PLACEMAKING

Bynum, North Carolina cannot be called a city - hardly even a town! Bynum is about 10 miles south of Chapel Hill.  There’s a church in Bynum and a general store. The population?  About 300.  It’s where Clyde Jones lives.

Clyde is 73 years old and worked in a saw mill which accounts for his missing finger.  In his spare time he began constructing animals - “critters” he calls them - out of post sized logs. These logs are not whittled, chain sawed or otherwise messed with. They are quickly nailed together into big-eared dogs, long-necked giraffes and strange composite alien animals - a human once in awhile.  Some have baseball eyes and plastic flower noses and others, real horse saddles or any part thereof.  All are painted and most are dusted in glitter.  Clyde likes glitter. 

Once, you could hardly walk through the zoo in Clyde’s yard. So he began “loaning” animals to all his neighbors. Now nearly every one of the 75 or so houses in Bynum has at least one animal in its garden; the loanees must agree not to sell any of the menagerie. And since wooden animals are everywhere, the traffic signs are also hand-made wood - cut outs of turtles, painted with spots and stripes with words like “Drive Like a Turtle.”  (I don't know for sure if Clyde made the signs.)

It’s easy to find the house where Clyde lives. It’s the one that’s covered in painted flowers and animals. Even the chimney - even the roof! - sports flying fish, snaky eels, and wingless birds.  One whole side of his house is covered in a painted pod of whales, a sight seldom seen anywhere near Bynum. The porch is papered with letters and post cards from admirers and magazine and newspaper articles all about Clyde. 

Clyde is famous.

As recently as the late 1970s Clyde’s form of art was a big head scratcher. Academics hardly knew what to label these people who were formally untrained but created raw, spontaneous  paintings and objects. In 1980, the Corcoran Gallery curated and installed the seminal exhibit “Black Folk Art in American: 1930 - 1980.”  It was followed by a string of thoughtfully curated exhibitions in university galleries and museums like the American Folk Art Museum and the Smithsonian Institute.

Jones’ “Haw Creek Critters” have been exhibited in these and other venues all over the world. But he still gets a kick out of visitors driving off the main highway to find him and while he can’t walk around so well anymore, he’s often outside on his only luxury: a customized riding lawn mower festooned with plastic snakes.

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THE REST OF THE STORY    Clearly, Bynum, North Carolina is far from being a tourist mecca but it’s curious that the state has now widened and improved the roads leading to Bynum and the little crossroads that barely had a name, is clearly marked on maps leading out of N.C.’s Research Triangle.  I call this the power of Art in Placemaking.

ONE SIDE OF CLYDE'S HOUSE

A NEIGHBOR

ANOTHER NEIGHBOR - AND MOST OF THE ANIMALS  ARE 'LIGHTED'

THE FRONT OF CLYDE'S HOUSE

IN CASE YOU MISS HIM, THAT'S SANTA IN THE CANOE

HOME AGAIN!

When I was 9 years old, my mother took my younger brother and me by Greyhound Bus from our home in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, to visit her brothers and sister in Hardy, Arkansas where they were all born. She was the only one who moved farther than a few miles away from the 100 year old “homestead.” 

This was high adventure for kids who had never been on a bus, never been further than a city park away from home, and never remembered meeting these people with whom we shared DNA.  There was my bachelor uncle, shot gun over his knees, just in from hunting squirrels -  a trunk full of confederate dollars in the corner of the log cabin where he lived.  My other uncle lived with his sweet lady just down the hillside in a pristinely clean farmhouse. We drank milk straight from milking while Aunt Delaney baked biscuits and pies for lunch. Two cousins showed up - Aunt Velma’s sons - that I never saw before and only once since when he was interviewed on a 60 Minutes episode twenty years later.

Now I’m home from a week’s road trip through the Carolinas - one of innumerable jonts my husband and I have gone on over the years and so I am thinking about “vacations.”  I remember vivid details about that long ago visit to Arkansas, the closest thing that I can loosely label “family vacation.”

My mother must have been homesick all those years away from family and place that she loved. For her, the bus ride back to Arkansas meant something entirely different from the shift into alien territory I might describe. My brother, four years younger than me, probably holds a totally different memory (or maybe none at all!) of the bus ride back to Arkansas.

Families, known or unknown. Trips familiar or exotic. The value is in the deposit they make to our memory bank. I am thrilled - even as old as I am now - to add to the treasury.  

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This is artist Patrick Doughtery. He's building a site specific work in Hillsborough, N.C. commissioned by the arts council and paid ($26,000) by private donations and grants from the Merchants and Tourism Councils. He works with one salaried asistant and loads of volunteers.  Chip and I spent part of a day stripping leaves from saplings.

The Round Stone House in Wilson,NC, was designed and built by Oliver Freeman (born 1882), a graduate of Tuskegee and one of the country's first African -American architect/builders. It was built in the 1940s to house vets returning from World War II.

A completed work by Patrick Doughtery - NOT the one in Hillsborough. I love that these pieces are built of natural material and meant to fade back into the earth in 3 or 4 years.

The home - and art installation! - of Clyde Jones, one of the naive/folk artist we tracked down in N.C.