Sept/Oct 08 | Features

Best of the New South

50 people, places and things that make us proud

Album

Raising Sand

Nobody, with the possible exception of producer T Bone Burnett, could have imagined that the pairing of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss for the album Raising Sand would have resulted in such a successful melding of sounds. Plant, the former Led Zeppelin frontman, and Krauss, the leading voice of contemporary bluegrass, prove music has no barriers. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll, the album is like some bizarre chemistry experiment gone horribly right. (robertplantalisonkrauss.com)

Architect

John C. Williams, New Orleans, Louisiana

Spend any time speaking with John C. Williams and it’s evident that Brad Pitt and his Make It Right Foundation would have had a hell of a job finding anyone more qualified to rebuild New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. The designer of Emeril’s New Orleans, K-Paul’s, and a pending $200 million development along the Mississippi oversees an international team of world-class architects from Los Angeles to Ghana—all intent on reanimating New Orleans’ most devastated neighborhoods.

Williams is entranced by a vision of a Lower Ninth Ward of solar- and wind-powered homes with bioswales and vast new wetlands as barriers and filters for storm water. It’s a monumental task. Pre-Katrina, seventy-two churches stood in the Lower Ninth Ward. Today there are seven. Only 1,200 people live in a ward once home to 18,000. “There are meetings every week, and one-tenth of their people always go,” he says. “They’re hugely tenacious. They know they’re carrying the other 17,000 on their shoulders.” (williamsarchitects.com)

Art Gallery

Meredith Long & Company, Houston, Texas

When it comes to running a gallery, the true “art” of it is having a portfolio of artists stretching from, say, Albert Bierstadt, George Bellows, and Winslow Homer all the way to Peter Reginato and Frank Stella. Which means Meredith Long & Company may be the South’s best. It has the reach, clientele, and tasteful aesthetic that have lifted it above the rest for more than fifty years.

“We started championing American art in 1959,” says Meredith Long, the gallery’s proprietor. “There were a few galleries doing it in New York, but we were the Lone Ranger here in Houston, and the city has always supported us.”

Currently hanging at the gallery is the annual Fall Sporting Exhibition, which includes John Martin Tracy’s oil-on-board classic Red Heads and Ogden Pleissner’s evocative watercolor On a Scottish Grouse Moor. (meredithlonggallery.com; 713-523-6671)

Artist

John Folsom, Atlanta, Georgia