went back to the hotel instead.  There sitting on the bed was a beautifully wrapped copy of Ham’s book. David went back to the gallery and bought the book for me as a birthday present, making the curator promise not to sell me a copy if I should return on my own.  

A wonderful epilog indeed.

Bridges

My love affair with bridges started in the backseat of my dad’s station wagon.  Every time we went over one of the Cape Cod bridges my mother, who was afraid of heights, closed her eyes and held onto to the dashboard with clenched fingers, while I pressed my nose against the window, thrilled to be able to see the world from above like a bird.

The freedom of big vistas, water and graceful man-made forms became a part of my daily life when I moved to Oakland, California in my mid twenties. My personal rating system for hikes in the East Bay hills and Marin Headlands was based on the vista and the bridge count. To go to the beach on a weekend, I would sometimes make a three bridge loop just so I could see the world from each span-the Bay Bridge, Golden Gate and finally the Richmond Bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge was my favorite. It is accessible from above, below, and afar.  From Baker Beach I sat and watched ships, submarines go under her arches, watched hundreds of sunsets behind her.  For the first years after returning to the east coast, I could be heard uttering a plaintive and wistful cry of “my bridge” every time there was a picture of the Golden Gate bridge on TV.

On Mother’s Day in 2002 my son and I, along with several thousand other people, waited in line for what seemed like hours to have a chance to walk across the Zakim bridge in Boston before it was opened to traffic.  It is the widest cable-stayed bridge in North America with 10 lanes.  In the very middle of the bridge is a fish lane – huge diamond shaped cut-outs in the deck. These are to let light shine through onto the river below and break up the bridge’s shadow so that the alewife fish swimming upriver to spawn will not get confused.  Fraulein Bosch does not offer her services to alewives.

Both Charleston and Savannah have beautiful cable stayed bridges – the Ravenel and Talmadge respectively. There are wonderful photos of these bridges taken by photographers far better than I, but still I couldn’t help myself.  How can you not admire this geometry?  

And of course when you turn around, there is more geometry hidden in the sand – an attempt to keep the beach from washing away.

Not Bubble gum...

Offbeat...
On my way to a walking tour of Charleston to get an overview of the city’s history and architecture, this closed key shop just tickled my fancy. 

What I thought were wads of dried gum on the sidewalk turned out to be locks and keys embedded in the cement - a perfectly charming, creative, permanent, low-cost advertising gimmick….

On the road with Fraulein Bosch...

With car packed with books, clothes for warm and cool weather, we set off for our winter snowbird sojourn – a road trip through the South and up through Texas Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We planned a general route and have made the technological switch from road maps to Google maps on our phones.  I was trying to come up with a good name for our “road guide”- Gertrude just wasn’t feeling right, and it wasn’t until Fayetteville, North Carolina that we discovered a proper name for our Google voice.  

Two block away from our dinner stop at a delightful Turkish restaurant the road was blocked by a train – not a train crossing an intersection, but a really long train on tracks that ran straight down the middle of the street. When the train came to a dead stop and everyone else around us started making u-turns in the road, we followed suit.  Well “Madam Google” was not having it and tried valiantly, and insistently, to get us to drive through the parked train.  It was then that David realized her true name is Fräulein Bosch and that she is a close cousin to Herr Bosch, our highly scheduled and persistent dishwasher.  

When our last Maytag died, we really wanted a quiet dishwasher and went with a Bosch.  While washing this appliance is indeed very quiet, but when it is done, it beeps incessantly. Please komm sofort! Ze dishes are done. Schnell!

David dubbed the tyrannical dishwasher Herr Bosch. Little did I know that my iphone held such a Germanic persona…  

We are not yet on a first name basis. 

Ocean Mist at Minus 6 Degrees

Yesterday at sunrise, when my weather app said it was -6 degrees, staying under the covers seemed like a good idea...until I looked out the window and saw hundreds of plumes of mist rising off the ocean.  Mist over the saltmarsh is pretty common, but not over open water like this.  But then, it isn't everyday that the ocean here on the southcoast is 45 degrees warmer than the air. 

Off I went to beach with only my iphone and tried to capture the magic until my fingers got numb - which wasn't long.  The high tide line was a wall of cascading ice forms and little crystals of ice formed briefly as low tide laps of water hit the shore.

Brrrrrr........

Out in the early morning snow...but not for long.

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MOMA Moments

It still takes me aback, how many people are snapping photos in museums. Recently  at the Sargent Watercolor Exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there was a woman religiously taking a photo of every painting with her ipad.   She appeared to be on a mission to photograph all 90+ paintings in the show.  It struck me as almost tragic that  while she was so busy concentrating on framing images with her ipad, she never directly experienced Sargent's rich, lush colors, marks or textures. 

But earlier this week, I confess I fell prey to the impulse to whip out my iphone camera in the Museum of Modert Art in New York.  No, I wasn't photographing the art hanging on the wall - just this priceless Frida moment:

Where is your eyebrow pencil when you need it?

And then there was this view across the atrium of a staircase - framed like a painting, an abstract still life.  God...I love my iphone....

Grassiela Gigantus 2.0

It was three years ago this November that I bought my first digital SLR and made a commitment to seriously reenter the world of photography.  What spurred me to finally plunk down the big bucks for the camera, extra lens and all the requisite doodads was Grassiela.  She is not a graceful muse with a lovely Spanish lilt to her voice, or even a photographer.  Grassiela is an obsession, a six-foot hummingbird.  

It all started with a trip to the DeCordova Museum Sculpture Garden. Up 25 feet in the trees was a school of 3-foot long metal fish, swimming in a circle.  These fish took up residence in my imagination and would not leave.

"I have tall trees in my yard," I said to myself.  "They need some creatures. How had I not noticed this before?"  The fact that I had never made a piece of sculpture in my life was totally irrelevant.  I bought a bag of pipe cleaners and started thinking about armatures.

Seedheads

And then I broke my foot in several places. So I spent a good part of the summer, watching hummingbirds flit about and through the ornamental grasses around my deck.  When the seed heads on the miscanthus emerge, their soft forms hold delicate patterns of maroon, grey and brown tones that make me think of gorgeously rich Italian wool suiting fabric.  This is what I wanted on my bird, on my obsession.  I wanted her clothed in beautiful warm tones of autumn grass.

So I began gathering grasses of many types, colors and textures and letting them dry.  A cardboard prototype was created and after many hours of cruising the aisles at Home Depot I decided to build the armature out of sheet rock lathing.  It is sturdy, flexible and cheap.  My smart husband made me buy a good pair of gloves and wire cutters and I was off and running. 

Cars were banished from the garage, which became my studio.  With all of my old rock and roll albums playing loudly on my iPod, I was in a state of complete happiness with a look David coined as Debby Demento. Each day I was figuring out how to solve new problems.  And each day, my grasses continued their natural progression from smooth sweet patterns to wild "poofiness" so they could fly away.  But I was not deterred. Thousands of feet of fishing line later; we hoisted her in the trees.  And while she didn't look much like my original idea, I was proud of my first attempt.

In the intervening years, I did the research I should have done and learned how to dry grasses so they maintain their soft shape and part of their lovely color patterns.  I learned how to use floral dyes so I could create a ruby throat of miscanthus.  This November, Grassiela 2.0 took flight.  She has a warm brown undercoat of burlap and her color and texture more closely approximate my dream.  The top and underside of the wings have different patterns and textures that utilize the seed heads and the stalks and there is still much to learn.

Ruby Throat

But what does this all have to do with photography?  How did a giant grass hummingbird propel me into photography? At different points in time cameras had been an important part of my life and work.  But they were always tools used for documenting. Photography was an adjunct to storytelling, a journalist's tool. Grassiela was strictly a creative impulse, about making art, something I had never done outside of a required school project.  Once she took flight I knew I could pick up a camera again and use it to make something very different.  Grassiela gave me the courage to believe that with time, patience, practice and study I could learn to make art with a camera.

Grassiela Gigantus 2.0