TONIGHT

Tonight is the unveiling of my work I created for Bliss Home and the International Biscuit Festival.
Also, today is the day before the first Market Square Farmers' Market, so it's practically Christmas around here. After a 12 hour day, I will collapse into a heap of exhaustion and rise in the morning like the Phoenix (or a biscuit) and go to the farmers' market to drink upppity coffee and buy greens.

Self Rising: A Celebration of Flour

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cotton sacks replaced barrels as containers for dry goods such as flour, sugar, rice, chicken feed, and seed. These bags were usually white with the company’s logo printed directly onto the cotton. Thrifty wives and mothers would repurpose these sacks into fabric for sewing  -- making pillow cases, quilts, hand towels, and even clothing. Imagine the embarrassment of your dress or underwear having the Pillsbury or White Lily logo on it. A great effort was made to remove the printed logo – sometimes with lye soap, bleach, or even kerosene, but sometimes they remained. Companies producing these dry goods realized that their bags were going on to have a second life. In an effort to ease some of the hardships of the Great Depression and to entice more customers, they began printing sacks with colorful patterns and paper labels that could be easily removed.* It was their hope that the home consumer would buy their brand of flour or feed not because they were faithful customers, but because the print on the bag was desirable for a new dress or quilt. This body of work is a celebration of some of the more interesting flour logos of the past and the wonderful tradition of printed, patterned flour sacks.

*One of these companies was the Bemis Brothers Bag Company founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1858. It was one of the first companies to produce machine-sewn bags for dry goods. By the 1920s, The Bemis Brothers Bag Co. had opened 5 more plants across the United States. In the 1930s, the Bemis Company began to produce printed dress sacks, and would continue to do so up until the 1960s. Their cat logo was designed in 1881, and the cat was named Biddy after the best mouse hunter in the Bemis factory. According to company history, owner Judson Moss Bemis wanted to emphasize that in “letting the cat out of the bag” he had nothing to hide and dealt fairly with his customers. This small logo can be seen on many older flour bags.

All these and more will be on display and for sale at Bliss Home for the month of May.

ID

Several years ago, I was looking through some boxes of family photographs and found my grandmother's ID badge for Fort Benning in Georgia. I'd never seen one like it before. It was metal and weighty, and wearing it would be more like wearing a very small framed picture of yourself than any laminated, holographic, plastic card people use today. The badge is over 60 years old, and is in far better shape than my sad looking student ID. After 4 years of swiping it at the dining hall and the library, it resembles more of a faded smear than me.

I found out about this exhibition that opened last Friday at Ricco/Maresca in New York. It is a very small portraiture show focusing on ID badges from the '30s-'50s. If you visit the link, you can scroll through several badges featured in the show. I had never seen another badge like my grandmother's before, and here on the New Yorker website were 15 more I could look at. The show features 250 of these tiny portraits, and Frank Maresca, co-partner of Ricco/Maresca says, “The show is an important portrait of the American worker, during a time when workers changed America as we know it.”

My grandmother's badge. Wasn't she pretty?

THROWBACK THURSDAY

My studio. 4.5 years ago. Lewisburg, PA.

OLD THINGS

After posting about my pencil obsession and the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, I decided to snap a few pictures of the oldies but goodies floating around my studio.

 

These oil pastels belonged to my mom back in the day. I used to use them in high school, but not anymore. I like having them around though. Like some sort of art talisman.

When I go home for Thanksgiving, I'm planning on grabbing my pencil collection and photographing the more interesting ones and posting them here. I know there are some great, old drawing pencils in there. Stay tuned for more art supplies, old and new.

THE STRIP: NORTH SIDE, PART I

Of the two sides of Cumberland Avenue, the North side has experienced less modernization and renovation. If you were to walk down that side of the street, you would notice that the buildings are built right up to the sidewalk. Parking and alleys are in the back. Newer buildings across the street are set back with room for extra parking, drive-thru windows, and landscaping in the front. In the case of some of these businesses, they only thing that has changed over the years are the tenants. Brick and mortar remains the same!

The Varsity Barber Show has been a Cumberland Avenue establishment for well over 40 years. Here is a picture shot through the window from the UT yearbooks.

It doesn't look like much has changed. According to an online review, Jack, the barber, is great and will even shave the back of your neck.

Next to the Varsity Barber Shop is this FedEx. It is very cozy with another building that butts up to the back of it. I've often wondered who would open a FedEx that blocks half an apartment building, then I realized that the FedEx wasn't always a retail space. Yearbook ads led me to this picture.

Traffic on The Strip -- a pain since the 1970s.

to be continued....

ADVERTISING

One of the things I've learned from my Dad is that digging through old newspapers and phone books for ads is a good way to find out what business was previously in an old building. As it turns out, yearbooks are great too.  Tennessee's yearbook, The Volunteer, was first published in 1897.  While it has little in the way of candid photographs that tell about student life, there are ads in the back. Most of the ads were for businesses on Gay Street, which was the main commercial area in Downtown Knoxville.

from 1910

 The student life sections showing street shots and students out in Knoxville didn't really start to appear in The Volunteer until the late 50s, but I did find some great early ads this weekend that tell what used to be on Cumberland Avenue. Ads were phased out of The Volunteer sometime in the mid 1960s.

The first few ads are from the 1929 yearbook. Before UT became such a large university, it shared a yearbook with the UT Medical College in Memphis. Therefore, some of the ads are for Memphis businesses, some are for the more popular stores on Gay Street, but a few were for buildings on The Strip.

From 1935:

From 1942:

From 1946:

From 1963:

From 1965:

Hope you enjoyed this smattering of what used to be on The Strip!