Tag: art

For now, WonderRoot is headquartered in a charmingly shabby bungalow on a gritty stretch of Memorial Drive. But never mind the urban setting; this ten-year-old community arts organization has taken a cue from farmers. Subscribers to community-supported agriculture (or CSA) programs pay growers a fee at the start of the season in exchange for baskets of locally harvested bounty. Four seasons ago, WonderRoot launched its own CSA—“community-supported art.”

Alabama didn’t end up with much oceanfront, but the towns tucked along Mobile Bay provide enough culture, architecture, and good food that visitors don’t miss the white sand. Fairhope, on the eastern side of the inlet, is just five hours or so from Atlanta and in some ways has more in common with Highlands, North Carolina, than sand-and-surf destinations like Panama City Beach.

You may not recognize the name Vera Neumann, but chances are if you’re of a certain age—say, old enough to remember The Mary Tyler Moore Show—her artwork is as familiar as your mom’s tuna noodle casserole.

“All my furniture needs to be charcoal gray,” says Carrie Penley—not necessarily because she loves the color, but to hide paint smears from her artist husband, Steve Penley, who walks around the house in freshly smudged clothes that look like a Jackson Pollock canvas.

I guess I never really got over the pottery wheel love scene with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in "Ghost." So when my husband mentioned casually, “Groupon is offering a half-off couples glassblowing class at Janke Studios,” I jumped right on it.

My last girls’ getaway to Savannah was chaperoning a gaggle of middle schoolers on the ritual pilgrimage to the home of Juliette Gordon Low: old-money Savannahian, fabulously feisty role model, and founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Liza Bryan likes to create interiors where fine antiques and carefully selected furnishings are the centerpieces, so imagine the designer’s disappointment upon hearing a new client say, “I don’t like furniture, and I don’t like antiques.”

It’s installation week for the blockbuster Atlanta Symphony Associates’ Decorators Show House, and Raymond Goins can hardly sit still. For Goins, a self-taught artist and furniture designer, the spring event is a debut of sorts: He’s decorated the entire master bath suite, his first solo showhouse space.