Making Vivid a Fading South

I've known that building since childhood. A few years ago, I was setting up my camera and the [man] who owned the land where the green warehouse is set . . . comes up breathing heavily and says, "William, I thought I should tell you. Before you come down next year I'm going to paint the green warehouse." And I said, "Oh, do you have to?" He said, "Don't you worry, son. I'm going to paint it the same John Deere green just for you." After he passed away, he left instructions to his two sons to keep that building up for Bill Christenberry.

But isn't that a false kind of preservation? If it weren't for you, the owner might have razed the warehouse. Instead, he's keeping it up to protect Bill Christenberry's image of the past. Seems you're a preservationist without realizing it.

I suppose so. But I love vernacular architecture and I hate to see it disappear. Where I'm from, there are some of the richest, most beautiful pieces of vernacular architecture.

In his essay for the Aperture book, Andy Grundberg writes: "All his work, from photographs of buildings to nearly abstract drawings of gourd trees, revolves around a vocabulary of signifiers of the rural American South." Yet the Confederate flag is conspicuously absent. Why?

It always has troubled me how the Confederate flag is used and abused by ill-minded people. As far as making it a big issue [in my work], I never had any desire to. As for the KKK, the issue with me was to do my dead-level best to not become pedantic or preachy. In the exhibition, I don't know if you noticed those strange drawings, in the room with "The Klub" photograph.

The trio of works on paper -- "Portrait I, II, and III" -- depicting Klansmen.

Those three big drawings -- they're called transfer drawings -- deal with all of those issues. Everything, including the eye sockets, are [made up of renderings of tiny] weapons. Guns. Pistols. Rifles. Holsters. A lot of people won't even notice those forms. This is [my] way to sneak up on you.

Your work focuses on a specific place. Does it translate for Americans at large?

My work is rooted in a place, but it is not just a regional thing. It's a universal, an attempt to make a statement that deals with all of us as human beings. Beauty and ugliness. It's about a profound feeling about many things and a need to make these [feelings] visible.

Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry, at the American Art Museum, runs through July 8, 2007.