Museum honors one of the South's greatest living artists 9/25/2009 12:31 AM By DR. TOM MACK Columnist
Few people might agree with William Christenberry that Alabama is the place to be in August. However, the artist, a resident of the District of Columbia since 1968, journeys to his native state every summer.
The trip serves two purposes. It gives Christenberry an opportunity to renew his ties to the place where he grew up. The journey also provides him with inspiration for the paintings, photographs and sculpture upon which his considerable reputation is based.
As a boy, Christenberry spent summers with both sets of grandparents in Hale County, Ala. It was not, however, until he had graduated from college and accepted a teaching position at his alma mater, the University of Alabama, that the artist came to understand the significance of his childhood environment. In 1960, by accident, he came across a copy of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," the now-classic collaboration by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans.
In perusing this volume, Christenberry had an epiphany. Through Agee's almost poetic prose and Evan's stark images, he revisited the places that had played such an important part in his own formative years. "I had never run into a writer who described so clearly, so beautifully, the things I had experienced as a child. The smell of that landscape. Of course, the appearance of it. The fact that he was a fellow Southerner," asserts Christenberry about Agee's text, "made it even more important to me."
Since that moment, for nearly 50 years, Christenberry has been chronicling in his work the people and places of one particular corner of the South. In so doing, the artist has called international attention to the vernacular architecture of this region, especially structures like tenant houses, country churches and farm outbuildings.
The current exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta showcases more than 50 photographs taken by Christenberry from 1961 to 2005. Nearly half of these images feature simple, hand-built structures shot from the same full-frontal perspective that Evans employed in his earlier black-and-white photographs.
In so doing, Christenberry has become the pre-eminent interpreter of the architecture of the rural South and those structures that have since come to embody a vanishing way of life. Consider, for example, the photographs taken in 1971, 1980 and 1988 of a structure that the artist calls the "Palmist Building."
Originally constructed as a general store in Havana Junction, Ala., by the artist's great-uncle, the place was subsequently occupied by a group of individuals who set up a temporary fortune-telling business. When the palm readers decamped without paying their rent, trashing the building in the process, one of their signs, inadvertently placed upside down, was used to cover a window whose glass had been broken by the irresponsible tenants.
This sign with its hand-painted palm print and hand-lettered text attracted Christenberry's attention, and over time, he photographed the exterior of the building until it eventually imploded, like so many rural structures abandoned to the elements. The resulting images, taken over a period of nearly 20 years, chronicle nature's slow, lyrically resonant reclamation of the man-made structure.
"William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005" will be on view at the Morris until Nov. 8. For more information about hours of operation and admission fees, call the museum at (706) 724-7501 or visit www.themorris.org.
A Carolina Trustee Professor, Dr. Mack holds the G.L. Toole Chair at USC Aiken.
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