Southern Agenda: December 2016/January 2017

Washington, D.C.

“I think we’re the only snowball fight in the world that has an official logo,” says Michael Lipin of the Washington D.C. Snowball Fight Association. The organization’s formal title and branding, however, are totally tongue-in-cheek, and the only thing you have to do to join the ranks is show up—no inside-the-Beltway red tape to negotiate. Every winter since 2009, Lipin and his co-conspirators have invited hundreds and sometimes thousands of revelers to a free-for-all battle in different D.C. locales; this year, Dupont Circle hosts the skirmish. The group has also inspired satellite contests in nearby Arlington. Because nobody can reliably predict when Mother Nature will supply the required five or six inches of snowfall, the organizers won’t be able to announce the date until just days beforehand. Stay in the loop on Facebook, and keep your gloves handy. When the storm inevitably comes—last January’s Snowzilla was one for the books, dumping twenty-eight inches on Washington—hundreds of whizzing snowballs won’t be the city’s only flurry of winter-weather activity. In 2015, Congress allowed sledders back on the most famous slope in the country—Capitol Hill—for the first time since the pastime was banned in 1876. A snow day is a government shutdown we can all get behind. —facebook.com/DCSFA

Stitches in Time

For the Great Depression generation, “getting creative” was less about the pursuit of art than about survival. But that didn’t mean there was no beauty to be found. Take quilter Ada Chitwood Jones, who in 1934 salvaged sock tops from the W. B. Davis hosiery factory in Fort Payne, Alabama, near her home in Fyffe, to piece together two of her most famous quilts. Today one of them belongs to the Smithsonian. The other will be on display as part of Sewn Together: Two Centuries of Alabama Quilts at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (January 28–April 16), along with nearly thirty other heritage quilts made in the Yellowhammer State, which, as the ladies of Gee’s Bend can tell you, has a rich quilting tradition. “From a young age, girls in Alabama were taught to sew, and quilts were an example of something useful they could make,” says the exhibit’s co-curator Ryan Blocker. “Not only are they utilitarian, they are beautiful works of art and a record of history.” The exhibition will display quilts in pairs—one example from the nineteenth century alongside a more modern version, showing how patterns and techniques such as piecing, appliqué, and hand stitching have evolved. But one element remains unchanged: the love sewn into every stitch. —mmfa.org

Splash Landing

Nobody’s really sure why a group of trumpeter swans winters on a tiny oxbow lake in Arkansas each year. Native to the northwestern United States, Alaska, and Canada, the snow-white birds rarely migrate farther south than Ohio. “There has been a lot of speculation, but I think a family of them was flying south and ran into bad weather,” says wildlife photographer Larry Jernigan of the three swans that first appeared on Magness Lake, two miles from his home near Heber Springs, in 1993. “Three pulled into our nice-looking pond and stayed.” No matter why the swans stopped, their presence—in the Natural State and beyond—is something of a miracle. Early settlers prized the enormous birds (whose wingspan can reach ten feet) for meat and feathers, and trumpeters were nearly extinct by the early twentieth century. Aggressive conservation efforts helped their numbers begin to rebound around the same time those original wayward swans showed up in Arkansas. Nowadays, more than three hundred descend on Magness Lake in late November and stay through February. Strong family ties mean the same birds return year after year. And Jernigan thinks he knows the reason. “Visitors like to feed the swans corn,” he says. “That Southern hospitality keeps them coming back.” —agfc.com

Reality Star

An independent spirit even by the art world’s standards, Frida Kahlo—known for her striking self-portraits—wasn’t a fan of labels. “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t,” she once said. “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Her otherworldly imagery is the subject of a new exhibition in St. Petersburg, Frida Kahlo at the Dali (December 17–April 17). Fifteen of her paintings will appear at the Dali Museum alongside seven drawings and a large assemblage of personal photographs. Organizers planted the museum’s gardens with oleander, bougainvillea, and yucca—many of the same botanicals that Kahlo grew in Mexico City—to serve as an outdoor extension of the show. “She would go out every day to tend her flowers and plants,” says Hank Hine, the museum’s executive director. “Her garden was an essential part of her identity and life.” Visitors can also sign up for a journaling workshop (Kahlo was a lifelong diarist), or take part in a hands-on cooking class (she was renowned for throwing dinner parties) to re-create some of the artist’s favorite dishes, such as a pomegranate and cactus salad. With so much on offer, you don’t even have to own a paintbrush to walk away from this exhibit inspired. —thedali.org

Keyed Up

Ike Stubblefield is used to sharing the stage with world-class talent; in his fifty-year-long career, the Atlanta-based keyboard legend has backed the likes of Al Green, B. B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Temptations. Today he jams with Widespread Panic and Derek Trucks. And on December 2, he’ll have more high-wattage company when two other Peach State players—Lloyd Buchanan, a native of LaGrange, Georgia, who tours with Alabama Shakes, and the Atlanta blues queen Lola Gulley—join him for a special showcase at Macon’s Douglass Theatre. When the artists aren’t hotdogging on the ivories during the ExploreGeorgia.org Songwriter Series, they’ll be swapping stories about their shared passion—one that spans decades, gigs, and genres. “We can go from jazz to blues to gospel to funk,” Stubblefield says. “The keyboard is an amazing instrument.” —exploregeorgia.org

Bluegrass Revival

In Kentucky, if you’re looking to fill in a blank limb on your family tree, check out a rare collection of bourbon bottles, or dive deep into the history behind some of the state’s most storied homes, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville is your one-stop research shop. The society has been archiving Bluegrass State history since 1884, so it’s understandable that by 2014, the group’s home—the Beaux-Arts-style Ferguson Mansion—was quite literally filled to the rafters. Two years and $12.4 million later, Kentucky’s oldest privately funded historical society has some much-needed elbow room. Completely gutted and expanded, the 111-year-old building and its carriage house reopened this fall with an enlarged footprint that includes a conservation lab, exhibition space, and lots of room for guests to pore over the records. Expect some things to stay the same, though, such as the society’s annual holiday reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” (December 12). Don’t be surprised if you leave with a hankering for fruitcake and whiskey, both of which figure prominently in the beloved tale. —filsonhistorical.org

Cause for Celebration

Born in 1960 as the youngest of a crawdad trapper’s eight children, Al Berard grew up poor but found riches in the wealth of zydeco, Cajun, Creole, and blues music played near his Atchafalaya Basin home. He mastered the guitar by age eleven and went on to become one of the area’s most prominent multi-instrumentalists. His fiddle playing even earned him a Grammy nomination. When he died of an aneurysm, in 2014, his friends and family put together the Al Berard Music Festival, held this year on December 3 at the NUNU Arts and Culture Collective in Arnaudville, near Lafayette. “All the musicians who will perform knew my father or played music with him onstage,” Berard’s daughter and festival organizer Laura Huval says of the lineup, which includes zydeco and blues accordion player Major Handy and the Cajun supergroup the Traiteurs. Proceeds from the event support local student musicians. “It’s a beautiful gift to give an instrument to a kid,” Huval says. Her father would surely agree. —alberard.com

Sugar and Spice

Folk Heart

Used to be, January was one of the few months when tourists weren’t pouring into Asheville. So much for that. The tenth annual Winter Warmer Festival will bring nearly two thousand beer enthusiasts to the mountain city on January 21. Forty-some Tar Heel State breweries, including Asheville’s Hi-Wire, Durham’s Fullsteam, and Farmville’s Duck-Rabbit, will set up temporary shop inside the U.S. Cellular Center, serving four-ounce samples by the souvenir glassful. (And nonalcoholic beverages for the designated drivers.) “Some breweries bring their favorites, and others see it as an opportunity to test the market,” says organizer Lauronda Morrow. “We don’t limit them.” Try as many as you like, but be sure to stop and refuel: Last year, chef Joe Scully of Chestnut and Corner Kitchen catered a complimentary buffet. In the dead of winter, what more can you ask for than all-you-can-drink local beer and a warm hearty meal? —ashevillebeerfest.com

Ghostly Hoofbeats. Skeleton Trail. Death Rides the Night. Sure, the book titles grab your attention. But the dramatic covers are what really helped sell the pulp paperbacks that sparked the imaginations of many a midcentury wannabe cowboy. The scrappy artists who painted them rarely received the acclaim they deserved. “Sometimes, these artists only knew the titles of the books,” says Karen Spilman of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, in Oklahoma City. “Sometimes they got two or three paragraphs. They’d have to formulate what they wanted those covers to look like and then sit down and paint them—just like a fine artist would.” To give the underrepresented painters their due, Spilman organized The Artistry of the Western Paperback, an exhibit showcasing thirty-six outstanding covers that runs from January 21 to May 14. Some will be shown in their original form as books, others blown up to poster size, allowing visitors to fully appreciate the skill and attention to detail. This is one time when it’s perfectly fine to judge a book by its cover.  —nationalcowboymuseum.org

Buying a ready-made holiday wreath is convenient. But when two of Charleston’s most sought-after florists offer to share their time, talents, and pruning shears to teach you how to create your own showstopping door decor, how can you say no? The brainchild of Heather Barrie of Gathering and Anne Dabney of Stems, the Charleston Flower Workshop holds a series of hands-on seminars throughout the year, including two special wreath-making sessions on December 3. Sign up for a morning or afternoon class and observe how Barrie and Dabney use camellia leaves, boxwood, pine, cypress boughs, and bunches of juniper and holly berries harvested from nearby Wadmalaw Island, and then follow their lead. The lessons are held in a venue as gorgeous as all the greenery—the historic circa-1820 Aiken-Rhett House. A tip for making your handiwork last: “Once the wreath is hanging on your front door,” Barrie says, “spritz daily with a bottle of water to keep it looking fresh.” —charlestonflowerworkshop.com

Just getting onstage at the Mother Church of Country Music is a career-topping honor for plenty of bands, but Old Crow Medicine Show long ago passed that milepost with more than a dozen performances at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. “We think of them as something like our house band,” says the historic hall’s Lisaann Dupont. And each December 31, the banjo-picking, guitar-strumming, fiddle-playing, foot-stomping band comes home—along with some two thousand friends—for an one-of-a-kind New Year’s Eve show under the stained glass. Ryman regulars and fans from all over the country pack the well-worn wooden pews to be part of the midnight magic. And although the show isn’t the raucous, everything-goes revelry you’ll find outside on Broadway (thankfully), it’s not exactly subdued. When the clock strikes twelve, the band plays “Auld Lang Syne,” and then “it’s pandemonium for a few minutes,” Dupont says. “It’s the kind of communal experience that doesn’t happen when you’re in a plastic seat at an arena.” —ryman.com

The Stars at Night…

Dinner Date

Wild Things