Making Vivid a Fading South

Alabama Occupies a Special Place in Christenberry's Art

Art rooted in a region: "Church, Sprott, Alabama," a dye transfer print by outsider artist William Christenberry. (Smithsonian American Art Museum Photos)

In an unusual move, Smithsonian American Art Museum curators gave 69-year-old Washington artist William Christenberry a new job -- that of curator for his own show and for a selection of folk art from the museum's holdings.

"Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry" and his outsider-art choices enjoy prime spots among the newly renovated museum's inaugural shows. His own artworks will remain on view for almost a year.

Hale County, Ala., is Christenberry's muse. He's visited every year since 1968. "Passing Time" includes 60 of the works that have come out of that place, including photos, sculptures, paintings and works on paper. A catalogue by Aperture accompanies the show.

The images Christenberry gives us, of a faded rural South peppered with austere old churches and run-down honky-tonks, are affectionate but sober, with a touch of sadness. Alongside these melancholy views hang the charged works of Christenberry's Ku Klux Klan series, including multiple sculptures of Christenberry's signature form -- the elongated white structure with the pointed cap he calls his "Dream Building." The structure suggests a Klansman in the way our own Washington Monument can.

Recently, Christenberry sat down with The Washington Post to discuss his work as a curator and his ongoing love affair with Hale County.

Q: Placed in the unusual position of designing your own exhibition, you chose to illustrate your images with quotations from [William] Faulkner and [Eudora] Welty. How does their work frame your examination of the South?

A: Southern writers -- Faulkner, [Flannery] O'Connor, Welty, [James] Agee -- have had a profound influence on my work and what I wanted to say. Not in a narrative way, but in terms of feeling.

How would you characterize that feeling? Is it nostalgia?

"Dream Building Ensemble," part of the retro- spective that Christenberry himself curated.(Smithsonian Museum Of American Art)

Not nostalgia. Not time past -- time passing. As I get older, time passing is even more important. One of the writers that most affects me as I get older is Emily Dickinson. Of course, she's not Southern. But that wonderful quote, "Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell" [included in the show] really rings true. It resonates with me about the whole exhibition. Memory is certainly a major part [of my work] as I get older. I have so many fond memories from my childhood. Then going back and seeing the things disappear . . .

Isn't that disappearance a metaphor for innocence lost? Perhaps you can't keep your childhood Eden intact.

I wonder. If I still lived there, I honestly doubt I'd be doing the kind of work I'm doing. I don't think so.

One of your most interesting endeavors has been to chronicle vernacular architecture across decades. Sixteen panels capture the Bar-B-Q Inn from 1964 to 1991. In the final frame, it's shocking to see the building's gone. As viewers, we become attached to the building, too. Another photo series on view documents a green warehouse. Apparently that building still stands.