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?

STARTING OFF WITH A BANG

This First Friday I will have two pieces on display in the balcony gallery of the Emporium building in Downtown Knoxville. My work will be hanging with work by others who work and participate in Knoxville's art-supporting and art-making spaces!

HOLLY DAZE

I'll be spending the next 2 weeks with friends and family feeling holly jolly. In the mean time, look for my work hanging early January at the Small Hall Gallery between Magpies Bakery and the Glowing Body Studio in North Knoxville.

See you in 2014.

bringing some of memphis to knoxville

You've seen this picture before. I wrote about the building here. Last week, I received another piece of good news. This photograph was chosen for the next Arts in the Airport  show. I had no takers on the Plane Art, but that just means I can use it somewhere else. 

I  sat down a few days ago and worked the drop-off and reception dates into my art calendar deadlines. I started to panic a bit because I've got a lot on my art plate right now. It gives me a headache to think about how I'm going to get some of it done, but I'm more than thankful for being chosen to participate and show.

This is the second of my photographs that will be shown in Knoxville this summer. My photograph of Yee-Haw will hang at the Bijou Theater gallery through the end of June. Sears Crosstown, Memphis will be at the McGhee Tyson Airport through October.

I only really started taking these photographs about a year ago. It's nice to know that someone besides me thinks they are compelling.