This is the time to celebrate your favorite author, filmmaker, artist or historian. This is the time to pass on to a friend your favorite book, or recommend a beloved song. This is the month to pull close your children or grandchildren and tell them about your family’s history. Take this month to explore your hometown, or a new town you’ve never visited in Alabama. Learn about the structures there, the culture, the people…learn more about your history as an Alabamian.

Take the time to learn more about the humanities…and more about yourself.

By Paul Lawson, AHF director of development and public relations

Singer Ricky Nelson was slightly before my time but not by much. Gee, he would be 71 if he were alive today. He died tragically in a New Year’s Eve airplane crash headed to a concert in Texas. I vividly remember Ricky closing most of the old Ozzie and Harriet shows with one of his hit songs. Screaming teenage girls, of course, were included in the sound track. Looking back, I think ole Oz helped his youngest son out by using the TV series to promote Ricky’s music. Record sales shot up the next day. Mucho presto! The music video was born 25 years prior to MTV.

One of Ricky Nelson’s most popular songs, “Travelin’ Man,” fits nicely with an exciting new AHF project—“Journey Stories,” premiering in Alabama this summer. The song was written in about 20 minutes by little known writer, Jerry Fuller. His first choice was to offer it to Sam Cooke, but Sam turned it down. Ricky’s bass player, Joe Osborne, had been in the next room of the record company and heard it. He asked Cooke’s manager if he could hear it again, and the man said: “Here, you can have it.” It was one of Ricky’s biggest hits and stayed on the Billboard music charts for more than four months, including two weeks at number one.

I invite you to put “Travelin’ Man” in the CD player and listen as you journey to one of the six cultural institutions hosting “Journey Stories.” In Alabama, the six communities hosting the exhibition starting on June 25 at the Bankhead House and Heritage Center in Jasper are: Alexander City, Arab, Eufaula, Jasper, Marion and Mobile. Don’t miss out on a winner, like Sam Cooke did!

For all of the specifics on the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition “Journey Stories,” including dates and locations, visit ahf.net/journeystories.

As February—Black History Month—turns to March—Women’s History Month—it’s worth noting that three women played key roles in recording the African-American experience in rural Alabama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through oral history, photography and art, they captured a way of life defined by deep poverty and Jim Crow segregation, but rich in stories, music, religion and strong family ties.

Arguably the most famous of these women was Ruby Pickens Tartt of Livingston (1880-1974). Daughter of a prominent Black Belt cotton grower, she became captivated at an early age by the black community surrounding her in Sumter County. She attended Alabama State Normal College (now the University of West Alabama), studying under the progressive educator Julia Tutwiler. She later attended the prestigious Chase School of Art in New York, where she studied under the realist painter William Merritt Chase. The combination of her early interest in the people of the Black Belt, her art training and financial need, led Tartt to accept a job with the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. In 1936 she was appointed chair of the local Federal Writers’ Project in Sumter County, whose responsibilities included accompanying the ethnomusicologist John Lomax to record folk songs for the Library of Congress. Between the two, they compiled a large collection of recordings of songs and interviews with ex-slaves. Among them was the local cook Vera Hall Ward, who is now considered among the most important folk, blues and spirituals singers of the 20th century. The online Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA) includes Lomax’s recording of Vera Hall singing “Railroad Bill.”

Instead of using a tape recorder, Mary Morgan Keipp (1875-1961) documented life in the Black Belt with a different instrument—a camera. A native of Selma, Keipp trained in the Northeast to become a nurse-anesthetist. Like Tartt, she was also exposed to the visual arts while away from Alabama. Between 1899 and 1904, Keipp exhibited her photographs, which she made on trips home to Selma, with some of the greatest photographers in America, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Thomas Eakins. She returned permanently to Selma in 1904 and ceased exhibiting. As photography scholar Frances Robb writes in her EOA entry on Keipp: “Although some of Keipp’s photographs were publicly exhibited and probably interpreted across a spectrum of racial attitudes, no comic or denigrating elements are evident in her work. Because her photographic activity was not reported in Selma newspapers and was completely unknown outside her family at her death, her images were apparently not intended to influence Alabamians’ ideas about race and culture. Instead, they are most appropriately viewed as Keipp’s personal appreciation of rural and small-town Alabama life and a means of artistic and perhaps social discovery.”

The last of the three women, who documented African American life in postbellum Alabama, was Maria Howard Weeden of Huntsville (1846-1905). Born a generation earlier than Tartt and Keipp, Weeden also studied art—not in the North but from the successful local portraitist William Frye. But her education and youth were profoundly interrupted by the Civil War. Her relatively prosperous family was forced to flee Huntsville when Union troops occupied the city in 1862. When they returned after the war, they were financially ruined. To supplement the family income Howard (as she was called), began producing hand-painted greeting cards and writing romantic novels, which she then illustrated with her own calligraphy. In the 1890s she produced the most important work of her career—brush-and-ink portraits of ex-slaves who lived nearby. These straightforward but sympathetic images gained her international recognition and eventual exhibitions in Chicago, Berlin and Paris. Today Howard Weeden’s work and life can be seen firsthand in the Weeden House Museum near downtown Huntsville. Built in 1819, the Federal style house is one of the oldest in Alabama.

The next day we drive a few miles north to Hogback Mountain Trading Post/Pawn Shop located in a small nondescript building on the edge of Navajo territory. The shop’s fourth-generation proprietor spends a good deal of time sharing stories behind the displays of native art work, artifacts, handiwork and the artists that created them. The smell of leather draws our attention to a banister surrounding a loft above us hung with rows of saddles. He explains they belong to native cowhands that pawn them after roundups and rodeos for safekeeping over the winter, a virtually free storage service. He narrates the history of handmade rugs and turquoise jewelry on consignment from his fellow tribe members and a collection of not-for-sale arrowheads on display in a glass case.

His most engaging story is about a Navahjo artist/friend who creates the intricate “sand art” that caught our attention the moment we entered the post. Using indigenous sand as a medium, the artist crafts cultural designs and colorful regional landscapes glued on plywood. The shop owner tells us, “I arranged a showing of his work at a well-known gallery in San Francisco. The morning of the exhibit, we loaded several of his ‘paintings’ in my van and headed west. The drive that normally takes four hours lasted twice as long because every time he spotted sand or rocks in colors he could use in his artwork, we had to stop long enough for him to gather the materials. So, we arrived at the gallery with the van loaded down with rocks and sand but too late to arrange his ‘sand art’ works for the evening showing.”

Please tell us about your own encounters with local artists, or artists you’ve met on your own journeys across the U.S. and other countries.

Our recent blog “assignment” was to write about a work of art or literature that made a significant impression on us at a young age. I put off this “assignment” because my childhood favorites seem juvenile for the scholarly AHF blog. But here are the works that I read and reread, looked at again and again.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was my favorite childhood book. The orphaned Mary Lennox is sent from India to England to live with her rich uncle at Misselthwaite Manor where she finds a walled garden and friendship. I dream of finding a secret garden like the one pictured in the book and believe in the healing power of nature. I have given this book to every girl in my family at age eight since I won the award for reading the most books (or for being the nerd) in the third grade when I read it.

The first book that I loved was The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by DuBose Heyward. The little country girl bunny dreamed of growing up and becoming one of the five Easter bunnies. The big, white, male rabbits laughed at the little Cottontail and told her to go back to the country. Cottontail grows up to be a mother of 21 bunnies and is chosen to be the special Easter bunny because she is wise, kind and swift from teaching her bunnies to take care of themselves. As a working mother, Cottontail has inspired me to teach my children to be independent and to pursue their dreams.

With an art teacher and English professor as parents, I was exposed to great works of art and literature at a young age. At the National Gallery of Art, my favorite artwork was Whistler’s “Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl.” The innocent young woman stands on the skin of a bear. The girl’s red hair is a statement of empowerment in the “symphony in white.” As a kindergartner flipping through art books, my favorite picture was the young Infanta Margarita in Velázquez’s “The Maids of Honor.” I see my own daughter as Velázquez’s princess around whom the family revolves.

In reflection on my childhood favorites, I realize that each work focused on a female character. These female images have empowered me as a woman.

Remember the scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” when Ferris’s best friend Cameron stands before Georges Seurat’s giant painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte? He just stares and stares and stares.

I’ve done that too.

The moment I walked into The Art Institute of Chicago, I was in heaven. Let me wander around an art museum and soak in paintings and sculptures, and I’m a happy girl. But when I saw Seurat’s painting, I was transfixed. The scene is unbelievably beautiful: an island in the Seine, women with bustled dresses and umbrellas, men in top hats and long coats. Looking at this painting is like being transported back in time.

Seurat is a Post-Impressionist and used his pointillist technique to create this painting in 1884. Post-Impressionists “developed a structured, more monumental art to depict modern urban life,” according to The National Gallery of London’s website. Housed in that museum is Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, another scene taken from the River Seine.

The Impressionists who came before Seurat were known for paintings that, to some critics, looked more like “sketches” than completed paintings. According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art website, “The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions…”

These are undoubtedly my favorite paintings, next to Seurat. And my favorite painter? Why Claude-Oscar Monet, of course.

I could stare at a Monet painting for hours, and I often did when I lived in London a few years ago. The National Gallery is truly amazing, for one, because it’s free. It was also located a short distance from my office there, so I could spend lunch hours gazing at some stunning works, namely The Thames Below Westminster by Monet. He painted this in about 1871 when he lived in London during the Franco-Prussian War. Another favorite at The National Gallery is Snow Scene at Argenteuil, completed in 1875. This painting is of boulevard Saint-Denis, northwest of Paris, where Monet lived for a time. I am entranced by the effect of the snow on the street and trees; it looks almost like it’s underwater, or floating among the clouds.

The first time I ever saw a Monet in person was at The Met. My two favorites there: Water Lilies and Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun) are on view right now. I stood before these paintings, trying to study each brush stroke and how the colors were layered on one another. This past Christmas I returned to The Met and found these paintings again. I stayed in front of Water Lilies for so long, my friends thought I was lost. I told them, next time, just find Monet, and that’s where I’ll be.

Sources — The Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm; The Art Institute of Chicago: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/27992?search_id=1; The National Gallery: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/georges-seurat

I was in high school when Charlie Brown made his debut in America’s daily newspapers on October 2, 1950. I had long been an avid fan of comic strips, but I was not the least bit impressed with this clueless moon-headed kid that my younger brother could have drawn. Why should anyone want to read a comic strip about a boy in elementary school who is already a loser? During my years in college, I occasionally found the Peanuts strip somewhat amusing, but it was not until I had a “Charlie Brown” experience several years later that I came to appreciate the profound genius that surfaced in Charles Schultz’s simply drawn characters.

I was spending several days with my friend Stan and his wife at their Napa Valley home in 1970. One morning as Stan and I were to drive to Sacramento on business, his wife asked that we swing by her friend Joyce’s house and drop off some placemats she had made for their afternoon bridge club meeting. So as we stopped near Santa Rosa, parking in the circular driveway of a ranch-style house splayed across a small hill, Stan insisted I go with him to see Chuck’s place inside. So I helped him deliver the placemats. Joyce greeted us at the door and invited us inside. The size of the huge foyer impressed me but not as much as the art work covering every wall—neatly framed comic strip characters traipsing across white backgrounds. Stan asked if Chuck was busy. “Are you kidding? That’s all he does is work in his studio,” she groaned, “but you’re welcome to show your guest around the house.” I insisted we had no time to spare, so Stan handed over the placemats and we left.

As we drove towards Sacramento, I commented on Joyce’s house and her collection of art. “What kind of work does Chuck do?” I asked. Amazed at my inquiry, Stan suddenly realized I had unknowingly visited the home of Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts. Although surrounded by overwhelming evidence, I was clueless. For a moment I felt that Lucy might pop out of the back seat of Stan’s car and shout, “You blockhead!”

From that “Charlie Brown” moment on I read the Peanuts strip from a more analytical perspective, observing that the artist was expressing his philosophy of life through Charlie Brown. It amazed me how Charles Schultz could capture both our hopes and insecurities inside one simple strip. How many times did Charlie Brown approach the football with renewed hope only to end up flat on his back in the final frame?

After Charles Schultz suffered a stroke in the 1990s, he questioned whether he should discontinue the strip, but a quick recovery allowed him to turn out daily strips until his death in the year 2000. Many fans observed that thoughts of mortality began showing up in Schultz’s work as his time of death drew near. In one segment Linus asks Charlie Brown, “When you’ve died do you get to come back?” Charlie answers, “If they stamp your hand.”

Schultz’s death marked the end of new, original Peanuts comic strips, but Charlie Brown lives on in reruns, even at age 60. Good grief!

During October, we at the Alabama Humanities Foundation will bring you a series of blog posts highlighting some of our favorite humanities topics. These could be art history, literature, film studies…whatever we find interesting, whatever we’re passionate about.

We hope you will comment and tell us what books you love, what films you could watch again and again, or what pieces of art strike your heart.

Our first post comes from AHF Chair Bob Whetstone and celebrates Charlie Brown’s 60th birthday. Happy Birthday, Charlie Brown! And Happy National Arts and Humanities Month!!

More recent travels led to a closer destination, Florence, where a famous Midwestern architect left his own stamp on Alabama. Not far from the Tennessee River stands the Stanley and Mildred Rosenbaum House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939. (Actually, Wright never visited the site or the completed house. His apprentice and associates managed the project.) Meticulously restored by the City of Florence in 1999-2001, the house is one of the Shoals area’s most prominent historic sites today. It is the only Wright-designed building in Alabama and is open to the public on a regular basis.

A house, we like to believe, is in statu quo, a noble consort to man and the trees; therefore the house should have repose and such texture as will quiet the whole and make it graciously at one with external nature.”

–Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (1953)

The Rosenbaum House is considered a first-rate example of Wright’s “Usonian” houses, which he designed for clients across the country in the mid-20th century. What I find most interesting about the Usonian concept, from a humanities perspective, is its reference to the expanded idea of “America” as embodying all of North America to include Canada and Mexico. According to this design philosophy, not only would the house unite nature and artifice, outdoors and indoors—it would also unite the broader sense of what it means to be an American.

Given that the Usonian house is considered a predecessor of the 1950s ranch house, I wonder whether our Canadian and Mexican friends want to celebrate that particular architectural contribution from the United States’ most famous architect. (Perhaps NAFTA has been their revenge.) No matter. The Rosenbaum House is pure FLW, and well worth the trip from anywhere in Alabama.

Written by: Bob S.

Many other artists took a similar approach in creating their artwork–some reread the book, some interviewed those who had read the book, and others simply looked at the book’s historical effect on our state, nation and world.

The Alabama Humanities Foundation’s hope for TKAM2010 is that people (not only in Alabama, but the world over!) will pick Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird back up, reread it, and, most importantly, share their new thoughts, feelings and insights with others–just like our wonderful 30+ contributing artists have done.

We’re seeing and enjoying a true humanities approach to our event, and we hope you’ll join in!

**Event tickets available for purchase!

Written by: Katie C.