LONDON – This summer Tate Modern will present the first retrospective of the seminal American painter Agnes Martin since her death in 2004. The exhibition titled “Agnes Martin” will run June 3 through Oct. 11.
Martin was renowned for her subtle, evocative canvases marked out in pencil grids and pale color washes. The exhibition will cover the full breadth of her practice, reasserting her position as a key figure in the traditionally male-dominated fields of 1950s and 1960s abstraction.
This internationally touring show will demonstrate Agnes Martin as one of the pre-eminent painters of the 20th century and trace her career from early experiments to late work. Born in 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin established her career as an artist in New York, living in the Coenties Slip neighborhood alongside fellow artists Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. The exhibition will reveal Martin’s lesser-known early paintings and experimental works from this period including The Garden, 1958. It will chart her experiments in different media and formats with found objects and geometric shapes, before she began making mesmerizing penciled grids on large, square canvases which would become her hallmark. Tate Modern will bring together seminal examples of these works from the 1960s such as Friendship, 1963, a gold leaf covered canvas incised with Martin’s emblematic fine grid.
Martin left the New York art scene and abandoned painting in 1967, just as her art was gaining considerable acclaim. In search of solitude and silence, she traveled across the U.S. and Canada for almost two years before finally settling in New Mexico where she lived for the rest of her life. Georgia O’Keeffe had already famously moved to New Mexico by 1940 and other artists and writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko had all been drawn to visit the area.
Martin began making work again with On a Clear Day, 1973, a portfolio of prints of differently proportioned grids and parallel lines. She continued to work in series of paintings, creating delicate, evocative works in monochrome or color washes in combinations of pale blue, red and yellow. While often associated with Minimalists and an influential figure to those artists, Martin’s restrained style underpinned a deep conviction in the emotive and expressive power of art. Influenced by Asian belief systems including Taoism and Zen Buddhism as well as the natural surroundings of New Mexico, Martin sought to evoke a meditative contemplation of art. The exhibition will also feature a group of Martin’s final works brought together from private collections including Untitled #1, 2003, which reintroduce the bold geometric forms she had experimented with in her early career.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog from Tate Publishing and is organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York where it will tour throughout 2015 and 2016.
PHILA., Pa. – Fraktur is the name used for documents and religious texts that – in the hands of Pennsylvania German artists – became an important expression of American folk art. The name is derived from the angular appearance of the “fractured” German lettering used on this type of ephemera. Serious collectors have been willing to pay five and six figures for the best examples, and in 2015, the spotlight is on their specialty.
Three exhibitions and the most comprehensive work of scholarship in the last 50 years will introduce a wider audience to the beauty and historical importance of these fragile works on paper. Now open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection” will be on view through April 26. The Johnsons have promised the future gift of their extensive holdings to the museum. Nearby, the Free Library of Philadelphia will present an exhibition of works drawn from its own permanent collection titled “Quill & Brush: Pennsylvania German Fraktur and Material Culture,” to run March 2 through June 14.
On March 1, the Winterthur Museum in Delaware will open “A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans, and the Art of Everyday Life,” a broader yearlong exhibition which groups fraktur with other art forms from this distinctive culture such as painted furniture, decorated pottery and textiles. In 2014, Winterthur purchased 121 fraktur and nearly 200 textiles from the estate of Frederick S. Weiser, an ordained Lutheran pastor and legendary scholar and collector of Pennsylvania German folk art. Assembled by Weiser over a span of more than 40 years and with a careful eye to collecting the most significant or rare examples, the collection includes many objects acquired directly from descendants of the original owner or maker. Many objects were featured in Weiser’s publications, exhibitions, and lectures and represent a core group of well-documented pieces on which scholars rely.
The guiding force behind this exhibition activity is Winterthur assistant curator Lisa Minardi, who has authored the comprehensive Drawn with Spirit catalog, which is the most important scholarly study of fraktur since Donald Shelley’s 1961 publication for the Pennsylvania German Folk Art Society. The catalog opens with an informative interview with the Johnsons by Ann Percy, curator of drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Their comments are accompanied by interior views of the collectors’ home, showing how they enjoyed displaying the fraktur. This is followed by over 300 pages of information assembled by Minardi on the origins, motifs, techniques and distinctive schools of fraktur, profusely illustrated with examples from the Johnson Collection.
In an interview with Auction Central News, Lisa Minardi explained, “The three projects came about very separately; it was just coincidental that the timing was overlapping. I have made fraktur my specialty and I’ve know the Johnsons for years – they wanted me to write the catalog. That was the first ball that was moving. The Free Library had hired me in 2007-2009 to help recatalog their whole fraktur collection. When they received this grant to do two exhibitions on traditional and contemporary, I guess it a natural fit for me to do the traditional one.”
She continued, “At Winterthur, we made a big acquisition last year of Pastor Frederick S. Weiser’s collection and there was an opening on the exhibition schedule. I think there is really strength in numbers, and these exhibitions make the Delaware Valley a destination if you’re interested in folk art. You really have to come and see all three.” Winterthur will also issue a separate catalog for their exhibition.
According to Minardi, “The Winterthur exhibition is a little different than the other two because it’s not just a fraktur exhibition; it’s very much a mixed media show with furniture, pottery, metalwork – all sorts of media. We were aiming for it to be more like the 1983 traveling exhibition that Winterthur and the PMA did – “The Pennsylvania Germans: A Celebration of their Arts, 1683-1850.” There really hasn’t been a comprehensive exhibition of German folk art since then. We’re aiming to address that with new scholarship and new exhibitions.”
In her opening introduction to the Johnson catalog, Minardi wrote, “Fraktur has become one of the most distinctive and iconic forms of American folk art. The most common type made by the Pennsylvania Germans was the Geburts-und-Taufschein, or birth and baptismal certificate. Whether handwritten or printed, these documents typically include extensive genealogical data … in addition to decorative motifs such as hearts, flowers, angels and birds.” The catalog illustrates a variety of these birth and baptismal certificates, which were obviously a favorite of the Johnsons, but there are also decorated bookplates, religious views and texts, cutwork valentines, and just-for-fun drawings.
The good news for newly interested collectors is that fine examples come to the market every day at auctions around the country. Family records were often tucked away for safekeeping, only to emerge in the 21st century as bright and colorful as the day they were drawn up. Jeffrey S. Evans heads an auction house in Mount Crawford, Virginia, which features fraktur in their Americana sales, particularly rare examples made in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
Evans noted, “There’s not only much less Virginia fraktur produced, there’s also much less of it that has survived. That’s the reason that it brings higher prices than examples from Pennsylvania. Most of the artists in the Shenandoah Valley either came from Pennsylvania or had training in Pennsylvania, especially in the counties of Rockingham and Shenandoah. All the fraktur that came out of those counties are based on Pennsylvania fraktur and the large majority are in German. Frederick County is a little bit different because it was primarily Scots-Irish, so some of the fraktur from there – the Record Book artist and others – that are written in English.” One example in English, a Frederick County record of Mary E. Jones’ death in 1849 by an unknown artist sold for $29,900 at Evans in 2013.
Demand remains strong according to Evans: “Especially in things that are Southern and regional when there’s a good story about the artist and the family, and especially things that have descended in the family. A matter of fact, we were just consigned a fraktur for our June sale that was found in the family Bible, that had not been discovered before, so there are some fraktur that are still coming to light out of the original families which makes them extremely desirable. Collectors like to have things that they are the first one to have collected, that are new to the market.”
The catalog Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection is available from the Philadelphia Museum of Art bookstore; visit www.philamuseumstore.org or call 215-684-7960.
Collectors also can look forward to an upcoming conference March 5-8, “Fraktur and the Everyday Lives of Germans in Pennsylvania and the Atlantic World, 1683-1850.” Lisa Minardi encourages all interested to attend: “The joint conference will be based primarily in Philadelphia at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies on Penn’s campus, but there will be different events happening at all the participating institutions. It’s geared toward both a scholarly and general audience, so you don’t have to come in there knowing everything about fraktur. There will be general talks, there will be talks about materials such as pigments, there will be talks about different sorts of imagery.”
A drawing of Adam and Eve, circa 1834-1835, attributed to Samuel Gottschall, is one of the treasures on view in ‘Drawn with Spirit: Pennsylvania German Fraktur from the Joan and Victor Johnson Collection’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through April 26. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
A rare Hampshire County, Virginia, fraktur record of the birth and death of infant John Kelley in 1847 sold for $32,200 last April at a Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates auction. This example and the similar following lot, which brought $23,000, were attributed to the anonymous ‘Shenandoah Valley Illuminated Artist’ of Winchester.
Many fraktur were decorated birth and baptismal certificates such as this lively example from the Johnson Collection made for Anna Maria Oberle, born Sept. 19, 1798, attributed to artist Johannes Ernst Spangenberg. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art
This early 19th century southeastern Pennsylvania religious text – perhaps a Mennonite hymn – is lettered and colored on a circular cutwork pattern of eight hearts embellished with tulips. The lot brought a hammer price of $2,100 at Conestoga Auctions in 2010.
More than four dozen examples of fraktur will be part of a multimedia exhibition, ‘A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans and the Art of Everyday Life’ opening March 1 at Winterthur. Andreas Kolb of Montgomery County signed this elaborately illustrated religious text circa 1785. Courtesy Winterthur Museum
A Pennsylvania fraktur bookplate with the German text ‘Jesus alone my heart shall own, Barbara Lieht, March the 4th, Anno 1826,’ probably from Lancaster or Lehigh County, was hammered down for $1,400 last October at Conestoga Auctions.
The Free Library of Philadelphia will display this bookplate for Abraham Landes, attributed to artist Johann Adam Eyer of Bucks County, in their exhibition ‘Quill & Brush: Pennsylvania German Fraktur and Material Culture,’ opening March 2. Courtesy Free Library of Philadelphia
PHILA., Pa. – On Saturday, Feb. 7, Kamelot Auctions will present an antique furniture and decorative arts auction in their Philadelphia showroom beginning at 10 a.m. EST. The auction will present over 650 lots of antique and 20th century furnishings, fine art, decorative objects, clocks, lighting, rugs and architectural pieces.
LiveAuctioneers.com will provide absentee and Internet live bidding.
At the forefront of Kamelot’s sale is the original walnut library executed by Gotlieb Volmer, circa 1887, from the Peter A.B. Widener mansion once located at Broad Street and Girard Avenue in Philadelphia. The library is composed of a pair of four-door corner bookcases and a third unit that spans the length of one wall. This unit has an L-shape, four-door bookcase on the right side and a window seat on the left side. Widener, a prominent businessman in Philadelphia, amassed his fortune during the second half of the 19th century through the development of new industries including railroads, steel production and mining. In 1887 Widener had a large mansion built. Designed by architect Willis G. Hale, the residence was four and a half stories high and included an arched entrance with a double staircase, a banquet room and original murals and frescoes by artist George Herzog. Kamelot’s sale will feature the original library (lot 411, $3,000-$5,000) accompanied by two oak fireplace mantels (lot 486, $600-$900 and lot 487, $600-$900) and a set of oak paneled entry doors (lot 474, $400-$600), all of which were removed from the mansion around 1980 just prior to the mansion being demolished. The Widener library is one among this sale’s several shining examples of the architectural pieces that Kamelot has become known for.
Lot 409 is an extraordinary collection of matching Victorian giltwood mirrors and valences, circa 1880, removed from a Manhattan brownstone. The lot is composed of a matching pair of giltwood pier mirrors resting on separate marble-top bases accompanied by a matching overmantle mirror and six valences, two of which were designed to abut one of the mirrors, and all with the same detailing and nice original gold gilt surface. Nine pieces in total, lot 487 is presented with an estimate of $10,000-$15,000.
Other architectural highlights include a complete oak library composed of approximately 75 running feet of glass enclosed bookcases, circa 1910 (lot 411A, $4,000-$6,000), an unusual 19th century Anglo Indian carved mantel (lot 478, $500-$800), and an American Empire period white marble mantel, circa 1840 (lot 489, $2,000-$4,000).
Furniture buyers can anticipate an exciting array of very decorative, classic and original dining tables, chairs, settees, consoles, desks and upholstered pieces from a variety of styles, periods, and origins. Quality French furniture is a forte of Kamelot’s and highlighting the sale will be an oversized pair of giltwood carved Louis XV-style arm chairs with shaped and carved crest rail over acanthus decorated open arms and shaped seat (lot 219, $2,000-$3,000), a pair of labeled Maison Forest 19th century Louis XVI-style armchairs having a giltwood and needlepoint back and seat (lot 232, $1,000-$1,800), a variety of Napoleon III chairs, and several sets of Louis XV- and XVI-style dining chairs. A good selection of Maison Jansen furnishings will include a Louis XV-style Jansen three-part oak and marble console table, circa 1920 (lot 343, $1,200-$1,800), a rare Louis XV-style Jansen oak and Lucite desk circa 1940 (lot 350, $1,000-$1,800), and a similar pair of Jansen eglomise mirrors having shaped tops over silvered gilt and foliate decorated frames circa 1940 (lot 339, $1,500-$2,500).
Italian furniture is lead by lot 40A, an elaborate and complete eight-piece painted Italian bedroom set circa 1900. Estimated at $2,000-$3,000, the set is composed of a queen-size bed, a pair of marble-top nightstands, a marble-top dresser with mirror, a vanity with mirror, and a three-door armoire.
From the English category comes a very good 19th century English George III secretary having stepped cornice over inlaid Greek key and three mullioned front glass doors (lot 252, $1,000-$1,500) along with a pair of English leather club chairs with loose cushion seats, circa 1920 (lot 267, $600-$900).
The auction will include a great variety of paintings and prints by well-recognized and widely collected artists. Highly anticipated is lot 588, an oil and acrylic on canvas painting titled Miss Johnson (Angie) by the prominent African American Artist Barkley Leonnard Hendricks, signed upper right “B. Hendricks” and dated 1973, and comes with a strong provenance to uphold it’s $40,000-$60,000 estimate.
Also featured in the sale are an oil on canvas painting by New York/Austrian artist Joseph Floch titled Mod Girl, circa 1965 (lot 587, $5,000-$7,000), and an oil on canvas story illustration by New York artist Elbert McGran Jackson, signed lower right E.M. Jackson, circa 1933 (lot 622, $1,000-$1,500). The illustration features a standing man in a tuxedo confronting a seated woman and accompanied a story by Pauline Partridge in Cosmopolitan magazine, 1933.
Other fine art highlights include an oil on Masonite painting by Franklin Dullin Briscoe of figures picnicking along a coastline, dated 1883 (lot 593, $1,000-$1,500), a mixed media on paper work by Titian Ramsay Peale titled Scardinius Erythrophthalmus, 1831 (lot 630, $2,000-$4,000), and a large 20th century KPM painted porcelain plaque depicting a nude woman with angels, stamped “KPM” en verso (lot 591, $500-$1,000).
Leading the selection of decorative arts is lot 511, a full-length bronze figure after Augustus Rodin’s The Bronze Age signed A. Rodin in the base and foundry mark of “Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris” ($400-$600) and by the same artist, lot 511, a bronze figure of a man mounted on a marble plinth after Rodin’s Adam with foundry mark of Alexis Rudier Paris (1902-1952) circa 1950 ($200-$400). A select group of clocks is lead by lot 543, an exquisite Cartier Art Deco day/date desk clock in nephrite with hexagonal jeweled decoration circa 1920, estimated at a conservative $500-$700. Lot 546, a very good French dore bronze mantel clock, circa 1870, featuring a Classical seated huntress, along with lot 545, an elaborate onyx and bronze French mantel clock signed Amour Combattant Par Aug. Moreau, circa 1880, featuring a female archer are perhaps the most striking of the selection, both bearing a presale estimate of $800-$1,200.
Rugs number more than 30 lots, lead by an 8-by-12-foot Persian Vis rug (lot 443, $700-$900) and a 6-by-9-foot Tabriz Mahi rug with silk highlights (lot 442, $800-$1,000).
For more information call 215-438-6990.
[button color=”black” size=”big” alignment=”center” rel=”follow” openin=”samewindow” url=”https://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/66636_continental-furniture-paintings-and-dec-arts/page1″]Click to view the catalog at LiveAuctioneers[/button]
Joseph Floch, ‘Mod Girl,’ circa 1965. Estimate: $5,000-$7,000. Kamelot Auctions image
Pair of oversized giltwood carved Louis XV-style armchairs. Kamelot Auctions image
Two corner pieces of the original walnut library executed by Gotlieb Volmer, circa 1887, for a Philadelphia mansion. Kamelot Auctions image
Bronze figure after Rodin’s ‘The Bronze Age’ bearing the foundry mark of Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris. Estimate: $400-$600. Kamelot Auctions image
Cartier Art Deco day/date desk clock in nephrite with hexagonal jeweled decoration, circa 1920. Estimate: $500-$700. Kamelot Auctions image
PETWORTH, UK – The Antiques Dealers Fair Limited is organizing a brand new event – The Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair – on the grounds of Petworth House, the magnificent National Trust property in West Sussex, which inspired such great British artists as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Scheduled for Friday, May 8, through Sunday, May 10, the Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair will be held in a marquee in the 700-acre deer park, which surrounds the late 17th century mansion and borders the Sussex town of Petworth.
A wonderful excuse to visit the fair this May is that each ticket also gains free entry to Petworth House (and Park) to see all its treasures, including paintings by J.M.W. Turner and Van Dyck. In a reciprocal arrangement, Petworth House ticket holders and National Trust members can also have free entry to the fair.
A treat is in store for art lovers, with several exhibitors offering a wide range of paintings and sculptures from antique to contemporary. Horton London is bringing Auguste Rodin’s Femme qui se peigne, a 24cm-tall bronze, inscribed “A. Rodin” and numbered 1 of 8, priced at £25,000 and A Water Party, oil on canvas signed by John James Chalon (1778-1854) and dated 1836, £3,600.
Haynes Fine Art of Broadway has collections of oil and watercolor paintings by Thomas Sidney Cooper (1803-1902), Heywood Hardy (1894-1933) and Edward Brian Seago (1910-1974), including Seago’s On the Dunes, oil on canvas, with a price guide of £100,000 to £150,000.
Worthing based Wilsons Antiques has paintings celebrating the Sussex coast with Thomas Bush Hardy’s watercolor of Littlehampton Harbour, circa 1880, priced at £2,750. Other Sussex exhibitors include Petworth dealer Ronald G. Chambers Antiques offering a wide range of the finest quality mahogany, rosewood and walnut antique furniture dating from 1700 to 1910; Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, from the nearby hamlet of Egdean, selling contemporary art and sculpture; Tim Saltwell with Regency and Edwardian fine furniture and interior accessories, including a fine Napoleon III gilt bronze and blue Celeste Sèvres-style porcelain mantel clock, circa 1870, £7,950; and Garret & Hurst Sculpture bringing 19th century bronzes, including a fine early signed bronze cast of Giselle by pioneer of animalier sculpture Pierre-Jules Mêne (1810-1879).
Spectacular pieces of jewelry can be found from a number of dealers at the fair. London-based Richard Ogden Ltd. is bringing an Edwardian openwork platinum brooch set with a large cushion cut aquamarine of approximately 24 carats and rose cut diamonds, selling for £3,800 and an unusual, quirky tsavorite garnet and diamond set grasshopper brooch, mounted in 18K white and yellow gold with cabochon ruby set eyes, £5,275.
There is a great opportunity to pick up antique furniture from a number of specialists. Freshfords Fine Antiques from Bath is bringing a George III mahogany inlaid secretaire bookcase in the manner of Gillows of Lancaster and London, circa 1795, £13,850.
With over 30 antiques shops, Petworth itself is a favored destination for collectors of antiques, fine and decorative art, so it seems fitting to add a stylish antiques fair to the area. Some 35 specialist dealers, predominantly members of LAPADA, the Association of Art & Antiques Dealers and the British Antique Dealers’ Association, will showcase their finest wares including traditional furniture, jewelry, silver, antique and contemporary paintings and sculpture, glass, clocks, Oriental rugs and carpets, objets d’art and much more.
Unique to this new event is a sculpture park with a number of art dealers providing differing works of art for outdoors, with works by local and other artists shown by Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, The Jerram Gallery and others.
Ingrid Nilson, director of the Antiques Dealers Fair Limited said, “We are most grateful to the National Trust for inviting us to hold this new event. We are excited to work with them and have the support of the Petworth Antiques & Decorative Arts Association and the Petworth Business Association and are looking forward to building a thoroughly attractive event for visitors from far and wide. The grand 17th century Petworth House boasts an internationally important art collection. Together with its ‘Capability Brown’ landscaped country park, it will provide a magnificent backdrop for our newest fair.”
Refreshments are available throughout the day. Tickets for the antiques fair cost £10 each and can be bought in advance from organizers – The Antiques Dealers Fair Limited – or at the door. There will also be free parking for antiques fair visitors in a specially located nearby car park. For tickets or more information contact The Antiques Dealers Fair Limited on +44 (0)1797 252030 or visit the website www.petworthparkfair.com
Eighteen carat gold tsavorite garnet, diamond and ruby set grasshopper brooch, £5,275 from Richard Ogden Ltd. The Antiques Dealers Fair Limited image
The Antrobus Basket by Joseph Story and William Elliott, London, 1810, £8,950 from Mary Cooke Antiques Ltd. The Antiques Dealers Fair Limited image
Petworth House and Park, the magnificent National Trust property in West Sussex, site of the Petworth Park Antiques & Fine Art Fair, May 8-10. Martin Offer image
THE HAGUE (AFP) – Thirty-six masterpieces belonging to the Frick Collection went on display at Mauritshuis museum in The Hague on Thursday, the first time the famous collection has been shown outside its New York home.
Joining Mauritshuis, home to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring among others, are artworks from the collection donated by American industrialist Henry Clay Frick.
It includes the exhibition’s centerpiece, the 1845 Portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
“It’s the first time that the Frick Collection has lent 36 works of art, such a big group of works, (to be displayed) elsewhere,” Mauritshuis director Emilie Gordenker told AFP.
“It’s our first exhibition of fine art in this space, that we have designed especially to feel a little bit like the Frick Collection,” she added.
Also included are paintings by Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as no less than eight drawings by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and others.
“We selected a group of works, paintings but also some sculptures, drawings, bronze sculptures, other sculptures and even a clock to give you a sense of the variety of works in the Frick Collection,” Gordenker said.
The Mauritshuis is displaying the Frick Collection artworks randomly against a pastel wallpaper background of light browns, pinks and purples which gives it a feeling of “an art lover’s living room,” its organizers said.
“What I particularly like is that they decided to represent the Frick the way we show ourselves in our house in New York, which is everything mixed together,” said Ian Wardropper, the Frick Collection’s director.
“We don’t show things by school or by chronology. We show paintings and decorative arts and sculptures in a very personal kind of mix,” he told AFP.
Situated just off New York’s famous Central Park, the private Frick Collection was turned into a museum after Frick’s death in 1919.
Pieces collected by Frick himself are never lent out, but the Frick Collection continued to acquire art after Frick’s death, including the artworks currently on display at the Mauritshuis.
“The Mauritshuis lend us an extraordinary group of pictures a year ago, which proved to be the most popular exhibition that we had in our history,” said Wardropper.
“We felt that we should make an extraordinary exchange and we are sending for the first time ever an exhibition from the Frick Collection,” he said.
Housed in a 17th century mansion in the heart of The Hague, Mauritshuis is also home to Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch and other paintings that drew record crowds while on display in New York.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act by earmarking $50 million to restore key civil rights areas around the nation.
The president’s budget includes money for the national historical trail from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which commemorates in part the “Bloody Sunday” attack by police on civil rights demonstrators. Their march was portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film Selma.
The attack helped boost the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which banned the use of literacy tests, added federal oversight for minority voters and allowed federal prosecutors to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections. The White House said part of the money for the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail would be for museum collections, oral histories and online access to collections.
Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., said she was pleased Obama’s budget “includes a commitment to preserve a critical part of our history.”
Also in the request is money for improvements at the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site in Arkansas and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Central High in 1957 to enforce a court order to let nine black children attend the school, which is still a working school as well as a national historical site. The King Historical Site includes the birthplace, churches and grave of King. All are controlled in part or in full by the National Park Service.
The money is part of a $4 trillion budget sent by President Barack Obama to Congress on Monday. The plans still have to be approved by the Republican-controlled House and Senate.
Obama plans to travel to Alabama in March to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
Copyright 2015 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) – A Fayetteville landmark, the Prince Charles Hotel, is getting an $11 million makeover and conversion to apartments and retail space.
Media outlets report that the new owners, Michael Cohen and his fellow investors in Prince Charles Holdings LLC, announced plans for the building Monday.
They bought the hotel at auction in December for the minimum $200,000 bid.
The price was a little more than a tenth of what the property brought seven years ago and half of what the hotel was appraised for five years ago.
The new owners plan to rehabilitate the building with apartments and put retail space on the ground floor.
Cohen is founder of a solar energy company based in Santa Monica, California. He previously worked with Strata Solar that operates solar farms across North Carolina.
Copyright 2015 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
MONROEVILLE, Ala. (AP) – In the small Alabama town author Harper Lee made famous with To Kill a Mockingbird, the Southern classic novel can be seen and felt everywhere.
Signs in Monroeville are decorated with mockingbirds. The old courthouse, a model for the movie version of the book, is now a museum that sells souvenirs including coffee cups, aprons and Christmas ornaments. A statue in the town square and a mural decorating the side of a building depict characters who inhabited a fictional version of the town Lee called “Maycomb, Alabama.”
So when it was announced Tuesday that Lee had written a second novel to be released this summer, Monroeville residents and visitors alike were pleased and excited – but they were also perplexed.
The first book centered on small-town attorney Atticus Finch, his children Scout and Jem, and racial injustice in the Jim Crow South. The new book, Go Set a Watchman, is described as a sequel that Lee actually wrote in the 1950s before To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I was really surprised,” said Jillian Schultz, 28, who owns a business in the town square. “You know there’s a lot of controversy about whether Harper Lee actually wrote the (first) book. There’s been so many years in between, and you have to wonder, ‘How did somebody forget about a book?’”
Located halfway between Montgomery and Mobile, Monroeville calls itself the “Literary Capital of Alabama,” a designation bestowed by the state Legislature in the late 1990s. Besides Lee, the city was home to novelist Truman Capote and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist Cynthia Tucker.
For years, the town of 6,300 was known as the home of a huge Vanity Fair mill and outlet, but the factory shut down nearly 20 years ago. That left Monroeville with “Mockingbird” and its literary heritage to attract visitors off the nearest highway, Interstate 65, about 25 miles away.
The nonprofit Monroe County Heritage Museum opens the old courthouse to visitors and features a display about Lee’s life in her own words. Fans can sit in the courtroom balcony depicted in the Academy Award-winning screen version of the book.
Area residents put on a play based on the book each spring, holding the first act of sold-out performances on the courthouse lawn, then taking patrons inside for the climactic courtroom scenes. While visitors are few in shops right now, they’ll return once winter is over.
“It will be busy again during the play,” Schultz said.
Visitors likely won’t see the 88-year-old Lee, who lived in New York for years but now resides in an assisted living center not far from where she grew up. A longtime friend said she is deaf, blind and in poor health, spending much of her time in a wheelchair. She was last seen publicly in November at the funeral of her older sister, Alice Lee, who long represented the author and was known for being protective of her.
Harper publisher Jonathan Burnham acknowledged Tuesday that the publisher has had no direct conversations about the new book with Harper Lee, but communicated through her Monroeville attorney, Tonja Carter, and literary agent Andrew Nurnburg.
The publisher says Carter came upon the manuscript at a “secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Burnham said during a telephone interview that he had known both Carter and Nurnburg for years and was “completely confident” Lee was fully involved in the decision to release the book.
“We’ve had a great deal of communication with Andrew and Tonja,” said Burnham, adding that Nurnburg had met with her recently and found her “feisty and in very fine spirits.”
Some “Mockingbird” fans encountered in Monroeville on Tuesday said they are excited by the news of a new book.
“I bet it’s going to be great. The first one was,” said Judy Turberville, of nearby Frisco City. Turberville said she can’t wait to read Go Set a Watchman, which publisher Harper said will be released July 14.
Ginger Brookover, who lives in West Virginia, is among the tourists who have been lured to Monroeville by “Mockingbird.” In the middle of her second trip to town when the publisher announced Lee’s new novel, Brookover got goose bumps.
“I’m just absolutely shaking,” she said.
Worldwide sales of To Kill A Mockingbird have topped 40 million copies since its release in July 1960. Although occasionally banned over the years because of its language and racial themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has become a standard for reading clubs and middle and high schools.
Copyright 2015 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
