Minnie Adkins Exhibition, "Story Carvings", Huntington Museum Of Art, Friday, July 28, 2023

 

                                                       Photo By Huntington Museum of Art 

On Friday, July 28, 2023, my wife Candice & I traveled to the Huntington Museum of Art in Huntington, West Virginia, to see the fairly recent exhibition of the work of famed Kentucky folk artist Minnie Adkins which the museum has titled "Story Carvings".  The exhibition is composed of several hundred small, painted carvings which Minnie created to illustrate several books which she produced with writer Mike Norris.   The books involved were called "Sonny the Monkey", "Bright Blue Rooster", "Mommy Goose: Rhymes from the Mountain" and "Ring Around the Moon: Mommy Goose Rhymes". The muse um website states:  "This collection of carvings is a seamless blend of wood and words reflecting Appalachian culture and covering an enormous range of subjects—from humor to anger, coal mining to creativity, bullying to the might of words."  

                                                Roger Hicks & Minnie Adkins July 15, 2023
 

 I have known Minnie is a superficial way for several years and have written about her and her work on this blog most recently after attending the annual "Minnie Adkins Day" in her hometown of Sandy Hook, Kentucky, on July 15, 2023.  I have a great deal of respect for Minnie and her work, especially those larger pieces which are often seen in museum collections or the homes of well funded collectors.  But this exhibit is composed almost entirely of pieces which are less than 6" and were intended to be utilized in photographic tableaux for the books mentioned above.  They are wonderful work and, if  you know Minnie and her work, they are easily recognized as coming from her hands, paint brush, and pocket knife.  Minnie is now just past her 90th birthday but still going strong as she demonstrated at the recent Minnie Adkins Day.  I suspected that she might not be keeping the same heated pace she did in her earlier years but she still had a great deal of works on display for sale at that Minnie Adkins Day, still posed for photographs with every admirer who asked, and took time to speak to every person who came seeking a little of her time.  I regret that I was not present at the grand opening of this exhibition to see her in her natural element holding court in a museum in front of a crowd of art loving admirers.  

The museum also has a sizeable collection of American Folk Art in their permanent collection and much of it is also currently on display at this time in an adjoining gallery under the title Folk Art: Eclectic Expressions from the Collection.   The museum in their description of the general folk art exhibit quotes their Senior Curator/Exhibition Designer John Farley about that exhibition in this manner: “This exhibition reminds us that living creatively and expressively is not reserved for those with specialized artistic training or academic education, Making things with our hands, our hearts, and our minds is the province of all people." "It is an excellent exhibition, especially if the viewer is one seeking an overview of American Folk Art or folk art of the Southeastern United States.  The first piece most likely to catch a visitor's eye entering the gallery is a wonderful quilt of about 20 individual squares made by Minnie Adkins about 30 years ago.  The top corner squares on each side are of Minnie and her late husband Garland Adkins.  The remaining squares are fabric reproductions of many of Minnie's familar carvings of local animals, both domestic and feral.  Another remarkable piece in that exhibition is by Howard Finster, who was arguably one of the best known of all American Folk artists.  For me personally, a favorite piece and one I had never seen in person despite having represented the artist, Donny Tolson, for a time is called "Dan'l Boone Kilt A Bar".    

It is a phenomenal carving of several separate pieces which have been fitted together to create a composite on a large, rounded wooden base of Daniel Boone in buckskins, knife in hand, in mortal combat with a large upright bear in a small grove of trees.  One of those trees even contains a small carved squirrel spectator.  The entire piece is about 2' x 12" x 16" roughly.  It is masterpiece of the woodcarver's art.  There are also numerous other pieces in this exhibition both of carvings and paintings.  This overall collection is well worth seeing any time you are in the area of Huntington, West Virginia.  The Minnie Adkins exhibition will be available until November 5, 2023.  The overall folk art exhibition will close on September 24, 2023. 

Minnie Adkins Day, July 15, 2023, Sandy Hook, Kentucky

 

Roger D. Hicks & Minnie Adkins

My wife Candice & I traveled to Sandy Hook, Kentucky, in neighboring Elliott County for our second visit to Minnie Adkins Day, an annual one day event which is named for the great Kentucky folk artist Minnie Adkins, whom I have known casually for somewhere near twenty years.  We are  not close friends but whenever I encounter Minnie she always remembers me and refers to me as "the auctioneer".  Minnie Adkins Day is a combination folk art show and sale which draws somewhere in the neighborhood of 75-100 artists and probably close to 1,000 visitors, cum customers, on a good dry day.  Yesterday did not turn out to be a good dry day. Candice & I arrived at about 11am and stayed for about two hours before leaving to go on to Grayson, Kentucky, in neighboring Carter County for lunch at Tres Hermanos Nunez, a pretty fair Mexican restaurant chain in Eastern Kentucky and Southern Ohio.  We decided to leave the event just as we saw ominous clouds moving in from the west and were told by some artists who were watching their cell phones that the weather was headed our way from the Lexington area.  

 

But considering the short time we were there, we  had a most excellent day. I got to see Minnie, converse with her for a short while, (there is always a line to see Minnie, say a few words, and get a photo with her if you want one)  got the photo together which I had never done in our many encounters.  Just in front of me in line to see Minnie was a couple whom I did not recognize but I heard someone refer to the man as Randy Yohe which was a great serendipitous meeting.  Randy is now retired from WSAZ-3 TV in Huntington, West Virginia, and works for West Virginia Public Radio.  I had seen Randy in 1996 when he did a story about me when I was chosen as an Olympic Torch Bearer for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.  I had carried the torch in Covington, Kentucky, and Randy and his camera person had filmed footage with me at Morehead State University, where I was a non-traditional student at the time, and in Covington where I carried the torch in a driving rain at 10pm.  I had liked Randy a lot at the time, followed his work in a limited way while he was still working at WSAZ, and lost track of him when he retired from there.  I introduced myself to Randy and his wife as soon as I had my brief time with Minnie and we reminisced about the Torch Run, caught up on what both of us had been doing in the past 27 years, made a plan for a possible meeting at another event I will be attending in West Virginia next year, and moved on.  

 

Then I checked in with my friend folk artist Brent Collinsworth who lives in nearby Wolfe County and is also a well respected Kentucky folk artist.  I have several pieces of Brent's work in my collection of folk art and we converse fairly regularly.  But it is always good to make contact with him anytime.   He had a few new pieces which I had not seen but, since I had bought a few from him not long ago during a visit to his home, I never bought any of his work yesterday. The crowd at Minnie Adkins Day is generally too large for old friends to converse with the artists except for a few brief words and I quickly moved on to other encounters with a couple of people I knew and a few I  had never met.  

I also made a point to find another local Elliott County folk artist, Tim Lewis, whose specialty is carved and painted wooden birds.  I had seen one of Tim's birds in a visit to Brent's house a few months ago and, due to having had a flock of relatively rare evening grosbeaks at our house for about two months from early March to early May, I had decided to ask Tim is he would accept a commission to carve and paint me an evening grosbeak.  We worked out the gist of the details but I still need to send Tim some photos of the grosbeaks and pay him for the carving which I will do in a visit to his house in a few days.  Tim's work is fairly well known across Kentucky and the adjoining states and he has a few pieces in regional folk art museums.  

Then I had another very serendipitous meeting with someone I have known on Facebook only for quite a while. Candice had moved around on her own in her power wheelchair and was talking to two women at their booth. They are a mother and daughter from the Elliott County area and do work primarily using found objects. Candice had found a piece she wanted, a nesting hen made from a folding cardboard fried chicken box.  We decided to buy that piece and while I was writing the check for it to the mother, I asked what name I needed to put on the check and the daughter said, "Use mine, Misty Skaggs."  I turned and realized that she was my Facebook contact and said, "My name is Roger Hicks.  Does that mean anything to you?"  Of course it did since we share the same liberal politics in general and have often been found on the same side of Facebook discussions of the seriously destructive problems in the country which have been perpetrated over the last several years by TRAITOR Trump and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican party.  Misty's mother's name is Bonita Parsons and she was the creator of Candice's chicken.  Candice then decided to stay and spend some time talking with Misty and Bonita while I went around to see what else I could see and whom I might meet.  

Then, as I was walking across the field toward more artist's booths, I met a man walking toward the food booths who recognized me from last year at the event where Candice & I bought a piece from him which hangs in our dining area.  Scott McQueen is his name and he is retired from several years as a minister before retiring and becoming a folk artist.  He lives in Alabama and always comes to the Minnie Adkins Day events.  

Then I ran into Tom Clark from Lexington, Kentucky, who used to run a large gallery there and whom I had encountered at several auctions or folk art events.  He was selling a part of his large collection and we talked for a while about several artists and an art dealer we had known in the past. Someone had also heard Minnie refer to me as an auctioneer and pulled me aside to tell me that a young artist at another booth was in the process of becoming an auctioneer and would like to talk to me.  We conversed for a while and I told him what I could about my experiences in running an auction house, conducting several good estate auctions in several Kentucky counties, and one or two firmly held beliefs I have about how auctions should be run, how a good to great auction crew is put together and my favorite little bit of wisdom that "at every auction someone is in charge, either the crowd or the auctioneer and it should never be the crowd."  Then I realized that bad weather was moving in and hurried over to get Candice and leave.  We just got into the van when the rain started coming down and went to Grayson for lunch. Misty Skaggs communicated to me by Facebook today and told me that most of the artists and late staying customers got really wet in a driving rain after we left.  All together it was a great day!