1856 Louis Haghe painting titled The New Ballroom, Buckingham Palace. Many exquisite artworks are on display in the ballroom.
LONDON (AP) – Few people are likely to turn down one of the prized invitations to the post-wedding gathering Queen Elizabeth II will throw at Buckingham Palace after Prince William and Kate Middleton tie the knot on April 29.
It’s not just the glamour of the wedding itself, or the chance to hobnob with Britain’s elite. It’s also an opportunity to wander through the central London palace, an opulent attraction in its own right that is being spruced up for the big event.
Officials said Tuesday that 19 state rooms will be used for the afternoon reception on April 29, which will be followed that evening by a more intimate dinner and dance for 300 friends of the royal couple.
Some of the palace’s finest art will be on display – think masterpieces by Canaletto, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and others of their stature – and food prepared by chefs accustomed to using only finest ingredients and some of the world’s best wines.
“Whenever we have a special event at Buckingham Palace we make sure that the greatest artworks are on display and make sure people are going to see the best of Buckingham Palace,” said Jennifer Scott, assistant curator of paintings at the Royal Collection. “For anybody who studied history of art, walking into this room is such a gift, it’s such an experience.”
William and Middleton probably won’t need to be briefed about the stories behind the paintings – both studied art history when they met as freshmen at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Scott said the palace was used by Queen Victoria for some of the opulent parties that defined her reign. She became the first monarch to take up residence at the palace in 1837.
“If you were to come to one of those balls in the 19th century you would be enjoying a great social occasion but also you would be in this setting, and so really it’s perfect for that,” she said. “When you get an idea of the special quality of this place, it’s magical, it really oozes history.”
Plans call for a number of state rooms in the west wing to be used for the reception, including the white drawing room, the music room, the blue drawing room and the state dining room along with the nearby picture gallery, where the multitiered wedding cake is expected to be on display.
Edward Griffiths, Deputy Master of the Household, said palace staff is used to hosting big events and caters to roughly 50,000 guests a year.
He said 60 people will be working at the afternoon reception, doing everything from opening car doors for guests to serving them canapes and drinks, including wine and champagne.
Details about the food selection and the wine list are not being released yet, though the queen’s head chef Mark Flanagan said the food will show off “the best of British produce.”
“It’s a very joyous occasion and preparations are going extremely well,” Griffiths said.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
1856 Louis Haghe painting titled The New Ballroom, Buckingham Palace.
Portuguese architect and Pritzker winner Eduardo Souto de Moura. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. LOS ANGELES (AP) – Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, whose buildings are praised for their careful use of natural materials and their unexpected dashes of color, has won the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the prize’s jury announced Monday.
Souto de Moura, 58, joins Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando and Renzo Piano in receiving the top honor in the field. He is recognized for the homes, hotels, museums, sports facilities and other structures he has designed, predominantly in Portugal but also in several other European countries.
“Eduardo Souto de Moura’s architecture it is not obvious, frivolous or picturesque. It is imbued with intelligence and seriousness,” the Pritzker jurors wrote in their citation. “His work requires an intense encounter, not a quick glance. And like poetry, it is able to communicate emotionally to those who take the time to listen.”
In past remarks, Souto de Moura has stressed the importance of designing buildings that modestly perform their function and fit in with their surroundings, on both an immediate and a global level.
“There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture, no sustainable architecture – there is only good architecture,” he said at a building forum in 2004. “There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects – one must always pay attention to all these.”
Among the projects mentioned by the Pritzker jury was the sports stadium he built into a mountainside in the city of Braga, Portugal, where the European soccer championship was held in 2004.
Jurors characterized the structure as “muscular, monumental and very much at home within its powerful landscape.”
The jury also mentioned Souto de Moura’s restoration and adaptation of a convent and monastery complex near the northern Portuguese town of Amares.
The project took the Santa Maria Do Bouro Monastery “from rubble to reinterpretation,” the jurors wrote. “Souto de Moura has created spaces that are both consistent with their history and modern in conception.”
Souto de Moura, who previously worked for 1992’s Pritzker laureate Alvaro Siza, began his career as an independent architect in 1980, after winning a design competition for a culture center in his native city of Porto.
Along with his architecture practice, Souto de Moura is a professor at the University of Oporto, and is a visiting professor at Harvard, as well as several European universities.
The formal Pritzker ceremony will be held June 2 at Washington, D.C.’s Andrew W. Mellon auditorium, itself considered one of the finest classical buildings in the United States. Souto de Moura will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.
Souto de Moura is the second Pritzker laureate to be chosen from Portugal, after Siza.
“When I received the phone call telling me I was to be the Pritzker laureate, I could hardly believe it,” Souto de Moura said in a written statement. “The fact that this is the second time a Portuguese architect has been chosen makes it even more important.”
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-CS-03-28-11 1335EDT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Sports stadium in Braga, Portugal, designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura. Image by Manuel Anastácio. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Liz #5, 1963 silkscreen portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, to be auctioned May 12 at Phillips de Pury’s Manhattan gallery. Image courtesy of Phillips de Pury.
New York – An iconic 1963 Andy Warhol silkscreen portrait of film legend Elizabeth Taylor will be auctioned on May 12, 2011 at Phillips de Pury’s Manhattan gallery. The painting is entered in part I of the company’s Contemporary Art auction and is expected to make $20 million to $30,000. Internet live bidding will be provided by LiveAuctioneers.com.
“Liz #5 is a pristine gem. It is Warhol at his very best with a perfect screen, glowing colors, and impeccable provenance,” said Michael McGinnis, Senior Director and Worldwide Head, Contemporary Art for Phillips de Pury. “She is classic yet every bit as cutting edge as she was when Warhol painted her nearly 50 years ago. Liz #5 embodies everything that a major collector of 20th and 21st century art desires and we are thrilled to offer this rare and exciting opportunity to the market.”
Liz #5 was painted at the height of the actress’ fame, which coincided with the most significant and creative period of Warhol’s career. The glamorous portrait embodies the most important themes of Warhol’s oeuvre including celebrity, wealth, scandal, sex, death and Hollywood. The epitome of old-world Hollywood style and glamour, Liz Taylor – who died on March 23 – was one of Warhol’s most famous inspirations, alongside Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. Taylor captured Warhol’s attention early on with her life’s high-profile romances and tragedy; it was this vibrancy and pathos that so attracted Warhol to her and ensured she was a formidable influence on his work throughout his career. In his own words he once said, “Elizabeth Taylor, ohhhh. She’s so glamorous.”
In Liz #5, Taylor’s unforgettable face emerges from a rich turquoise background, perfectly capturing her luminous skin, striking violet eyes and red lips. The power of her attraction has never been as evident as it is in this Warhol painting – a dazzling tribute to Elizabeth Taylor. This striking portrait is a testament to the legend and beauty of one of the world’s most beloved and iconic actresses, both capturing her very essence and transcending the limits of time.
Liz #5 was acquired by the consignor – rumored to be hedge fund manager Steve Cohen of SAC Capital – from the estate of famed art dealer and collector Ileana Sonnabend. Beginning in the early 1960s her gallery was instrumental in introducing postwar American Art to Europe and she represented the most prolific and groundbreaking artists of her time including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Liz #5 remained in her personal art collection until her death in 2007. This is the first time a work from her estate will come to auction and it offers the rare possibility to acquire one of the Sonnabend treasures in the open market.
Absentee and Internet live bidding will be available for the May 12 auction, and an electronic catalog will appear online at www.LiveAuctioneers.com in April.
A self-portrait by George Caleb Bingham, painted 1834-35. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) – The celebration of Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham’s 200th birthday is being marked by the possibility that his body of work could include 10 more paintings – all unsigned – that have been discovered in recent years.
Fred R. Kline, a Santa Fe art dealer and researcher, is updating online standard catalogs of Bingham’s works to include the paintings of a Western scene and nine portraits. One of the standard catalogs was published in 1986 by art historian E. Maurice Bloch, who identified about 450 Bingham paintings and itemized many more that had been documented but not located, The Kansas City Star reported Monday.
Bingham was born on March 20, 1811, in Augusta County, Va. He and his family moved to Franklin, Mo., in 1818.
Kline’s advisory panel of authenticators includes William Kloss, an art historian in Washington, D.C., and Paul Nagel, a noted Missouri historian and Bingham biographer.
“Like any lost art, anything can be anywhere,” Kline said of his finds. “I wish they had all been in one little collection with impeccable provenance.”
Some art historians have raised questions about Kline’s conclusions.
“Since authentication involves rigorous analysis, scientific examination, which can include testing of paint samples, X-rays and infrared technologies and consensus by several connoisseurs expert in the particular artist, it will be interesting to see what evidence supports these possible discoveries,” another Bingham researcher, Patricia Moss, told The Star.
Kline responds that his authentications are based on a nearly 30-year career as a generalist art historian during which he has identified several unsigned lost or homeless paintings, drawings and sculptures.
“With Bingham, I have closely studied most of his paintings in museums,” he said. “Also, I have made countless comparative studies of images and paintings, and this enables me to expertly read a good image or photograph. It is an uncommon talent, which I have cultivated.”
Kline has posted the works he says he has authenticated as Bingham works on his website. He said they were found in private homes and for sale in various locations.
The paintings include Horse Thief, a Western scene dating to 1852, which Kline authenticated as Bingham’s six years ago. The other paintings are all formal portraits, mostly of prominent Missourians – a steamboat captain, attorneys, Civil War veterans, a banker.
One of the portraits is owned by Kate McGonigal, a professor of sociology at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan. She said she found it in 2000 at an antique store in Hermann, Mo.
Kline and his panel authenticated McGonigal’s painting in 2010.
“We think it is clearly by Bingham,” Kline said, “and actually one of his best portraits.”
McGonigal said other Bingham experts disagree with the authentication, but she believes she owns a Bingham.
“There was a recent article in our local Hays daily newspaper that proclaimed, ‘Ellis woman discovers famous painting,’” McGonigal told The Star. “It should have been more like, ‘Ellis woman finds other people who agree with her opinion that it’s a famous painting.’”
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Online: www.georgecalebbingham.com
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Information from: The Kansas City Star, http://www.kcstar.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-CS-03-22-11 1200EDT
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
A self-portrait by George Caleb Bingham, painted 1834-35. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.‘Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap,’ oil on canvas, 1851–52. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A traveling exhibition of works from Pablo Picasso’s personal collection is breaking records at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Museum spokeswoman Suzanne Hall tells The Richmond Times-Dispatch that more than 75,000 regular admission tickets have been sold. Another 11,577 reserved tickets have been sold.
Hall says museum memberships have topped 31,000, another record. She says many of the new memberships can be attributed to interest in Picasso.
“Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris” opened in February and is scheduled to run through May 15.
The exhibit includes 176 of the artist’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and etchings.
Richmond is the exhibit’s only stop on the East Coast.
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Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, http://www.timesdispatch.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Sonia, who was intent on merging art and everyday life, applied this principle of “simultaneity” (color suggesting motion) to clothing, which naturally moves and flows with the body. She says she realized the potential of fabric in 1911, when she made a patchwork quilt for her newborn son and saw that it evoked the abstract patterns of cubist art.
In the next decade, she began making dresses in bold, geometric patterns that expressed the artistic ideas her husband was working out in paint on canvas. Her unusual ability to merge fine art with fashion marked the beginning of a long career as a groundbreaking textile and fashion designer. In 1964, she became the first living female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre.
Now more than 300 of her garments, textiles and designs are on view at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in an exhibition that focuses on her work in the 1920s, when she had her own fashion house in Paris, and in the 1930s, when she was designing fabrics for the Amsterdam luxury goods department store Metz & Co.
What’s amazing about Delaunay’s designs is how contemporary they look nearly 100 years later. As Matilda McQuaid, head of the textiles department at the Cooper-Hewitt, explains in the catalog, in the ’20s, Paris was the undisputed capital of the fashion world. Women demonstrated their independence through simplified styles, loose clothing and by tooling around in the new consumer plaything – the automobile.
Delaunay was the designer for the age. She designed costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, and combined text and fabric in “poem dresses” worn to Dadaist soirees. After her “Simultane” collections were featured at the 1925 International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris, she received commissions from celebrities and actresses, including film star Gloria Swanson.
But high-profile clients weren’t enough to keep her fashion house afloat. After it closed in 1929, she continued designing textiles, finding an eager client in Metz & Co., which bought more than 200 of her designs. Although her later designs became slightly more commercial, they are still remarkable for their strong sense of color, originality and vitality.
Delaunay, who died at age 94 in 1979, was extraordinarily versatile. Besides her textiles and clothing, she illustrated books, painted ceramics, and designed costumes, interiors, tapestries and rugs. After World War II, she concentrated on her painting.
The timing of the Cooper-Hewitt show couldn’t be better. Several of Robert Delaunay’s cubist-inflected canvases can be seen in a survey of early 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum, two blocks away.
“Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay” opened March 18 and will close June 5. There are no plans for it to travel.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) – The Wisconsin Historical Society has purchased 25 rare photographic proofs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin home near Spring Green.
Some photos show Taliesin just after it was built in 1912. Others show the estate after a fire destroyed most of the living quarters two years later. A number of photographs have never been published and were unknown to experts in the field.
The proofs will be held in the Society’s archives, where they’ll join thousands of Wright-related photographs, drawings and documents.
The historical society said Wednesday it learned of the photos when an antiques dealer in Portage, Wis., offered them for sale individually on eBay. It says 28 donors scrambled to raise money so the photos could be kept together in a set.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Located adjacent to the Mingo County Courthouse, the Coal House was home to the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. WILLIAMSON, W.Va. (AP) – A Mingo County landmark, a structure built of coal nearly 80 years ago, is about to get an extreme makeover.
The coal walls and the original arched windows will remain.
But nearly everything else was destroyed or damaged in a fire on Columbus Day last fall.
A $200,000 redo is in the works.
“It is the Coal House. It is the city of Williamson’s landmark,” said Leigh Ann Ray, project manager for the Mingo County Commission.
“The sky is not the limit, but the county commission is willing to do what they have to do to put it back and put it back properly.
“It’s really not that massive of a project.”
Ray said visitors still stop to take photos of the Coal House, even with its front entrance boarded up.
“People love this little building,” she said.
Contractors could submit bids for the project until Wednesday.
Ray said she anticipates commissioners will award the bid at a March 25 special session. The county expects repairs to cost about $200,000, with construction starting in early April.
She said the county hopes to wrap up construction by June 16 in time for the Hatfield-McCoy Reunion Marathon.
“We would like to have the Coal House open and ready to welcome the public,” she said.
The fire broke out around 6 a.m. Oct. 11.
Ray said some have made “uneducated guesses” about the fire, blaming faulty electrical wiring, but fire marshals did not pinpoint the true cause. Investigators determined only that the blaze started in the ceiling. No foul play is suspected.
“We’ll never know,” she said.
The fire gutted the structure. The building needs new drywall, flooring, lighting and electrical work. Wood framing is now visible, as are the coal bricks inside the walls. The ceiling also is gone, providing a clear view of the antiquated wiring, roof studs and the underside of the roof. The fire also torched brand-new hardwood flooring that had been donated by the nearby Mohawk Flooring plant. Workers had not installed the flooring, but the supplies were inside the Coal House, adjusting to the building’s humidity and temperature.
The exterior largely escaped damage in the blaze, aside from black smoke debris that now darkens part of the building’s entranceway.
“The fire, structurally, didn’t do much damage,” Ray said.
It did, however, uncover some structural problems. Water had leaked through the aged roof and into the walls over the years, causing some of the framing to rot, Ray said. Now there’s a temporary roof on the building to keep water out.
“The fire allowed us to go in there and see what needs to be done,” she said.
Ray said the Coal House is basically “just a great big room.” It’s 50 feet long and 21 feet across, with a small bathroom on one side of the main entrance and a coat closet on the other side.
It was constructed in 1933 under the supervision of H.T. Hicks, a Welch architect, and D.M. Goode, a Williamson businessman.
The 65 tons of coal used in the construction were mined from the nearby Winifrede seam and donated by five local coal companies.
Crews remodeled the building several times over the years. The main room was partitioned into three smaller rooms in the late 1970s, creating a waiting room and two offices. The high ceiling also was lowered around the same time.
Ray said the county wants to return the Coal House to its original look with hardwood flooring, plaster on the walls instead of wood paneling and period-appropriate light fixtures.
The interior again will be one large room, but with cubicle-style partitions to separate workspaces. Ray said the building’s back wall might be used to display the work of local artists.
The coal inside the walls will receive a special foam covering to prevent oxidation, which can compromise the strength of the bricks. The foam will be the same kind used to make coal mine seals.
The coal on the building’s exterior is protected by the paint and varnish that also keeps it black and shiny, Ray said.
He said the county must abide by State Historic Preservation Office guidelines during construction. That means the Coal House’s windows can’t be replaced with modern windows but must be repaired. The windows’ top arches, which were blacked out with paint at some point in the building’s history, must be cleaned so light can shine through.
She said the preservation office would have liked the county to repair the original roof, but that’s not an option because of the severe damage it sustained in the blaze.
Insurance policies should cover most of the construction costs. Ray said the structure was covered under two separate insurance policies – the county commission’s policy on the structure and the Williamson Chamber of Commerce’s policy for the building’s contents.
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Information from: Charleston Daily Mail,
http://www.dailymail.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-ES-03-15-11 1101EDT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Located adjacent to the Mingo County Courthouse, the Coal House was home to the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
‘Krishna Fluting for the Gopis,’ page from an illustrated Dashavatara series, circa 1730. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 10 1/4 x 8 inches. Collection of Catherine and Ralph Benkaim NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Hinduism is the world’s third largest religion and its oldest continuously practiced one, so it’s somewhat surprising there has never been a major U.S. museum exhibition on Vishnu, one of its most important deities.
“Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior” is a new exhibit at Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts that aims to introduce American art audiences to the visual beauty of the intricate ways Hindus throughout time have rendered their deities.
Curator Joan Cummins, of the Brooklyn Museum, described the goals of the exhibit recently during a private tour.
“First, to introduce one aspect of a major world religion, Hinduism, to a largely uninitiated audience,” she said. “We assume they are intelligent but don’t know almost anything about Hinduism.
“Second, to show absolutely gorgeous Indian art – the very best material from collections all over the world, the most beautiful and rarest examples.”
Vishnu is one of Hinduism’s three most important gods, although that description is somewhat misleading. Hinduism scholar Joanne Waghorne, a religion professor at Syracuse University, said many Hindus, but not all, believe the religion’s many different deities are simply aspects of a single divinity.
Vishnu is easily recognizable in paintings by his blue skin.
“His association with the skies is one explanation for his blue skin,” Cummins said, “but really it’s not explained very well in scripture. His skin is just blue.”
His role among the Hindu deities is the preserver. He maintains balance and is usually depicted with a very erect posture. Like many Hindu gods, Vishnu is often shown with multiple arms, symbolizing his ability to do many things at once.
A beautifully preserved sandstone stele produced in the 10th century in central India –Vishnu Flanked by His Personified Attributes – is one of the introductory pieces in the first galleries. It is one of several pieces that has never been seen outside its home museum or appeared in publications.
In it Vishnu wears his typical garb of an ancient Indian prince. His four arms hold three of the four emblems and weapons usually associated with him: a conch shell, a discus and a mace. He is also associated with the lotus flower, which appears behind his head. His fourth hand is raised in a gesture of reassurance.
Although Brahma is the Hindu creator of the world, “Brahma doesn’t have much of a following,” Cummins said. “And Vishnu worshippers feel that Vishnu is the beginning and end of all things.”
Another sandstone statue, Vishnu in His Cosmic Sleep, from central India around the 12th century, illustrates the story of how Vishnu created the creator. As he lies sleeping on a giant serpent in the primordial ocean, a lotus flower sprouts from his navel. Inside the bloom is Brahma.
Vishnu is the only one of the Hindu gods to have avatars, which Cummins describes as a more limited version of the God as he comes down to earth.
“He has 10 forms, but the list changes, so we have 11 in the show,” Cummins said.
Each form has its own legends surrounding it and its own followers.
Paintings and sculptures of the avatar Narasimha might look fantastical to many Western eyes, with his multiple arms and head of a lion, but two of the works show him engaged in an increasingly familiar activity: practicing yoga. In both, he sits in a meditative pose with his legs crossed. In one of the sculptures he uses a strap around his knees to maintain his posture.
Probably the most well-known avatar to Westerners is Krishna, who is also considered by some followers to not be an avatar but a god. The exhibit’s many depictions of Krishna may also be some of the most accessible. They include three small, playful sculptures of a dancing baby Krishna holding a stolen butter ball.
A watercolor, Krishna and Balarama as Naughty Children (Punjab Hills, India, circa 1780) portrays the theft of the butter as Krishna’s older brother distracts their mother with a tug on her veil.
In another, Krishna, now a gorgeous youth, steals the clothes from a group of bathing milkmaids and climbs up a tree with them, refusing to give them back (Krishna Steals the Gopis’ Clothes, Punjab Hills, circa 1775-1800).
The idea of displaying Hindu sacred objects as art is complicated, scholar Waghorne said, because in Hinduism, God is thought to be actually present in the objects that are worshipped.
“Very many pieces were on temples or in temples,” he said. “It’s difficult when they change the context of a piece of sculpture from a temple setting. It changes something about the piece. At museums in India people, every once in a while, will put kumkum (vermilion) and flowers on the sculptures,” treating them as objects of worship.
While some Christians might feel the presence of God in some religious artworks, Christianity tends to frown on this practice. In Hinduism, it’s a different matter.
“Looking at an image of a deity in a temple as the living image of God is the way you’re supposed to be looking at it,” she said. “There’s a ceremony that infuses that image with divine presence so that when you’re looking at it, you are looking at God. And God is looking back at you.”
The exhibit, five years in the making, was organized by The Frist Center and includes more than 170 paintings, sculptures, textiles and ritual objects created in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh between the fourth and 20th centuries.
It runs through May 29 before moving to the Brooklyn Museum, where Cummins serves as curator of Asian Art.
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Online:
Frist Center for the Visual Arts Vishnu exhibit page: http://fristcenter.org/site/calendar/eventdetail.aspx?cid(equals)888
Brooklyn Museum: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Krishna Fluting for the Gopis,’ page from an illustrated Dashavatara series, circa 1730. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 10 1/4 x 8 inches.‘Vishnu Flanked by His Personified Attributes,’ 12th century. Sandstone, 40 1/2 x 22 5/8 x 8 inches. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Gift of Ellnora D. Krannert, 1969-10-1
1960s Gees Bend Christmas quilt. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Slotin Folk Art. BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) – Four years ago, Claudia Pettway Charley of Birmingham set up a website to sell quilts made by her mother, one of the original Gee’s Bend quilters, and others from her hometown.
Thanks to a partnership between Pettway Charley and her husband, De’Lon Charley, with Greystone Antiques & Marketplace, the quilts that put the tiny Wilcox County community of Gee’s Bend on the map are now available to the public in Alabama’s largest metro area.
Their couple’s company, That’s Sew Gee’s Bend of Birmingham, has been leasing space inside Greystone Antiques since November, and the store’s manager says the Gee’s Bend quilts have been popular with her patrons.
That’s Sew Gee’s Bend was formed as “a labor of love” to allow her mother, Tinnie Pettway, and aunt, Minnie Pettway, to take their products to Birmingham, De’Lon Charley said.
“Though the quilts are here in Birmingham, That’s Sew Gee’s Bend is 100 percent born and bred in Gee’s Bend,” he said.
Pettway Charley said she and her husband decided to form their own company to carry original quilts made by her mother and other members of the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective.
“Our goal is to provide an outlet to help those quilters get what they deserve for their hard work,” said Pettway Charley, whose company gets a consignment commission for each sale.
She said the popularity of the quilts over the past decade established Gee’s Bend reputation, but many tourists who visit the area or come to buy them are surprised at how little the community has changed.
“We are an outlet for them,” Pettway Charley said. “Our hope is that we will provide an avenue to revitalize the Gee’s Bend community.”
Pettway Charley said the That’s Sew Gee’s Bend spot inside Greystone Antiques has original quilts ranging from $500 to $10,000 or more. They also sell potholders designed by her mother and other Gee’s Bend quilters that cost from $15 to $25.
“The potholders have been our biggest sellers,” she said.
Pettway Charley said her company works with a marketing company formed by another Birmingham couple originally from Gee’s Bend, John and Tanya Pettway, who are cousins.
Pettway Charley said her company has a publishing arm that sells her mother Tinnie’s book of poems, The Gee’s Bend Experience – Vol. 1. Since it was released in November 2008, her mother and Aunt Minnie have toured bookstores across Alabama, sharing their experiences growing up in Gee’s Bend and history of the quilts. Her mother is working on a second volume to be released this fall.
Last May, the Pettway family reopened the original Boykin Mercantile store in Gee’s Bend and helped unveil the Gee’s Bend historic state landmark plaque.
“Our near-future goals include a gift shop, restaurant and lodging and, in the process, establishing our nonprofit divisions of our company, Taking Back Gee’s Bend, which will bring tourism developments, improve public services, provide jobs, training and opportunities to be given to our community,” Pettway Charley said.
De’Lon Charley said their goal is to help revitalize Gee’s Bend.
“We want to bring jobs and hotels to the area,” he said. “When people come to visit, they have to stay in Camden, which is 50 miles away, or in nearby Selma because there are no hotels in Gee’s Bend.”
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
