Interesting Ideas

The Spanish keep calm when it comes to business names.

Charlevoix, Michigan, developer Earl Young’s constructions showed a personal vision almost from the first house he built, starting in 1918, but fortunately the vision had several decades in which to fully flower. Even without their wacky appearance, the “mushroom houses” he went on to plant in Charlevoix would be interesting as examples of progressive residential architecture ahead of the post-war building boom. But their oddity makes them a unique case of one man successfully expressing a highly idiosyncratic vision across a whole swath of city.

A recent visit to the Souls Grown Deep/Bill Arnett art warehouse in Atlanta was even more mind boggling than reports had led me to expect. The space was bigger and the profusion of work more out of control. A modest selection was more or less set out for easy viewing, but that represented only a fraction of the collection. There were boxes and racks and cases and cartons of work spread around two massive rooms, corrals of sculpture, stacks of drawings, piles of books — just what you’d expect from a collecting mission that has outrun any efforts to organize

Salt and pepper shakers pack concentrated meanings into tiny packages — miniature appliances, little foods, dwarf monuments, pint-size people, tiny bits of abstraction. They can be elegant or kitschy, modern or backward looking, but at best they resonate in a myriad of ways. Visit the Gallery