MEMORIES OF WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY

I walked into a large chalky white room with high ceilings, bare floors. The room itself seemed oddly vacant but for a smattering of little buildings about the sizes of most doll houses - maybe slightly smaller scale. The models sat on tables and pedestals only slightly higher than my waist. As expected in any museum, these objects were perfectly spotlighted from overhead; after all, this was the Museum of Modern Art. 

These obsessively detailed pieces of architecture were miniaturized churches, gas stations, general stores and fruit stands. They embodied life in the American south - or perhaps any part of America’s poor backroads communities where stores sold Nehi Grape soda and signs outside churches announced “Special prayer meeting tonite for Sister Grace.” 

Roofs more often than not were pieced together rusted sheet metal; most buildings were one room and a porch. Who knows when they were built? Or if they were built on purpose? More likely, they grew along the dirt road as naturally as milkweed.  

And after half a century or more, the buildings were abandoned, the road itself little more than tracks through the dirt. Customers gone to Walmart. All that remains are the ghosts.

I fell in love with William Christenberry that day nearly forty years ago.

Christenberry grew up in the deep south and says “I find beauty in things that are old and changing, wearing away.” He has spent his adult life documenting this now-obsolete way of life.  The models he builds are only part of the diary. Christenberry was one of the first artist to use color photography as an art form, pointing his Kodak brownie to these same objects and compiling the photographs into art collections. He’s collected metal signs along the way that now fill his 20 foot studio wall from floor to ceiling. I’m saving my money to someday buy a copy of his book “Working from Memory.”

Christenberry is 78 years old. Four years ago he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He’s at the tipping point with more bad days than good now and has just opened his very last exhibition at the Hemphill Fine Art Gallery  Logan Circle, Washington, D.C. The 26 works will be on view until August 1.  His love of the rural south and his exquisite eye will be missed.