STM SHOW

stained glass by allan joyce

Weary, slow morning, needing to go to town, dreading it, watching the time go by. The bank, the post office, liquor store, gas station, and knowing I'll be wanting to head home after the grocery store, thought I'd stop at the Tpot museum and see the current show. Parking space right in front, went inside stunned by the stained glass hanging in the window that Allan made. Every time I've passed the place wanting to stop, but unable, I would look at the stained glass thinking that has to be Allan's.

I didn't know before that it was a show of mostly people in the county, crafts people who make baskets, photographs, one thing and another. I walked through looking at Dan Abernathy's birds, struck most by the raptor with every feather in place. It stands on its perch like a cobra ready to strike. Daniel Cater's sculpture of a fiddle head fern held my eye for quite a long time. It's nice without reference to the fern, but all the better with the association. His wife Robin made an interesting tree kind of sculpture with a clay trunk and wire crown. I was glad to see them in there. They like to make imaginative objects with clay.

I was especially moved that everything was so good and it was all from here or near here. It gives one the impression there is some art activity going on in the county. All the baskets I saw were especially artful. Pat Sexton has raised basket making from a craft to an art. Some clay work done by Bet Mangum was awfully nice to see. Dear Bet, among the finest people on this earth had to up and leave us in what seemed like before her time, but what do we know about that?

I regret that I didn't spend more time while Bet was living to see her and Rob. I've always felt close to them, but our paths just took us separate places. When Bet was around, she was always a shining light. Over the years I appreciated how she and Rob set out to make a living doing pottery and they did. It worked for them, and worked for them well. She could pick a banjo too. Good musician, good singer and a genuine human being. Perhaps that's what I liked best about Bet, that she was genuine in everything she said and did. There was nothing unreal about her.

Yellow flowers made of glass on clear glass stems, quite beautiful against the black cloth draped behind it for clarity. It felt good to see so much that is so good and worthy of a good show. I gaped about meandering from piece to piece glad to see this good art energy flowing throughout the place. It's a show that would look good anywhere, in any city or town. Cynthia is not just the salvation of the Tpot museum, but she's becoming the inspiration for the direction the museum will take into the next generation. She has found the gems in the community and honors them. She has made what started as a big league Los Angeles enterprise that condescended to Sparta into something that features Sparta. Cynthia has brought the Tpot museum home and is making it Alleghany centered.

She has the potential to make some very positive changes in our community, the kind that benefit all instead of just a few. She's introducing to us a new way to see ourselves, boosting our self-esteem. This seems to be her spirit in the way she knows people too. She tends to boost the self-esteem of people she knows, or so it appears to me. I don't know her well enough to say that like I know what I'm talking about, but that's the way I see her spirit, applauding the best in everyone around her, is I think what I'm getting at. She's an encouraging spirit. And she doesn't mind getting down grubbing in the dirt. I have the impression we have a remarkable woman among us who can possibly help Sparta find it's identity that's been so elusive for so long.

Soundtrack music for the show is the Alleghany 150th collection of 4cds of music from the county. That is a treasure of a collection. Billy Dancy's banjo, Wade Petty's fiddle and Charlie Edwards singing while I was moving about from piece to piece. It felt just right. These are the guys that play up the street at the Jubilee on Tuesday and Saturday nights. The way Cynthia is working so intimately with the county makes the Tpot Museum into something I feel we can embrace.

Earlier, when it was about high art in NY and LA, it felt like stepping outside Sparta to step inside. It was nice. I have to say I loved those exhibits of zany teapots. But it was a pod of somewhere else set down in Sparta. What I see the Tpot museum becoming now is a step a little deeper into Sparta and the county. It's reaching into the art spirit in the county, what people living here are making. Makes it interesting for people living here and for people passing through. Every show she put on has been a knockout. Each has its own charm. And every one of them is right here at home.

SPARTA'S MAIN STREET MUSEUM

In town today to pick up a paper, Thursday, Tpot museum open. The present show is from the Penland school of crafts down in the Spruce Pine part of the mountains. In the world of crafts such as glass blowing, weaving, jewelry making, etc., Penland is a big name in lights. The kind of thing that sounds great at a cocktail party, "Oh, you went to Penland." That's credentials right there, like having played in Bill Monroe's band among bluegrass musicians. Penland is where you get your craft creds.

From the looks of the works exhibited, the credentials are well deserved.

The examples of glass work inspired questioning in my mind how whatever it is I'm looking at could be made and it glass. Like this red thing I saw, looking like a swan's neck bending with the chin and beak almost touching the lower part of the neck. At once it looked like something that grew, on the order of a jack in the pulpit. It had the grace of an exotic flower or bird. And it was a chunk of glass. I couldn't take my eyes away from it. Every way you look at it, it changes. What you saw before is gone and something completely different is happening inside the glass. Simple as it could possibly be and complex to the same degree.

A little tricycle made of maple twigs carved and painted white. Again, simple as it could be and equally complex. I had to pull myself away from looking at it, feeling awe for its creation. A kind of bowl-like circle of clear glass with little gold buddhas all around inside the glass. The closer you look at it, the more it looks like the bowl has water in it. Two letters, B and Z, made of thin steel to hang on the wall, gracefully suggested brush strokes. Its grace is what you see first, then that it's made of steel. Steel I don't associate with grace and it makes a good double-take. It was something I'd never get tired of looking at.

I didn't have paper in a pocket to make notes with and would rather not make notes anyway. So don't count on me to remember a name that you wouldn't recognize if I remembered it anyway. In a show such as what is inside that small museum, the objects themselves are of most interest to me. On the seat of my truck across the street was the paper I'd just picked up at Halsey Drug with a headline about Tpot museum returning the museum's projected land back to original owners. I thought that odd on the day I wanted to write you about the Tpot museum it turns up in the paper about selling the land.

On first sight it seemed to me a good idea, to get that elephant out of the room. I've thought for some time that space on Main Street makes a fine museum. Like Commissioner Milly Richardson says, when you need a new tractor, you want a big 4-wheel drive Kubota with a cab and air conditioning. If you can't afford it, a second hand Massey 135 will do the same job.

Through all the time of having opinions this way or that over the Tpot museum, whether or not, advisable or not, afford it or not, I was at a loss. It seemed too much to me like forcing a square peg into a round hole, or the other way around. I could see some potential good for the future of Sparta, and at the same time could see it as the worst thing that could happen to Sparta.

Mostly I thought, this is Roaring Gap's idea for the good of Sparta, maybe Roaring Gap could fund it for the good of Sparta. The people of the county don't seem crazy enough about it for a population of people who work hard and are unconsciounably underpaid to put up money they don't have for something they don't want. And besides, who wants to see a million teapots anyway? Take it to Las Vegas. They'll love it there. When Madame K called Sparta a 'black hole' in a Winston-Salem Journal interview, that tipped the scale for me. LA it aint. I'll give a Rebel Yell to that. Talk about black holes.

All that's in the past now and settled. I like calling it something like a museum of crafts and design, and focusing on state, regional and local work. That's much more something we can appreciate and comes closer to representing us than an endless variety of teapots. Pat Carriker was in there volunteering today. We had a good visit and I asked permission to take some pictures. Denied. I expected that, even knew better than to ask, but thought I'd ask in case of an exception. She suggested I get a picture of the window and I'm glad she did. That's Pat in the window.