Farrington Smith Gallery

This short film is very haunting and beautifully done. I wonder if the theme will seem outdated to those of you less connected to New Orleans…I hope not.

-Amy

We didn’t know Helen Hill, but she was our neighbor and an artist, and by all accounts, a good and kind person. We are so sorry for her loss to her loved ones and to our city.

A website has been set up in her memory.

We will be participating in the Stop the Violence March on City Hall tomorrow.

- Amy

Tomorrow- and every Saturday from now on- we will be open from 10-5.

I don’t think we’ll have our new street numbers up by the morning, but it’s 2514 St. Claude Ave. and easy to find. Here’s what you’re looking for:

Note Scott’s dog Rufus looking longingly out the door at us! Aww.

The gallery is just before you hit Franklin St. Ave. We hope to see ya tomorrow or soon. Oh, and if you can’t come on a Saturday, give us a call to make an appointment.

-Amy

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

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

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

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

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

This Friday, April 28th, the Royal St. art district will be celebrating After Fest from 6-10 p.m.

Lots of galleries are participating; come look at some art, walk around the good old French Quarter and have a drink. We will all be there in our newly spiffed-up gallery; Scott and I have been repainting and Scott has been rearranging. It’s looking great, if I do say so myself!

Also, in this week’s Gambit, our local weekly paper, you can see one of our fish prints on the Shop Around Town page. I haven’t seen it yet, but a friend called to say she thought it looked very eye-catching.

Adam and Scott are working on getting a new round of prints ready for the Jazz Fest crowds we hope will be here for the next two weekends. I think I’m going to Jazz Fest for the first time ever on Sunday, so I’ll post about that next week!

- Amy

ETA in May: I never really posted about Jazz Fest, but I went one day both weekends, and I sort of get it now…even though I still don’t like crowds or sun without shade. But I imagine I’ll go again. Elvis Costello was great playing with Alan Toussaint and I had about 3 different amazing snacks involving crawfishies.