This week I had the pleasure of heading to one of my favorite museums, The High Museum of Art here in Atlanta.* While the biggest current draw is the exhibition Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters, I was headed over to see Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of The High Museum of Art and The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.

Traylor was a self-taught African-American folk artist. Born a slave in 1854, he finally left the plantation to move to Montgomery Alabama around 1928, sleeping in the store room of a funeral home at night while drawing on the sidewalks by day.  He would sit outside and draw the world walking by, usually on the back of old cardboard ads he found on the street and in the trash. His media of choice (and availablilty) were pencil, watercolor, poster paint, charcoal and crayons. He was able to capture so much movement, emotion and personality with such simple drawings. While they are distinctly folk art, there are a lot of qualities that are at once primitive and modern, from the way he abstracts silhouettes of people to his use of color.

The cardboard is the back of an old sign advertisement for Sensation cigarettes, thus its odd size.

If you have chance to catch this show, you really should not miss it. It combines collections of the two museums. What’s so wonderful about standing 12 inches from one of these works, separated only by a pane of glass, is that you can see the dirt, wrinkles and tears on the cardboard. You can see the rhythm of the pencil strokes up close. You can see where the artist’s finger smeared the charcoal. I hadn’t been this moved by a show since I went to see the quilts made by the women from Gee’s Bend.

Learn more about Traylor and about Charles Shannon, a fellow artist who collected and preserved Traylor’s drawings ever since meeting him in 1939 at highmuseum.org.

All images via highmuseum.org.

I met a friend for lunch today in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, and as I was cutting through a parking lot I noticed a bit of guerrilla knitting over on Edgewood Avenue. I had just been reading about this phenomenon a few days ago (can’t remember where) but I do remember a blogging about a clever tree or two a few years ago, before I knew about the “guerilla.” It was fun to see this street tree (I think it’s a Japanese Zelkova) wearing a red legwarmer right in my own city:

Inspired by the beautiful sunshine and the vibrancy of the neighborhood, I took a few more camera phone shots of the cutest darn store in the world, Lottafrutta and thought I’d share:

They even have lime green construction cones!

The fun of the fruit continues to the side door:

In fact, there’s even a bit of fun out by the trash:

There’s also a rare (in Atlanta) Art Deco building across the street from Lottafrutta, complete with tropical palm trees – now that’s location:

There’s a growing Flickr pool full of guerrilla knitting, check it out here. By the way, they spell it with one “r.” I could never figure out why I could not remember how to spell this word, but it looks like it can be spelled both ways (?). My spellcheck seems to prefer “rr”:

P.S. A shameless request for advice: As you may have guessed from my cruddy camera phone pictures, my digital camera bit the dust. Does anyone have any advice on one they love that’s pretty easy for a non-photographer?

Thanks so much to Beth at Domestic Ease for letting me share my Top Twelve Must-Haves for Spring in Atlanta! Here’s a teaser, for those of you who happen to be around A-Town; most of these are good through fall.

On Sunday the sun was shining, the breeze was blowing, and the corndogs were deep-frying. The Inman Park Festival was in full swing, with plenty of live music, artisans, and quirky characters in attendance. I thought I’d share a few fun shots of the festivities, even though they are a little blurry and taken from a phone..

Missionary Mary Procter is one of my all-time favorites. Here are a few more shots of her work:

The day would not have been complete without another favorite, no, his name is not Miss Pinky, it’s Chris Cross Dresser:

Say what you want about the South, but Atlanta is awesome!

I stopped by my friend Lucas’s loft in the Old Fourth Ward today and took about a million pictures. Between the funky flash and the fact that I was dizzy, I’m not thrilled with the results, but the ideas are so good I had to share a few with you immediately anyway. I’ll share more of a house tour in a later post after some photo editing attempts, but for now, here are a few of his great ideas.

Aren’t these ticket stub shadowboxes a great idea? I have ticket stubs floating all over my house, some in scrapbooks, some on bulletin boards, I even saw one in my laundry room the other day. I’d love to get them all in one place, as each one carries different memories (side note: perhaps I’ll blow up the one from the Depeche Mode concert this past month – that show was AWESOME! OK, back to Lucas…) Lucas is a singer-songwriter and goes to see live music ALL the time. I even spy Suzanne Vega’s signature on a stub in his collection.

Lucas has a knack with IKEA frames. The piece above was bought from an artist in Provincetown, and he gave it more of a presence with an inexpensive black frame. The piece below is a tangle of old guitar wires that he was gathering up to toss out. When he saw they had formed a heart shape, he popped them in another frame:

Every surface around the loft is well-curated. Living in a small studio instilled the feeling of only keeping things you need and love around the house. Lucas entertains a lot, and I noticed he utilized trays and modern tray tables all over his home for various things. He keeps his bar beautiful with fresh flowers and candles.

A TV-related tree, currently some sort of shrine to Carrie Bradshaw!

Again, sorry for the photo quality. I’m not sure what happened there, and I feel like they don’t do the art or the space justice! Luckily, I have a bunch of photos from Lucas himself which are much better than mine. You can sort through them all in this flickr set if you’d like a peek before the house tour post!

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the note in the shadowbox, “U Cute” was a note left in grease pen on a Burger King bag by a toothless cashier who was staring at Lucas so much that he said “I was afraid he was gonna cut me.” It was only later as he picked up his burger detritus that he saw the note and it all made sense! Did I mention that Lucas is hilarious?