Farrington Smith Gallery

Adam and I both love the bits of history you find in and on buildings when you’re lucky. I never noticed this baseball guy on our door frame until it was time to change things.

I’m sorry for the poor photo quality, but he’s gone now and I can’t retake it. Adam and Scott are downstairs painting and installing different doors as I type, and the gallery should be reopened in our new location within a few weeks.

I’m sad to see the baseball man go, but isn’t a fresh coat of paint just like a miracle sometimes?

-Amy

It seems as if Adam is finding kittens here, there, and everywhere these days.

About 3 months ago, he was exploring an abandoned, flooded house. Not the typical kind that’s got broken windows, peeling paint, and a messed up roof that you see all over the place here in New Orleans, but one of those special ones that just looks like a mound covered in vines. I think these occur mainly in rural areas of the South, but this city has more than a few.

So he heard a mewing coming from inside the wall, one thing led to another, and he ended up carrying this black fuzz ball of a kitten home to me in the breast pocket of his shirt. I bottle fed the kitten for a few weeks, and now he’s a bona fide member of our family along with my other three cats.

His name is Wally- get it? He’s the black one on the right.

The one on the left is another find of Adam’s.

A couple weeks ago, on the last Saturday we had the gallery open on Royal Street, Adam found a mixed breed Siamese kitten on the sidewalk of the French Quarter. We were definitely at our limit cat-wise, but with the SPCA and other rescue organizations so depleted of resources around here, I decided to take responsibility for finding this no-name kitten a home.

I asked around to all our friends and sent out a mass email to all our local contacts, but no one wanted to adopt. Luckily, once the ad I placed in The Times-Picayune was published, I was inundated with calls. And luckily again, the first woman to come look at the kitten was a true cat lover. She and her family lost their house and all their belongings in the hurricane, as well as her 16-year-old cat, which was boarded in a facility that flooded.

So little no-name kitty went with her, and we got to make a small contribution to this family’s rebuilding. It feels good.

-Amy

No longer in the French Quarter, the Farrington Smith Gallery is now at 2514 St. Claude Avenue. The move brings the retail part of our operation closer to the creative part of the process, because Adam’s studio is behind the storefront of the new location.

Adam and I live above the gallery and Scott lives in Treme. All of us love this part of town the way it is, but we also hope that more and more interesting businesses start populating it over here…not that we don’t appreciate furniture stores, of course! So in that sense, we hope we are part of an early wave of something bigger.

Opening the French Quarter space back in November was a spontaneous decision born out of frustration, pent-up energy and love for the city. We had been back for over a month but still had no electricity, so Adam couldn’t make art or otherwise work. People were filtering their way back and businesses were reopening here and there, but there was so much devestation all around.

Doing something positive seemed like the thing to do. By opening the gallery, we all felt as if we were digging in our heels and creating a bright spot. We wanted to bring a jolt of vitality to the city we love and to our own day-to-day lives. Now that the city is on it’s way back, we have an opportunity to get a little more specific and focus on the part of the city that we happen to love the best.

The move also simplifies our lives, both in the obvious, financial way, but also how we get to direct our energies. We will miss being right there on Royal Street, hanging out and seeing who happens by. But we all can’t wait to get going on some new ideas that have been simmering on the back burner due to lack of time.

We will be open on Saturdays from 10-5 and will be available for appointments as well. Just give us a call for that.

-Amy

So I like the action movies, I gotta admit, and I made Adam go see the latest with me earlier in the week.

Then at 4:30 last night, I wake up because he’s sitting bolt upright in bed looking out the window saying, “Wow! It’s incredible! WOW! Oh my God, it’s just amazing!”

So then I’m fully awake, fumbling for my glasses, not sure if whatever is so amazing is GOOD amazing or BAD amazing…and I’m saying, “What? What is it?”

Adam says dismissively, “Oh, it’s this implant they put in my eye.” And he lays his head back down on the pillow, mumbles in response to my furthur questions, and is sound asleep in less than 30 seconds.

I get up and play on the computer until the adrenaline in my system dissipates. So I’m a little tired today, but I won’t argue if you say it’s fair payback.

-Amy

It’s got a crank poking out of the blade, and when you crank it, the wings in back flap. It’s a little uncomfortable to interface with the blade; it’s as if someone tells you to “talk to the hand” and then you do.

It’s important to try new things and to take the less obvious paths and perspectives.

Bulldozers are symbols of change. And change is scary, with good reason. But without optimism there’s nothing.

I have all kinds of unfounded optimism, and New Orleans is the Stagnantropolis of unfounded optimism. The Lower 9th Ward is still in pretty rough shape, but it’s always darkest before dawn…or a darker darkness.

-Adam

Bulldozer; Adam Farrington; Steel and Aluminum; 26″ x 28″ x 16″; $1800

I’m a newcomer to computers.

Only since I bought a computerized cutting machine a couple years ago have I had much appreciation for computers. I’d used the internet and email a little, but until my machine took the picture on the screen and cut it out of steel, they didn’t seem very relevant to me. Now I’m light years ahead of where I was, and if not totally computer literate, I at least have the tools to sound it out.

I’m glad I’m behind the curve. It’s probably how the iceman felt when he was thawed out, but with less damage to the connective tissues. Computers! Wow! A tower full of experienced little digital employees at my fingertips, ready to do my bidding.

Then I became more aware of the parallels between electonics and cities; electricity and people.

Bad city planning is like a bunch of crap rattling around, shorting stuff out, and making it impossible to have a functioning economy of messages. Our digital pals get all stagnant under the overpass, brooding with static electricity, ’til zap! Someone gets mugged.

My friend told me they call circuit board design “architecture.”

It’s interesting the way streets, originally layed out purposefully like wires, get sliced and spliced up over time. Press Street got chopped diagonally through the middle of an intersection, with a scarred barrier to ricochet cars around the corner instead of careening into the train yard that wiped away the old neighborhood who knows when.

No information finds its way down to the warf by Press Street anymore. Ursulines Street dead ends up against concrete, under the interstate.

Poverty is like a lack of sufficient voltage in the medium of exchange. Stuff happens in fits and starts if at all.

There are these neighborhoods with their lovely old houses stagnating, like broken radios full of perfect transistors. Someone could come in with a bulldozer or soldering iron and clear out some obstructed paths and carve out some new ones. But usually old radios just get kicked along the gutter untill they decintigrate in the weeds.

Who’s going to risk getting electrocuted by drug addicts when you can just go to Best Buy for a fresh, new Jim Walters home?

-Adam