Cassilhaus

SABBATICAL WEEK SIX

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My trusty VW in 32" of snow in Leonardsville, NY

They predicted snow....

but not a 50 year record blizzard! I grew up in Pennsylvania but it has been 40 years since I got to play in snow like this and it was spectacular.

On my trip I have been using an app called Pinbox. During the months of research prior to embarking on this journey I started putting pins in each location that I might want to visit and the app allows you to associate information like website/contact info/notes etc. As I am about to go to an area of the country I start digging in deeper to the sites I have pinned and do additional research to see if there are additional sites I missed.  I then typically call or write letters to those places and try to set up a visit.  Sometimes its months in advance and sometimes just a few days.  Scheduling a multi-month journey can be a bit of a house of cards as you want to be far enough out to be assured of a convenient visit time but not too far out that I schedule myself into a bind if my plans or timing change.

As I started week six I was leaving Buffalo and I decided to head to Central NY and specifically a place intriguingly named The Horned Dorset Colony located in the tiny village of Leonardsville. The 40 year dream of a writer, painter, and musician who have assembled an amazing cohort of lovingly restored structures anchored by the famed Horned Dorset Inn and Restaurant to create a singular environment to encourage artistic cross pollination. The inn and restaurant preceded the colony and indeed their world class French Cuisine by chef Aaron Wratten attracts clientele from 100 miles away. With little more than 24 hours notice and without knowing me from Adam, Roberta, Kingsley, and Harold welcomed me like family and installed me in "the library cabin" complete with a 10,000+ volume library and a beautifully restored and incredibly luxurious suite of my own.

My planned day long visit turned into four when we were completely snowed in with the storm of the century.  I got to know my hosts and their dogs, the history of the colony, helped shovel their driveway, and did I mention that the aforementioned chef is their son and he and Harold took turns cooking the most amazing meals ever for us? I was praying for the snowplow not to come. 

Kinglsey was really taken with this photo I made of one of their trays in the dining room with just the right light.

All of the "cabins" are meticulously restored with antique salvage from the area and the 3 directors do almost all of the work themselves.  It is almost unbelievable.  They tell me they have trouble prying writers out of the "Falls House" which they use for writers and poets.

After four days my hosts helped me dig my car out and I was very sad to say goodbye.  I definitely will be back.

 

I headed next to a residency program near Ithaca call the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and it really struck a cord with me about legacy.  Connie was a photographer who died of cancer way too young at 49 and decided just before her death that she wanted to endow a residency program for New York artists on her 200 acres of land in the Finger Lakes area of NY. Each session of the summer juried residency has one photographer, one writer, one poet, and two other visual artists. There are 5 discipline specific studios and lodgings on the campus.  In an unusual model these facilities are available the rest of the year on a first come first served basis for only 25$ a day to allow any NY artist to have uninterrupted time to do their work.

I immediately connected with the wonderful Executive Director Lesley Williamson and we had a lengthy and very helpful conversation about their program.

She also generously allowed me to stay the night in Connie's room in the house she built on the site.  I love this self portrait that hangs in the entry.

 

After six weeks solo on the road I was pining for some family time so we organized a little reunion with my two sisters Barb and Ann and their husbands and my wife Ellen in Carlisle, PA where Barb lives. Just before I left I got an email out of the blue from a high school friend I hadn't spoken to in 40 years telling me he had just bought our childhood home and so we organized a wonderful walk down memory lane and visited together as a family.  We also went to the land in Perry County PA where my parents lived for decades and we shared so many memories.

 

 

I found this on the tack board in Connie Saltonstall's bedroom.  Connie yours already has.

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK FIVE

Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv  Text Rain, 1999  Video Installation at 21c Museum Hotel Louisville

 

Week five started off with a small blip in my otherwise stellar travel karma. On my drive from Nashville to Louisville, KY I hit the remains of a pallet on the interstate and to make a long story short I am now the proud owner of four new tires on my car and am $900 lighter. I invoked my father's sage advice of not worrying about anything that can be fixed with money and counted my blessings that I was not upside down in a ditch on the side of the road.

It was a big traveling week with lots of ground to cover on my way to an important appointment in Cleveland mid-week. The redirect of my trip from Texas and points south means lots more winter. I finally feel like I have found my rhythm and my confidence and I have been able to stay in the present for the first time in a very long time. In this nice groove I have struck a balance between attending to the outside world and focusing on and executing the work I want to do on this sabbatical. I am for the most part no longer unmoored by Trump's daily attempt to lower the bar on human discourse and destroy the free world. I am constantly surrounded by generous, welcoming, engaged, loving, creative, and vibrant humans and it is a welcome and necessary salve.

 

First stop this week was Louisville, KY-my first time there and I was not disappointed. I surprised even myself by going to the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory Tour. I have no interest in baseball but I love me a good "how they make stuff" tour. Watching them turn those raw cylinders of wood into a beautiful sculpted bat in just seconds is amazing. Who knew there was a need for anybody to make 1.8 million bats a year and then find out that they are one of about 30 companies making them!  Who knew that EVERY MLB player has a proprietary formula for THEIR bat and each one is made to spec on a CNC cutter with amazing accuracy and each player goes through on average 175 bats each per year. In the sexism is alive and well department, I was astonished to find this enormous 4 sided display in the gift shop of personalized bat pens for the kids without A SINGLE GIRLS NAME ON THE RACK.

 

I got to see the original 21c Museum Hotel (the 5th one is in Durham) and its fantastic exhibition The Future is Female.

South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. Umfanekiso wesibuko (Mirror Image), 2013  Cowhide and Resin  The pieces are molded from the artist's own body.

 

South African Sanell Aggenback. Rumours, 2011 Mixed Media

American artist Kathleen McQuade Olliges.  Supply and Demand, 2014.  Latex nipples, silicone nipples, silicone adhesive, mannequin.

 

I headed on to Cincinnati where I stayed at an incredible airbnb right beside the stunning Eden Park area of the city. I had the entire four bedroom 3rd floor to myself for the grand fee of $75/night.The couple had lovingly restored the late 1800s home with their own hands over 7 years--an enormous grand mansion designed by the architect that did the major government buildings in Cincinnati. I stayed in the room with the balcony on the right. They have just finished and i think I was their second or third tenant. They could not have been more delightful hosts.

They found this room when they tore out the drop ceiling and drywall walls!

I woke up at about 2:30 in the morning to amazing light patterns all over the walls.  I grabbed my camera and spent the next hour photographing.

Cincinnati was an eye opener for me.  I had no idea it was so huge and so hilly and so beautiful. It also had a 21c Museum Hotel right near the Zaha Hadid designed Contemporary Art Museum.

Tim Hetherington (English/American)  Luke Nevalla, Korengal Vallery, Afghanistan, 2008  Digital Chromogenic Print  21c Museum Hotel

Frank has fun with mirrors at the Contemporary Art Museum

Casey Riordan Millard (American) Shark Girl at the Bus Stop

 

I had heard about Fred and Laura Bidwell and the work they were doing in Cleveland and was introduced to them briefly at an AIPAD fair by Tom Gitterman. Early on in my trip planning I decided I really wanted to make an effort to spend significant time in Cleveland as I felt like I could learn a lot from them.  They are serious photo collectors and support emerging photographers and the arts community in Cleveland in extraordinary and unprecedented ways. Their work is also having spectacular success on the economic development front in struggling communities in the city with major investment going on in the communities they initiate projects in. Fred was incredibly generous with his time and I was able to talk at length during two extensive meetings about issues of legacy, community impact, collecting, and a range of other issues.  The budget and scale of his projects are much larger than ours but many of the same principals apply. Through Bidwell Projects they converted and developed a former electrical power facility into Transformer Station which is an extraordinary museum showcasing emerging photo and photo based artists. He also shared plans for the amazing and world class FRONT Triennial they are planning for Cleveland in 2018.

 

Transformer Station

They share programming responsibility with the Cleveland Art Museum where Fred once served as director.

Speaking of the Cleveland Museum--it is a stunner!  The most recent addition was designed by Rafael Viñoly, the same architect that designed the Nasher Museum at Duke.

 

Pardon the horrible pun but his piece is off the Richter Scale!  Details below of the colors in this 1991 Gerhard Richter abstract painting.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this photo exhibition of the work of Louis Draper and Leonard Freed.

Louis Draper (American) Girl and Cuba, Philadephia, 1968.  Gelatin Silver Print

Leonard Freed (American) Playing football in a black neighborhood outside Washington, DC, 1964  Gelatin Silver Print

 

Anish Kapoor (Indian)  C-Curve, 2007  Stainless Steel

 

Cleveland is, of course, the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Coming out of the Cleveland Museum I stumbled upon this Frank Gehry Building at Case Western Reserve University.

The down side of things clicking along like a well oiled machine is that my planning time line was getting shorter and shorter.  I had started out fully planned two weeks out and by the time I got to Cleveland I was about 2 days out.  I had worked out some great connections in Pittsburgh but all three of them fell through and I found myself for the first time in a place where I didn't know where I was going to lay my head down that evening. I scrambled and sent some letters to prospects I had identified in NY state and thought I might head in the direction of Syracuse.  I looked at a map to find a place midway between Cleveland and Syracuse and I decided to go to Buffalo. I am traveling with a full US Lonely Planet travel guide and Ellen gave me a giant volume of all of the NY Times "36 Hours in...." and I found out there are some major architectural landmarks in Buffalo.  Before I married an architect and got involved with George Smart's amazing NC Modernist Houses, architecture was not much on my radar. Now I seek it out wherever I go. One of Frank Lloyd Wright's seminal early works is the Darwin Martin House Complex. It is a sprawling complex with 4 structures. The house was completely abandoned for nearly two decades and they are just completing a 50 million dollar!!! restoration.

 

 

A while back at a film fesitval I saw a documentary about the architect Louis Sullivan and it featured this amazing early sky scraper in Buffalo called the Guaranty Building.  With an exterior of terra cotta tile and an opulent interior it is magnificent to see up close.

 

A great way to end the week.  Thanks for following along.  Check out more pictures from my adventure here.

 

 

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

--Frank Zappa

 

SABBATICAL WEEK FOUR

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Mardi Gras parade on the Oxford, MS Square

Week 4 was mercifully a little slower paced. My good friend Lynn at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke connected me with a wonderful couple in Oxford, MS, Ron and Joe, who graciously put up this stranger in their stunning guest house, hilariously dubbed Ditch Crest. Ditch Crest is right out of a Faulkner novel which is appropriate as Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, is in town. Ron is the regional director of Teach for America and I learned a lot about this amazing organization. I was also able to catch up on a lot of non sabbatical related business and get to know the small town of Oxford.

The "kitten altar" in my bedroom at Ditch Crest

I had a wonderful visit to Rowan Oak and a walk through the adjacent Bailey Woods.

I had the best biscuit of my life at Big Bad Breakfast.

My big day trip adventure was to the blues capital of the universe, Clarksdale, MS. I think they have live music 365 days a year. For a guy who a) tries to get to bed by 10 pm every night b) doesn't much ever go see live music and c) can count on two hands the number of bars/clubs he has visited in his lifetime, a night out visiting THREE Blues Clubs was a celebration of being outside my comfort zone! My first stop was the Juke Joint Chapel at the Shack Up Inn.

I moved on to the Ground Zero Blues Club which is co-owned by actor and Mississippi native Morgan Freeman. The fried catfish was amazing and the mac and cheese world class.  Every surface in the entire place is covered with Sharpie graffiti.  Amazingly friendly folks, smoke free, and awesome music.

This is the local harmonica sales and repair store owner around the corner.  He offers Open Harp Surgery.

I finished off the night at Red's Blues Lounge which if you don't know where it is you definitely won't find it. Frank goes clubbing!!!

 

One of my most exciting finds on the trip so far directed me to an unplanned visit to Memphis-Crosstown Arts and the Crosstown Concourse Project. There are not enough superlatives to describe the team at Crosstown and this amazing $180 million community development project with funding from 30 different sources. Do yourself a favor and follow these links and learn about these projects.  I have never seen such a case where the arts tail was TOTALLY wagging the development dog. I felt like I was in some crazy parallel universe where all decisions were being made based on how well the outcome would support the arts community! My incredibly gracious hosts, Amanda "Sparks" Sparks and her husband Chris Miner, treated me like long lost friends after learning of my existence less than 48 hours before and gave me the super grand tour of all of Crosstown's projects and the entire Concourse renovation.  They will have apartments AND studios in the building for 12-16 simultaneous visiting artists and over 20 programmable arts spaces in the building! They and a small team are running the whole project and really have their acts together.  Ellen and I hope to go to the grand opening on May 13.

Sparks and Chris

Amanda picked the color.  All the suits had their panties in a wedge about it and now nobody can stop talking about how wonderful it is. Typical.

The building is a former Sears distribution center and this area at the top of the tower on the 14th floor housed a huge water tower to service the building. Future home of a great bar/restaurant.

 

I felt like I had the Golden Passport while in Memphis.  Sparks and Chris connected me to all of their friends in the arts community and I seemed like every door just fell open for me. I met their photographer friend Jamie Harmon at Amurica  and he showed me around his crazy studio.

He also invited me to a storytelling event started by his wife called Spillit which is very similar to The Moth (Moth podcasts have been my savior on my many long drives) and Durham NC's own The Monti. The theme of the night was "guts" and ran the gamut from hilarious chickening out stories to sobering stories of colon surgery. Folks put their name in a hat if they want to tell a story but everybody can join in the fun--on each seat was a piece of paper where you could write about the time you most famously chickened out and in between the main stories they would read those.  The most poignant moment of the evening came when the MC read "I almost chickened out coming here tonight.  That's why I was late. I am brand new to Memphis and I don't know anyone or have any friends here and I was nervous about coming." The MC stopped and said "this is supposed to be anonymous but I want to invite you to identify yourself so we can welcome you" and a young woman did and instantly 5 or 6 people got up and hugged her and said they wanted to be her friend and gave her their email addresses. It was such a sweet moment and typical of my experience in Memphis.

Another great stop was at the Dixon Museum and Gardens.  It was hosting a traveling exhibition called State of the Art which originated at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville Arkansas. Their curators visited the entire US and did more than a THOUSAND studio visits to find the best of the best or under recognized emerging and established artists working in the country.  Incredible show.

 

 

I managed to slip in a short visit to the famous Beale Street my last night there.

My final stop of the week was visiting my wonderful niece Natalie who lives and works for the Country Music Association in Nashville. Got to see her new house and groovy new office.

Off to Louisville, KY where I also have never been and always wanted to visit.. Thanks for being along for the ride.

 

 

The blues is like a planet.  It's an enormous topic.  You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from.  Without it, I don't know where I would be.  It's indelible and indispensable.  --Tom Waits

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blues.html

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blues.html

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blues.html

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/tomwaits

SABBATICAL WEEK THREE

Thank you all for following my journey. If you want to see images in a more timely manner you can either follow me on Instagram @cassilhaus or if you are not on Instagram you can simply Google #frankssabbatical or @cassilhaus and there are aggregators like http://www.imgrum.org/user/cassilhaus/3510596490 on the web that simply show all of my posts w/o being on Instagram.

Who knew there was a National Margarita Day???

Along Route 61 Hale County

Orrville, Alabama

 

Week three was a bit off the central thesis of my sabbatical. I didn't identify specific arts or residency related programs in the deep South that I wanted to visit but I had never really spent time in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas and I had heard much wonderful lore about spending time in the Alabama Black Belt and the Mississippi River Delta. This trip is hopefully as much about learning about advancing Cassilhaus as it is about learning about myself and the country I live in. It didn't take long to find amazing people and adventures in my next chosen destination.

When I was still in Georgia I asked a bunch of people what I should check out in Hale County, AL and I got the same response every time--visit with Pam Dorr and see the amazing community development and rural poverty work she is doing at HERO and check out the Auburn Rural Studio. Here is a bit about Pam from one of her TED talks.

Pam is so delightful, dynamic, and easy to be with and is a complete inspiration.  She is a force to be reckoned with and a walking community development machine. Between her housing initiatives, bamboo bike business, thrift store, pie lab, and others it was hard to keep up.

Her team is working on the renovation of the Martin Stewart School which was saved from demolition and moved to their campus in three parts and reassembled.  It is almost complete and one morning she had me help clean up and move bunks in place that will house design interns that come to Greensboro to help with her initiatives.

My introduction to Alabama was memorable.  I hadn't been in town for an hour when Pam invited me to dinner with her friends Tom and Stella Martin who have a place on the Black Warrior River just West of town.  What a stunning evening and an amazing home cooked meal with homemade key lime pie. In their back yard is the former main town dock for folks coming into Greensboro.  The river is still used extensively for commerce.

 

Pam housed me during my time there in another of her projects, the HERO bunkhouse.  I had the place to myself.  I got a new camera just before coming on this trip and I have been trying to carve out time to slog through the 600+ page manual so I can really exploit its capabilities. I dug in a bit at the bunkhouse and shot my first significant photo series in the wee hours of the morning the first morning I awoke there.  These images were all shot hand held at an astonishing 16000 ASA.  I've never seen a camera that can resolve so well in almost total darkness.

 

For a photography lover like me, Hale County Alabama is the stuff of legend from the work of William Christenberry and Walker Evans. A visit had long been on my bucket list. It is a bit of a photo cliche but i had to go shoot the famous Green Barn that Christenberry returned to again and again.

Being married to an architect means I haven't been able to miss hearing about the legendary Auburn University Rural Studio started by Sam "Sambo" Mockbee and D.K. Ruth. I spent the better part of two days seeing the campus and looking at present and past projects while giving my jealous spouse updates (she had not made the pilgrimage yet) and sending her photos.  This was sustainable architecture before anyone knew what that meant.

 

Main campus

Above two images are student designed, built, and occupied.  Students are responsible for building their dorms!

Outdoor classroom and greenhouse.

You think you've got a lot of projects going on......

Spectacular, brand new, and just christened outdoor work space. The lion's share of the entire structure was built by 4 students!

Out in the town of Faunsdale, AL, visiting professor Jake works in the pouring rain with a team of Rural Studio students to put a roof on a house they designed and built for a member of the community in need.  Like all of their projects this is done at no cost to the future home owner who currently lives in a trailer behind the building site.  This is one of the 20K prototype houses they call the "income house" and in the dogtrot design the 2br house is on the left and the studio on the right allows for income generating work to be done.

The recycle and reuse ethos is strong in this project using recycled carpet.  This was one of the very first RS projects done during Sam Mockbie's tenure.

 

Mary Cris, one of the Vista/Americorp workers in Pam's office invited me on a family pontoon boat outing on the Black Warrior River on a beautiful sunny afternoon.  Way fun and boy that boat could move!

 

Greensboro Alabama's location allowed some pretty great day trips.  I had heard much about the Quilters of Gees Bend but had no idea they were less than an hour from where I was.  Selma, a major site of the civil rights struggle, was also close by. On the way to Gees Bend I had arranged to sit in on a class at a high school in Uniontown, Alabama taught by a Teach for America teacher named Kara. My host for the next week of my trip, Ron Nurnberg, is director of TFA Mississippi so I thought I should get up to speed!  I hadn't been in a high school class in a LONG time and it was inspiring to watch Kara work her magic to inspire her kids to learn.

 

 

Gees Bend PO.

The National Park Interpretive Center right across from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma was inspiring and very well done. I felt such sadness about all of the voter suppression that continues and is already getting worse under Trump.  How many times do we need to fight for the same thing? I walked across the bridge in both directions thinking about that awesome march and the sacrifices so many have made toward the goal of one man one vote.

 

My final stop of the week had me saying goodbye to Alabama and headed to Jackson, Mississippi. Back in December I attended a conference put on at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC (not to be confused with the Greensboro I just left) as part of its Southern Constellations series. The main presenter was a woman named Nia Umoja who is part of an unusual neighborhood development/anti gentrification project called The Cooperative Community of New West Jackson.

Again I am pretty far off my planned sabbatical thesis but I was incredibly impressed by what I heard at the conference and wanted to see it with my own eyes.  Nia generously put me up at their wonderful guest house in the community and took me on an extensive tour.  I am still going through a complex series of emotions about all that I saw.  Sobering and inspiring in equal measure.  I don't know how she does it all.  Did I mention she has 7 young children ??!!?

The cooperative hopes to develop a significant food economy in the neighborhood and this large community garden is one of the first steps.

One of the newly renovated houses in the neighborhood. All work in the neighborhood is done by people living in the neighborhood.

 

OK so I am officially exhausted now.  I can't believe this all happened in a week.  It takes me a week to document a week!  Thanks for sharing this journey with me.

 

"Change happens at the speed of trust"