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Margaret Eby
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Shark Week
by Margaret Eby February 21, 2011
The photographs no longer functioned as trophies, but as records of animal life, glimpses into the natural world unsullied by humans. And this, for Bower, is where the trouble begins.
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Margot Wade’s Cabinet of Curiosities
by Margaret Eby August 2, 2010
But how do you construct a museum without the attendant effects of museumification? Birmingham-based artist Margot Wade discovered an elegant solution to this paradox: Keep living in the art. Wade, a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke, is turning her grandparents’ house into a museum, one that’s partially dedicated to her grandparents’ impressive art collection and partially a monument to her family history.
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The Blues is Dead, Long Live the Blues: The Most Southern Weekend on Earth
by Margaret Eby July 22, 2010
Which is why The Oxford American, a Southern literary journal based in Arkansas, chose Clarksdale as the site for their weekend-long shindig, a convention/festival/editorial vacation on July 9th and 10th entitled “The Most Southern Weekend on Earth.” The hundred or so intrepid festival-goers who descended on downtown Clarksdale managed to book out all the hotels and swamp the afterhours juke joints. Most of the Southern Weekend events were staged at Ground Zero, a newer blues club with a carefully curated rundown look opened by Clarksdale native Morgan Freeman—most of the locals refer to it simply as “Morgan Freeman’s place.” Along with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Freeman has been instrumental in the marketing of Clarksdale as a Southern tourist spot—a piece of authentic blues history, still kicking, still accepting donations.
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Bringing Out the Dead at the New York Historical Society
by Margaret Eby May 20, 2010
The New York Historical Society initially seems like an odd place to commemorate the achievements of the Grateful Dead, rubbing shoulders with artifacts of the American Revolution and John James Audubon’s watercolors. But browsing through the Society’s exhibit of items from the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, it begins to make sense. The Dead’s roving entourage included a number of graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers that rode along with the equipment crew, effectively creating a mobile artists commune.
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Who’s Afraid of Robert Moses?
by Margaret Eby March 29, 2010
Moses emerges as a kind of urban-studies super-villain, the tyrannical, automobile-friendly Goliath to Jacobs’ pedestrian-defending David. This is Disney movie stuff: the scrappy, bespectacled community advocate versus the big-government, cigar-chomping transportation boss. His policies are to blame for the city’s decline into near-bankruptcy; his eventual defeat by bands of Jacobs-inspired grassroots planners the reason for New York’s revival since the 1970s.
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