Indholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2024 i Garden & Gun

It’s another stormy day in Nashville, a city that’s seen its fair share of turbulent weather over the past few years. Last December, another brigade of tornadoes raked Middle Tennessee, including one Sierra Ferrell says almost hit her house. She has a unique way of coping: “I call it tomato weather.” Come again? “Tomato weather. It just sounds better than tornado weather.” She’s not wrong. Tornadoes haven’t been the only whirlwind in Ferrell’s life. Since the release of her Rounder Records debut, Long Time Coming, in 2021, the Charleston, West Virginia, native has become one of Music City’s most buzzed-about artists. She was nominated for Artist of the Year at last fall’s Americana Music Awards, has opened for Dave Matthews Band, and recorded a duet, “Holy Roller,” with breakout country…

■ Truckload of Art, Hachette Books, $34 The intersection of the rarefied world of fine art, with its gallery exhibitions and Chablis-sipping collectors, and the down-home world of country music, with its honky-tonk shows and Lone Starswigging boot-scooters, can be boiled down to two words: Terry Allen. The fine-art world has long renowned Allen for his multidimensional assemblages of drawings, lithographs, and sculptures that he often laced with elements drawn from his West Texas boyhood. Major museums—among them, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—have his work in their permanent collections. In the country music world, he’s known for off-kilter, radio-unfriendly songs such as “Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey),” a Panhandle corker that’s been sung by Bobby Bare, Robert Earl Keen, and,…

Chloe Wright and Ryan Smith’s first project, the Rosecomb, opened in the North Shore neighborhood of Chattanooga in the summer of 2021 as the oakleaf hydrangeas in the front yard bloomed. The pair, who have since married, decorated the garden house bar and restaurant like a luxe bolt-hole in the Cotswolds, hanging blues posters and folk art portraits from his native Mississippi alongside gilt-framed mirrors and sepia photos that nod to her roots here in Tennessee. By that fall, regulars had claimed spots at the dogleg bar to sip cocktails garnished with mint harvested from pots by the window and eat bowls of cornmeal-fried catfish fillets, draped over grits and floated in a moat of potlikker. Wright, who had run a guerrilla restaurant in Chattanooga called Fancy Feast, began a…

The moment Whitley Esteban saw the aging white cottage, tucked behind a thin picket fence and a bed of weeds in Pensacola’s Seville Historic District, she knew it was the one. “It’s like that dog at the shelter that has really big, beautiful eyes but just needs a couple more baths than the others,” says the architect and designer, who was aching to return to her native Florida from her home in New York City, where the pandemic had fanned her case of slow-burn homesickness into a full-blown bonfire—and turned a decade of casual Zillow alerts into a genuine hunt. That was back in 2020, when Esteban was working as the managing director for the award-winning global architecture and design firm Roman and Williams, the creative geniuses behind such properties…

ART’S RISING VANGUARDThe Patron Saint On the side of Wynwood 25, a hulking building in Miami’s eponymous artsy district, three teenage faces gaze out over their neighborhood. Nearly nine stories high, the evocative mural can be seen for miles: exactly what Patricia García-Vélez Hanna envisioned when she helped commission the artist El Mac to paint it five years ago. As the art director for the Related Group, a real estate development company, Hanna plays a prominent role in texturizing South Florida’s cultural landscape. While it’s unorthodox for a real estate firm to employ a full-time art director, it makes sense at Related, where each property displays work from international artists. “Art has the power to completely transform neighborhoods and give a voice to those who are otherwise underserved,” Hanna says.…

LOCATIONFort Worth, TX PROFESSIONArt conservator A FAVORITE TOOLAntique surgical scalpel When Shan Kuang began pursuing a degree in chemistry at Yale, she planned to go to medical school, but she just couldn’t shake her passions for art and history. “I was never sure how to incorporate it all until I discovered art conservation,” Kuang says. “It’s a rather niche field, though. It might have been easier to become a doctor.” Undeterred, she landed a spot in the highly selective two-person master’s program at the University of Cambridge and completed her postgrad internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., with work stints at other prestigious institutions such as the Royal Collection Trust in London. Equal parts scientist, artist, and detective, Kuang, while working for the Samuel H. Kress…

THE CHESAPEAKE BAY GLITTERS AT THE BASE OF the hill behind Mark McNair as he swings a small hatchet into a block of white cedar, which with each effortless strike looks more and more like a duck. “I make this look easy because I’ve been doing it a long time,” he says, casually spraying up wood chips like confetti into the sunlight. It’s a scene seemingly from another time. Dressed in a worn oxford shirt and a frayed straw hat, McNair is at work beneath a craggy juniper tree about a hundred feet from the 205-year-old clapboard house where he lives with his wife, Martha, in remote Craddockville, Virginia, overlooking a body of water that, for centuries, has inspired so many of the nation’s finest carvers of duck decoys. Of…

TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOULWEEKENDS 1 Folk Hero BEREA, KENTUCKY 1| “People have been coming to Berea for craft for a hundred and twenty years,” says Michelle Weston, who for decades has been transforming 2,050-degree molten glass into captivating, often aquatic-themed sculptures—jellyfish, tide pools, seahorses—at her Weston Glass Studio. Since the 1890s, folk arts and crafts have served as the beating heart of this Kentucky hamlet that edges the Appalachian foothills about forty miles south of Lexington. The town grew up around the leafy campus of Berea College, a much-admired (and tuition-free) liberal arts “work college” founded by abolitionists in 1855, with a deep-rooted craft tradition of its own. (The New Yorker once described it, rather bluntly, as a school “for the academically talented but economically strapped.”) Many…

Nigel Parry PHOTOGRAPHER Nigel Parry drove only about a hundred miles from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, to Savannah to photograph the painter and collector Andrew LaMar Hopkins (cover and p. 117), but he might as well have been entering another world. “Being in Andrew’s house was like stepping into the garden of good and evil,” says Parry, who has also photographed such notables as Bill Murray, Britney Spears, and for this issue’s feature “Art’s Rising Vanguard,” the taxidermist Erica Heller. “He’s a collector of all sorts of things: antiques, paintings, religious memorabilia. It felt like Aladdin’s cave.” People aren’t Parry’s only focus: This spring, you can find his ethereal, Rothko-inspired landscape photographs on display at Charleston’s City Gallery. “He’s a collector of all sorts of things. It felt…

One evening at Virginia Commonwealth University, Corey Pemberton saw a glow coming from a room. It was a glassblowing studio; the aspiring graphic design and illustration student hadn’t realized his campus had one. But watching molten glass turn into art that night made him want to seek his inner alchemist. The next day, he decided to major in craft and material studies instead. “From there, I took classes in ceramics, metals, textiles, and all sorts of glass techniques,” says Pemberton, who is now thirty-three and a sought-after artist. “I was playing with the idea of making work that wasn’t sequestered to, or limited by, a single medium.” His repertoire includes bold mixed-media paintings and ornate glassware, which have been exhibited at the likes of the Museum of Art and Design…

In the late eighties, a Savannahian pulled the visiting journalist John Berendt aside. “As far as Savannah is concerned,” she told him, “being a writer and being from New York is a deadly combination.” “I understand,” he replied. “But I have no intention of being secretive. I will let everyone know I’m writing a book.” That 1994 nonfiction work, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which Clint Eastwood turned into a film, soon became known in Savannah as simply “the Book.” The personality of the city propels each page—creaking, art-filled mansions; unforgettable characters like the Lady Chablis; Chatham Artillery Punch–fueled parties; and the unraveling of a murder that somehow, in some way, involves just about everyone. A new musical based on Midnight is now in the works, and…

Spring has sprung and the grass has riz, which means it’s bachelorette party season—the time when brides-to-be join forces with their besties to storm the streets in matching pastel outfits, feather boas, and tiaras increasingly askance as the night progresses, displaying a fierce determination to not go gently into that matrimonial night. Particularly in Nashville, which has become the pre-wedding wingding capital of the South. “From March to October or November, it dominates the season,” says Paul Morrison, the lead bartender at L.A. Jackson, a popular Music City bar and restaurant. Bachelor bashes have been around for generations. But bachelorette parties are relatively new, hitting their stride only in the 1980s. Brides saw little reason that only grooms and their bros should go wild before forsaking their “freedom.” And roaming…

FINE IRON: ARTISAN ................................................. ROBERT THOMAS LOCATION ................................ NORTH CHARLESTON, SC COMMISSIONS .................... ROBERTTHOMASIRON.COM Charleston and its environs are steeped in ironwork, thanks to contributions from past greats like Philip Simmons and the artisans now being turned out by the city’s American College of the Building Arts. When Robert Thomas first opened his firm out of a Wadmalaw Island shrimp shack in 2013, he found himself so busy with residential and public commissions for historic and preservation sites—gates for a private King Street home, for instance, and outdoor sculptures for the Cormac Apartments downtown—that he now employs more than twenty people. Thomas and company move the needle forward with contemporary commissions as well, such as this distinctive stair railing with steel balusters and a bronze cap rail they designed and…

ART’S RISING VANGUARDThe Maverick Question everything has long been Chase Quinn’s motto. He remembers his family sitting around the television, his grandparents lobbing coverage critiques at the nightly news. He later worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York; and then as a journalist, he asked questions for such publications as Vanity Fair and Artforum. Now, as a burst-of-energy staffer at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, he is rethinking how a world-class art institution plays its cards. “There have been lots of moments throughout my career,” Quinn says, “when I’ve had to say, I know this is how it’s traditionally done, but what if we tried it another way?” His two-part job title gets at the fresh ideas he brings: In the first part…

ART’S RISING VANGUARDThe View Finder LOCATIONAtlanta, GA MEDIUMPhotography HOME STATEGuanajuato, Mexico José Ibarra Rizo can replay every detail of the nearly two-thousand-mile journey he and his mother, Amelia, took from Guanajuato, Mexico, to Gainesville, Georgia, when he was seven years old. He remembers how his mother hid her money in his shoe; he recalls her strength and determination; he can still feel the trauma of being robbed at gunpoint and hiding in tall grass. Rizo, a Georgia College & State University graduate, is now an in-demand Atlanta photographer. He’s spent his career primarily making portraits, and especially documenting other immigrants—from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. He photographs day laborers, construction workers, teenage lovers, skateboarders, and landscapers against Georgia’s fecund terrain. His subjects are usually outside, both literally and figuratively, and…

ART’S RISING VANGUARDThe Amplifier As a child, Ryan N. Dennis loved to wander through art museums in San Antonio, where she lived with her mother, and in Houston, where she spent summers with her dad’s family. “But early on,” she says, “I had the realization that I didn’t know who was actually putting the art on those walls.” These days, she’s her own answer: She landed her first curatorial job after college at Houston’s Menil Collection; and at the Mississippi Museum of Art, she served as chief curator and worked on landmark exhibitions such as a traveling show on the Great Migration. Galleries were just the start. At Project Row Houses, a Houston nonprofit that promotes the arts out of revitalized shotgun houses on five blocks in the city’s Third…

Shield Ranch lies in the heart of Barton Creek watershed, critical to the Edwards Aquifer, a major water source for Central Texas. Blake Murden, the 6,400-acre property’s CEO and manager, was driving us over the expanse in his pickup, stopping to show me and two curators from Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Maggie Adler and Spencer Wigmore, clear turquoise streams teeming with Guadalupe bass and a vast habitat restoration in progress. This was fall of 2020, my first exploratory trip for an exhibition commissioned by Adler and Wigmore, whom I had first met after lending work for a group show at the Carter. The museum has a history of engaging contemporary artists in projects related to Texas. Much of the state was at one time prairie, but…

■ Find us on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok @gardenandgun THAT’S THE SPIRIT As a longtime bourbon aficionado and “armchair expert,” I thoroughly enjoyed your February/March 2024 issue. I especially liked the piece on bourbon bars (“Bourbon’s Finest Hour”). I’ve had the opportunity to visit many bourbon bars and distilleries, and I was pleased to see two Virginia entries on the list. However, you missed one: Right here in Richmond is McCormack’s Big Whisky Grill, which stocks what has to be the largest collection of brown liquor in the state and has an owner who really knows his stuff and a killer menu to boot. It deserves a spot on your best-of list. John CrossRichmond, Virginia I appreciated your coverage of the women in the bourbon industry. I…

Georgia has done it. So have Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. South Carolina is considering doing it for the second time in recent years, with changes that would go into effect in 2025. Across the South and beyond, states are tightening regulations on wild turkey hunting, seeking to help stem an alarming decrease in bird numbers. The comeback of wild turkeys has been one of modern wildlife conservation’s great successes. Thanks to massive transplanting efforts across the country, turkeys rocketed from abysmally low populations in the mid-twentieth century to healthy numbers across the bird’s range. But steep declines over the past several years have hunters and biologists worried. Potential culprits for the bird’s challenges include an array of factors, from loss of habitat to changing climate to increased mortality from…

Tonya Council isn’t one to leave good enough alone. She likes to keep tinkering in the kitchen until she discovers something great. It’s a trait she learned at her grandmother’s elbow. It didn’t hurt that her grandmother was Mildred Council, the woman most people who know anything about Southern food called Mama Dip. Since her passing, in 2018, generations of offspring have kept her long-standing Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant going and branched out to create their own successful food businesses. “She raised me, so I was always by her side,” Council says. “I caught the bug that way.” An entrepreneur in her own right, with an online cookie business and a retail shop in Raleigh, Council opened a new bakery, Tonya’s Cookies & Bakeshop, in Chapel Hill last November.…

Wayne Edens fell in love with fishing as a young boy, prowling the salt water and fresh water of his home state, Florida. The sport was “a joy,” recalls the seventy-three-year-old retired insurance executive, who lives in New Smyrna Beach. A way of forgetting any problems by concentrating on the present, on where he was fishing and what he was fishing for. That is, until one moment in 1988 that cast him ceaselessly into the past. That day, he had taken a client bass fishing near Cocoa. As they left the water, the client invited Edens to come by his house so he could show him something: sixty or so antique lures. The client, as it turned out, had just lost his job and needed money, and he offered his…

LOCATIONSavannah, GA MEDIUMPainting HOMETOWNMobile, AL I have known Andrew LaMar Hopkins since he was seventeen, and watched as he’s become the internationally known artist and force of nature that others meet today. Originally from Mobile, and a longtime student of French antiques, Creole culture, and real Champagne, Andrew creates paintings that blend historical accuracy with the cheeky fun of courtesans and cocktail parties. Last year, in his adopted hometown of New Orleans, the Louisiana State Museums hosted a major exhibition of his work at the Cabildo, titled with his catchphrase Creole New Orleans, Honey! Then recently, he moved to Savannah and began painting Gullah Geechee subjects. “His art is about life lived in peacock glory, dazzling, crazy,” the critic Jerry Saltz says. “It has this great sexuality.” (It’s also selling…

LOCATIONNorman, OK MEDIUMSculpture ALMA MATERUniversity of Arkansas Much like the Caddo Nation’s origin story—which recalls the tribe, led by a man named Moon, surfacing from Chahkanina, or “the place of crying”—Raven Halfmoon’s monumental artworks are humbly born from the ground up. Her solo exhibition at New York’s Salon 94 will open this May, filled with drippy ceramic sculptures, some standing from five to twelve feet tall, requiring Halfmoon to work thousands of pounds of clay in her Norman, Oklahoma, studio. She begins each piece by layering clay coils, orbiting around them to build up the likenesses of horses, totemic portraits, and reclining women whose surfaces ripple with thick white, black, and bloodred glazes and impressions from her fingerprints and nails. She then sets each work—whole or in giant segments—in enormous…

LOCATIONGreensboro, AL MEDIUMTextiles HOMETOWNGrady, AL When he drives along the flower-lined back roads of the Alabama Black Belt toward his house in Greensboro, Aaron Sanders Head doesn’t see weeds. Queen Anne’s lace looks like summer, and the first bright blooms of goldenrod bring with them fresh inspiration. Head’s artwork, made from secondhand textiles and dyed with botanicals he forages and grows, ties him to the land in ways both literal and mystical. “Anyone who spends their time in the Black Belt,” he says, “knows this is a beautiful, radical place, brimming with so much life.” Originally from unincorporated Grady, Alabama, Head grew up close to both agriculture and craftsmanship. His father, who worked at Bonnie Plants and built greenhouses, and grandmother, an avid gardener, taught him about native flora. His…