I went to the Atlanta History Center for the sole purpose of visiting their many exhibits–for the first time in my life. This is really sad, considering I have a degree in history, I’m earning a master’s student studying museums, and I’ve lived in Atlanta for more than five years. In my defense, I’ve been there once to see one specific exhibit, and we also got a tour of the innards of the place, including their giant holdings areas down below where they keep the collection pieces that are not on display in exhibits. I have also been to their Kenan Research Center on several occasions for research purposes. But this was my first time going to meander my way through their permanent and temporary exhibitions.

Folk art meets daily life necessity: rice hulling mortar and pestels, circa 1800s (used into the 1900s). This is the most enormous mortar and pestel I've ever seen.

I knew I needed to pick one to highlight for yet another assigned exhibit review for a class (this makes about the fifth review I’ve done), but I didn’t really go in thinking of any one in particular–especially not, for some reason, the folk art exhibit, which I’d heard one or a few classmates discuss before but never given much thought. But this semester, I’m taking a class on Material Culture, on the things we adorn with a human touch, and make with a purpose, be it necessity, pleasure, tool, comfort or any other reason we have to create something. In the wake of this summer’s interior design class, I already feel that I am more aware of the conscious designs and historical components surrounding aesthetic, style, and the use of the things around us.

The first two weeks of class already have me thinking even harder about the things we design, make, buy, use, sell, throw away, repurpose. It was truly serendipitous that after a few other galleries, I wandered over to the Shaping Traditions: Folk Art in a Changing South gallery while deciding where next to spend my time. I had been planning to review a different exhibit, for a different class than Material Culture, but here it was in front of me, and there on the introductory panel was John Burrison, a professor at my school and friend of many of my professors, in a photograph with some of the pieces in the collection. I had a memory flashback and realized that I remembered learning that most of this collection–thousands of items–was his–he had been collecting southern folk art since the 1970s, and turned his collection and his lifetime of knowledge on folklife into an exhibit–a stunning and approachable work in itself.

From this leftover bit of mussel shell, you can see how they made buttons out of them. Incredible!

There on the same panel was a name that suddenly meant a lot to me: Henry Glassie. I had only just finished reading one of his books for my class, his 1968 classic within the folklife field, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. I got really excited, and from there, it was several hours later before I noticed how much time I had been spending at each panel, examining each piece of folk craft, studying the selection of photos that accompanied throughout.

My favorite part, obviously really, was the section devoted entirely to southern textiles, quilts, motifs, and influential styles. The designers came up with a truly ingenious method to display and preserve the six quilts within the exhibit: each one rolled out on its own giant display board, once prompted by a visitor who pushes a button–which sits below a description of the type, material, quilter, and estimated year of creation. I must have pushed those buttons more than a dozen times, engrossed in their pattern and fabric choices, old as they were. Each was so beautiful, and they combined to tell a distinctly diverse story of the variety of quilting styles and influences that play into southern quilting.

The clever system within the exhibit that only exposes the quilts to light when visitors choose to roll them out--it's also fun to use!

The textile section had an essential "touch me" section, for those of us who were dying to feel the quilts and had to contain ourselves.

"Barn Rising" variation of a Log Cabin quilt, early 1900s

"Eight Point Star" variation with strips, by Estella Daniel, Emerson County, Georgia, 1930s

"Whig's Defeat," by Susan Loyd, Rome, Georgia, 1856

"Brick Work" and strip pattern, Annie Howard, Madison, Georgia, 1957

(Read on for a bit more about the themes of the exhibit; it’s worth a few minutes!)

The exhibit was consciously created to revolve around its stunning artifacts, to tell the larger story of the relationship between folk craft and folk art in past and present southern life. The overarching thesis the exhibit aims to impress upon visitors is that there has been both continuity and change in southern folk art, and that the relationship within it—southerners and their handmade products—is an important component in the history of the South.

Craftsmen-made ladderback chairs

The exhibit has an incredible collection of folk furniture, with all the requisite textiles, potter-made earthenware, and other pieces that defined home life in preindustrial Georgia.

Modern-day artists and immigrant groups who have added their cultural traditions to the South in the last half century are featured near the end of the exhibit space, proving that folk art in the region, while no longer necessary for our work or daily life essentials, is still an important part of our cultural lives; we are surrounded by the artistry and traditional techniques of those who continue to practice and pass on our folk arts. Shaping Traditions tells this story through the objects that define the subject.

Go see it.

Ben stopped by to say hi to my camera

Ben's note in the guest book. Haha. True statement.

This is what pure giddiness looks like.

Also: Nose-picking in the Metropolitan Frontiers exhibit

No, the one by Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris (“Welcome to Atlanta“) just won’t cut it; there is much beyond the parties “’til 8 in the morning.” The remix version is also not quite good enough to fully represent us. (But, they are crunk, I suppose.)

This crossed my mind as I was driving home from school, from a class period devoted to the Civil War, specifically the Atlanta Campaign, Sherman’s larger campaign through Georgia in 1864, and Lee Kennett’s book Marching Through Georgia: The Story of the Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman’s Campaign. I felt a very specific connection to this history, as we talked about the areas where many of the battles occurred, as well as spots north of the city that saw Union soldiers that summer and fall–like Ezra Church, Allatoona, Big Shanty, Cassville, Ringgold–and south of Atlanta, like Jonesboro, and on down to the coast, Fort McAllister, and Savannah. There was a strange jolt in feeling personally connected to the places I was learning about. Is this what everyone else gets in their stomachs when they learn about the history of their hometowns, or through discovering their genealogical history or researching old inhabitants and stories of their homes? I have clearly been missing out.

A lot was hanging on the outcome of Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, as the split North and South were war-weary and President Lincoln was seriously doubting his reelection, in the summer of 1864.

I also shall boldly say that Kennett’s book is far and beyond one of the very best I’ve read on Georgia history, and especially on the Civil War. The sheer number of firsthand accounts he uses, while keeping the story readable and downright interesting is a true feat. His stories of General William T. Sherman, his soldiers, the Confederate generals (especially General John Bell Hood) and soldiers, and civilians–slave and free–who were affected told the story of the iconic Atlanta Campaign and the March to the Sea in a way that brought it to life.

I was most impressed with the way he portrays the experiences of the men on the battlefield, pointing out that the very lack of objectivity we sometimes dislike in war stories is in fact also quite useful in learning how battle was: “to anyone trying to construct battle as men experienced it, the way things seemed is in fact as important as the way they were.”

Reading Kennett has given greater depth to a Civil War I have long known about, but have not seen in as many shades of gray. The “Civil War” quickly becomes a crystallized, invariable part of the American past to the average person, albeit an enormous piece of the narrative; Kennett’s foray beyond that hardened image adds those intricate shades, a contribution that proves helpful to every Georgian or interested reader who picks up the book. I definitely recommend it.

He also makes clear to me the immense accomplishment of Sherman and his men just making it to Atlanta, what with the rugged terrain and lack of useful maps; then again, the terrain across the country during their time is far beyond what I could conceive, and Atlanta hard to imagine then compared to my view today. All the more reason for me to keep learning about it. All the more reason it’s time for another song about it, more reminiscent of what “Empire State of Mind” stirs in the heart about New York City’s inspire power.

P.S. I’ll start by visiting the Cyclorama. Never been.

In a very significant way, much of the discipline of history focuses on the human story: human relationships, triumphs, failures, innovations, war, spirit, and, occasionally, growth. It becomes quite easy to forget the very scene on which this all takes place; but as it likes to remind us from time to time, nature trumps human power when it wants to. Man wields great machines to change the shape of it, but he cannot invent enough devices to fully manipulate the land as he wants.

Rice cultivation in the Ogeechee River low country

The most striking and significant fact to take away from Stewart’s work on low country history is that there were three main characters in the drama of the low country: the natural landscape, which had been there thousands of years prior and forced its inhabitants to cooperate and adapt, African American slaves, who worked the land to the point that they developed an immensely intimate connection to it, and the white men, who tried in earnest to manipulate and coerce these other players, both of which were in fact much too powerful to ever completely defer to the European plan.

The importance of place in understanding history cannot be diminished; landscape–that is, latitude, weather, soil, water, tide, flora and fauna–is inextricably entangled with every cultural era and social episode in our past. Yet it rarely plays as large a role in the history of a region, beyond a brief geography lesson as a primer. I risk sounding hyperbolic in my description, but it was a profound thought, for many of us in my class, and one that we discussed in earnest earlier tonight. Let us not separate the very material that creates our world from the existence it has allowed us to assemble. Let us begin with the weather, indeed.

Bridgette McGee-Robinson with an image of her grandfather, Willie McGee (Photo via Teri Havens, NRP.org)

Ms. McGee-Robinson has by no means proven any new facts beyond all doubt. But as she reports, that was not her intention. What lied within this journey of discovery for her was a means through which to better understand what happened to her grandfather, and how best to see him in her own eyes. Ancestry is obviously important to each family in its own way, and comes with its own asteriskses and exceptions, oddities and inaccuracies, emotions and upsets. And at then end of the day, there will never be a definitive hard-fact truth to the matter, nor, usually, will any families receive the historical recognition they feel their ancestors are due. But stories like Willie McGee’s, told through the eyes of his granddaughter, take this beef out of the equation entirely. It becomes much more than a little research on the lives contained in one family tree; it touches on the living memory of  a city and on the racial flares that still erupt when we question a white woman and a black man romantically involved in the 1950s American South. It suddenly makes family histories, or at least this one, seem much more relevant than they had before to the larger historical narrative, and in a very good way. In a sense, it validates the arguments made for studying ancestry, while also explicitly pointing to the inevitable discrepancies and distortions of time and memory.

By the end of this radio segment, I was in tears; I couldn’t believe the power this poignant story, and its development, had on me on that Friday afternoon, while I was set and ready to take to the road. As someone who has spent time preparing both historical and journalistic writing, I appreciate all the more the utterly nuanced elevation the piece contained, building until there was no way to turn it off; when you’re writing for an audience, a story like the one she has is both coveted and exceedingly rare.

Listen to the entire radio diary here; it is worth the 23-minute investment, I promise. I would not dub this one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard if I was not serious.