Farrington Smith Gallery

Well, the Dirt Drive has ended.

The Dirt Drive was Adam’s conceptual art project that called for donations of dirt from all over the country to be sent here and symbolically added to our levees to bolster them. He started this project soon after we returned to New Orleans in October, and I gotta say candidly that I’m a little sad it’s over.

I think the Dirt Drive is still very timely and relevant: our levees aren’t up to par, it’s hurricane season, information about the Corps of Engineers continues to be brought to light, etc. But I understand that Adam feels done with it; that’s how it goes sometimes. And there is more pressing work to be done getting our gallery ready…although it’s looking very fine and taking shape beyond what I imagined.

So, here’s a picture from the site of Adam sprinkling dirt on the levees:

It’s in the final post which you can find in the “reviews and pictures” section of the Dirt Drive site.

So long, Dirt Drive.

-Amy

PS If you have a comment about the Dirt Drive, we’d love it if you posted it here!

Territorial ambiguity makes for some dynamic tension; it can be like the three bears.

New Orleans has long inspired curious trespassing with all its strange vacant spaces, but it feels a lot less comfortable since Katrina. It’s different when you are familiar with the circumstances that forced the people out and left the doors ajar.

No One Home is pictured at night, maybe illuminated in firelight. Perhaps a party house in one of those broken bottle zones, or maybe the home of an impoverished heir eking by on SSI. You wouldn’t know, but you’d have to poke around.

There’s a ten speed leaning there. It reminds me of when I was walking by the wharf and there was this red Schwinn with a headlight and tire generator. It was leaning over on a pallet in the corner. It wanted it, but I wasn’t sure it was truly abandoned. I figured I’d come back the next day to see if it was still there.

Then I imagined some guy having to park the bike in exactly the same position each day before starting his wharf shift. So I clicked the generator down on the tire, like Goldilocks would. I figured the bike would be mine if it was still down the next day, but I never came back. It was all a little too OCD, and the bike wasn’t worth it. But that’s private property for you.

-Adam

People may wonder why we want to live in a port city, below sea level. But on a sunny day, there is nothing better than lolling by the Mississippi, watching the barges and boats go by.

Only one steamboat is in operation around New Orleans, the Natchez, which has a steam calliope you can hear playing regularly if you’re in the French Quarter.

But way back when, they crowded the ports down here. A steamboat captain named Milton Doullut even built two houses with design elements of the vessels he commanded; one was for himself and one was for his son.

The second isn’t as pretty to look at, but I like how it gives a tiny feel for the neighborhood and the proximity to the levee. They were built in the early 1900s, and were actually red-tagged for demolition at one point post-flooding. Thank goodness that was fixed.

All my out-of-town visitors get taken over the Industrial Canal into the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood Holy Cross to see the steamboat houses.

You may not be able to tell from the photos that Steamboat Sally is a kinetic sculpture; the wings flap and some of the embellishments in front bob up and down when you turn the crank. I try to summon the steam calliope music when I turn it.

-Amy

Until very recently, my mother typed everything on an ancient manual typewriter, which was her high school graduation gift.

The red and black ribbon wiggled round trips from spool to spool, clunking out fainter and fainter messages about whole wheat and recycling. Sometimes she’d splurge on a new ribbon.

After decades of jerking the ribbon back and forth, the machine gave up the ghost, and the digital age dawned in the form of a Formica-toned period piece from the dot com era. It was given to her by a friend, and though you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you shouldn’t buy it dentures either.

Somehow she managed to have it serviced…but most often she sends me hand written letters.

-Adam

Friday was the Mayor’s Arts Awards Luncheon with the Arts Council of New Orleans, and Adam was asked to do the centerpieces this year. This is one of his steel vases, but they have variations of shape and colors of glitter.

His artist’s statement about them reads: “Rust is just a crustier form of glitter, which I think is evident in this series of vases. It is metaphoric of New Orleans as a whole, with its showy duality and swampy utopianism.”

I think it was neat he was asked to do this project this year in particular; every annual thing these days is not just another event, but the first since the flooding. It all feels at least somewhat monumental; every continuing tradition is a statement about the resiliency and the strength of this city’s culture and people.

We had fun talking to children’s book author/illustrator and TV/movie producer William Joyce before the ceremonies. He has a sad but funny story about his hurricane and Mardi Gras-themed New Yorker cover drawing getting bumped after Dick Cheney shot his friend…here’s a link that tells that story in more detail. Now he’s going to sell prints of the cover-that-wasn’t, and the profits will benefit Louisiana artists and arts organizations. The email address to inquire about buying a print is katrinarita@nadersgallery.com.

So that is all very cool, but we really liked Mr. Joyce because he’s into odd antique toys and kinetics and things like that.

Overall, we’re both glad to have participated in this event. Adam donated 100% of the centerpiece sales to the Arts Council, and we got to get to know some of the staff as well as some interesting guests. Can’t argue with that, although we do wish the mayor had showed up.

-Amy

ETA: The link wasn’t working, but should be fixed now.

Adam’s series of houses made out of old enameled bathtubs and with wings that flap make up an imaginary place called Farringtown.

After the flooding in New Orleans, Farringtown came into being shortly after we got our electricity turned back on and Adam was able to weld again. Here’s his statement of purpose for Farringtown:

“If you’re always fighting fire with fire and then life hands you lemons, so you make some lemonade, but then you find out that your city is inside a bathtub, you should probably have a house made out of a bathtub. Farringtown is an unique community of utmost consideration!”

Scott likes to break it down for people by saying these are the houses for the new New Orleans: they are up on piers, are made out of bathtubs so they are waterproof, and if all else fails (including the levees), they have wings to get you out of here.

The legs of the houses are made out of bolts and other various metal parts from old, rotted piers on the Mississippi. Adam likes to go rowing around in his flatboat collecting these off the banks of the river sometimes. So between those and the old metal bathtub walls of the house, they have a good bit of history built into them.

-Amy

Over the weekend at a bookstore, I picked up the June 2006 issue of Sculpture magazine. Flipping through it, I was excited to see an artwork that I had loved when I saw it in person way back in 1991 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

It’s called Deep Station, and it is scaled-down elements of a subway station. You can walk all around it, and every stairway or track goes off somewhere out of sight. There are sounds of the subway playing. As a Midwestern girl who had an infatuation with New York City before I even visited the place, it held an automatic fascination for me. It also had a magical quality, sort of like a dollhouse or a train set, but more giant! An odd medium size. There was a not-sad loneliness that drew me in. I was mesmerized and never forgot it.

And then while Adam is looking through the magazine, he says, “Hey, one of my favorite instructors from college has a giant article in here!”

I tell him why I bought it, and it turns out his instructor is the artist who made Deep Station. Her name is Donna Dennis, and this is a link to her website, where you can see that and other works.

New Orleans is a like small town, so I’m used to discovering all kinds of links among the people I know. But it was strange to find this thread between my husband and me, this little connection over ten years before we met. He was studying art in his home state of New York back in 1991. I was a Missourian close to college graduation, visiting a friend’s family in Indianapolis and going to the museum.

I love that this little connection between our pasts is a great work of art.

-Amy