The 2011 Kennedy Center Honors were bestowed on five giants from the world of the arts — not just for a single role or a certain performance, but for a lifetime of greatness. The recipients, Yo Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Barbara Cook, Neil Diamond and Sonny Rollins, were honored at the White House in December.

He Shot Rock ‘n’ Roll Too

How many roads must a man walk down
Before they call him a man?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
– Bob Dylan

Glynn Wilson

Rowland Scherman at Art Folk, Inc., “We Shot Rock ‘n’ Roll” (See video, links and purchasing information below)

by Glynn Wilson

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Running into Rowland Scherman at the “We Shot Rock ‘n’ Roll” show the other day made me think of a story I picked up from a professor who taught a class at the University of Alabama on the history of “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a story packed with advice about how to live life and succeed.

Scherman was in town for a special show at a downtown gallery since none of his works were included in the Birmingham Museum of Art show going by a similar name out of Brooklyn, New York. When I saw the announcement about the Museum of Art show, I planted the idea on Facebook to get Rowland back down here, since his name was not on the list of photographers and I knew he had some of the most iconic pictures from the beginnings of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

At the time Rowland was running Joe bar on Birmingham’s Southside in the early 1980s, I was a student of journalism and photography at the University of Alabama, fully engrossed in reading authors like Hunter S. Thompson, and ordering Bass Ale, because that’s what Thompson drank at the Watergate Hotel. Joe was about the only place in Birmingham you could get it then.

The professor in question, Jim Salem in Tuscaloosa, liked to say when the bus pulls up to the station, no matter what your dream, you better have your bags packed and be ready and willing to get on that bus and go. When opportunity knocks, that is, you get on the bus.

Photographer Rowland Scherman got on that bus, in 1957, and he’s still on it, although sometimes these days, it’s a train or a plane taking him to the big picture.

Let’s just say Rowland Scherman was there, for some of the most important cultural moments of the 1960s and beyond.

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Guest Column
by David Underhill

MOBILE, Ala. – When a pope hired Michelangelo to paint his chapel in the Vatican, the risk was that the impulses of art would violate piety. But popes were lusty enough then to take the chance.

When one branch of the Rockefeller family hired Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to decorate the lobby of their rising Rockefeller Center in New York, they knew he was a lefty. But this was the agitated 1930s and they were patrons of the arts. Rivera’s brush depicted his beliefs, and another branch of the family was aghast. They recruited jackhammer vandals to pulverize the painting by night.

When Maine hired a painter to create an interior mural for the state’s labor department building a few years ago, they didn’t have to fret. In this tamed time public art would not be bothersome. The 11-panel work displays labor history in a style that shies from the thrusting, heroic proletarians once traditional for such projects (see below). Scenes of historic events are static and drab, and figures in them are as stiff and blank as store mannequins. Even strikes look sedate.

But this neutered composition riled the new governor of Maine, who’s deeply steeped in Tea Baggery. He decreed it contrary to his labor department’s “pro-business goals” and ordered its removal.

Maine’s Republican Governor (Paul LePage) Censors Union Workers in Wall Art

The changing trajectory of grand-scale artistic taste swiftly arced from Maine to Mobile. Emblems of the alternate order have appeared at the Chamber of Commerce headquarters on the main street through downtown. And they are not discreetly tucked inside. They are up front and out front, celebrating 175 years of the Chamber’s history in Mobile.

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I caught up with Manuel Cuevas at the Day of the Dead celebration on Birmingham’s Southside Tuesday night and got him to explain the purpose behind the event.

Manuel is the designer who turned Johnny Cash into the “Man in Black” and put Elvis in a jumpsuit, according to biographies on the Web, including a story from National Geographic and Wikipedia and his own Website.

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The Friends of the Locust Fork River will sponsor a public presentation by award winning photographer Beth Maynor Young entitled Headwaters: A Journey on Alabama Rivers, for The Covered Bridge Festival, Thursday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m.

The event will be held at the Lester Memorial United Methodist Church Fellowship Hall in Oneonta, Alabama.

The work is from Young’s new book on Alabama rivers and will highlight the Locust Fork River and the Black Warrior watershed.

For more information, contact Leigh Lynn at Leigh@uab.edu or (205) 915-5493.

The National Shrimp Festival will be held in Gulf Shores, Alabama, October 7-10, in spite of the mess from the BP-Halliburton oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, organizers confirm.

Celebrating its 39th year, the festival has historically attracted about 300,000 people who come to view fine arts and crafts from more than 200 artists, partake of Gulf seafood, and take in the continuous musical entertainment on the beach.

Chances are the turnout will be down significantly this year due to the oil-stained beaches and polluted air over the Gulf. But it should be fun anyway.

Glynn Wilson

Bob Taylor the metalsmith peddling his wares at the Magic City Art Connection at Linn Park in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. [Click on this link or the image for more photos].

The Magic City Art Connection, a FREE contemporary art festival with more than 200 exhibiting artists, children’s art activities, music, food and more, is this weekend in Linn Park in Downtown Birmingham, April 23-25, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Get a preview of the 2010 Magic City Art Connection Exhibiting Artists…and other programming schedules at the Website MagicCityArt.Com.

To order advance $25 tickets for Corks & Chefs, call 205-595-6306, or pay the $30 at the door.

I have to admit to being more schooled in science than in art, having been forced in the Jefferson County, Alabama, public school system to choose only one art. I chose the high school band and played the drums. So I never got to take an art class.

Even in college, as a print journalism major and a political science minor, I never had to take an art appreciation class.

Into my master’s and Ph.D. years in the 1990s, I spent most of my time studying science and communications research.

But as I crest middle age and once again take up the camera, I find myself more and more interested in art.

What is art? What makes it special or mundane?

I learned something of art from my close friend Spider Martin, an artist turned photographer. He idolized the artistic genius Pablo Picasso, not only for his art but for his personal life as a renowned womanizer.

I can only know what I read about his personal life, but looking at his art work it is clear he has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude.

His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey a myriad of intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages, according to James Voorhies with the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Picasso’s creative styles transcend realism and abstraction, Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism and Expressionism.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Pablo Picasso’s depiction of the dying bull at the end of a Spanish bullfight

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