The Barnstormer's Pilgrimage Down South
By David J Brown
(printed in Sculpture (magazine) and in the book, Artists Reclaim the Commons: New Works, New Territories, New Publics, ISC Press, edited by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer.
Let me share with you a little known fact that may come as some surprise: the mid-way point between the mega-metropolitan areas of Tokyo and New York is the town of Cameron, North Carolina. Picturesque Cameron is a small community approximately one hour south of Raleigh if you travel down U.S. Highway 1 until it intersects with Rural Route 24/27. With a population of less than 250 people spread among 50 or so families, this town is home to a countrified economy of small businesses that includes large farming tracts, small family-run hotels, and antique shops. Cameron was once well known for its turpentine industry until an infestation of the pine bark beetle decimated the source of the turpentine resin, the longleaf pine tree. Tobacco soon replaced the trees and barns for curing the tobacco leaf soon cropped up in fieblinking cursorlds and along roadsides. In the 1960s, bulk barns made of metal, named because of the more efficient mechanized system they used, replaced the traditional wood or gas-fired flue barns. Today littered along some of the roads that pass through the town, you can find any number of glorious old tobacco barns and other outbuildings in various states of repair and verticality, each adorned with a rich weathered patina, some sprouting vines like a wig of wild hairs.
Nobody knows for sure, but the estimate for the number of tobacco barns left standing in the state is somewhere between a generous 50,000 structures to perhaps several thousand. More certain is the state’s 300-year history of producing this contested leaf crop and its gradual demise. According to the North Carolina State Historic Preservation office, the peak of traditional tobacco cultivation was in the mid-20th Century, when there were almost half a million air-cured and flue-cured barns throughout the state. Along with recent catastrophic losses in the state’s textile and furniture industries, the dwindling of the tobacco farms makes the rural south a microcosm for the disappearance of the U.S. manufacturing industry in general—a disappearance that hits small communities very hard.
Cameron is an unlikely place for a social/community public art project, especially one that would forever change all of the participants involved and result in a groundbreaking museum exhibition. But that’s what happened when the large-scale collective known as the Barnstormers came to town. The Barnstormers are a unique group of artists, designers, and friends, headed by former North Carolinian David Ellis, who attended the North Carolina School of the Arts high school program before moving to Brooklyn in 1989. After viewing the seminal film Style Wars which celebrated the subway graffiti and street culture of New York, Ellis became inspired to begin painting on the sides of old barns and outbuildings on his parents’ farm.
Every year since his first Barnstorming visit back home with Tokyo-based artist Kami in 1999, Ellis has led as many as 30 people (from as far away as Japan and each highly accomplished in his or her own right) to Cameron to create large-scale, collective murals on a series of old barns, tractor-trailers, shacks, and farm equipment.
The citizens of Cameron opened themselves to the impulses of this multi-talented, creative group of artists: they provided food (donated by local restaurants and grocery stores and served in a school cafeteria), shelter (at the Holiday Inn and in private homes), supplies, found barns to paint, and, during late night outdoor painting sessions, light. The urban, hip-hop, hard-nosed, hit-and-run graffiti collided with the honest-working, down-home, southern-style hospitality, and the interaction profoundly affected both the group and the community at large. Jane Rogers was the school librarian while David was growing up and played a key role in making the Cameron project happen. She shared some humorous stories about some of the Barnstormers being scared at night by the “monstrous and horrible sounds” of what turned out to be roosters crowing. The ‘Stormers return to live the Cameron life every year and to spend time with their newly established extended family (to date they have painted over 40 structures). Their repeated journeys south have had a major impact on their work as they continue to interpret and communicate the visual, cultural, and spiritual awakenings from their projects there. As Ellis observes, “Looking back on the first trip, it was overwhelming. I wept uncontrollably several times. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but what did was an awakening. The two communities in my life, that in my head had nothing to do with one another, sat down at the table together, held hands, and became one.” Upon learning of this yearly pilgrimage and citing the connections between Ellis, the Triad region where SECCA is located, and our propensity for community projects, we invited the group to tackle the architecture of SECCA’s cavernous Main gallery in a celebration of their activities. In my initial discussion with Ellis, I suggested that the group might consider relocating one of the Cameron barns into our space to begin a time-based painting project that would alter and change as various members of the group visited the area. The Barnstormers took the bait and worked with SECCA in developing a series of works, that in combination, resulted in a retrospective of their work and pointed the unit in a new direction: a hybrid of sculptural works, sound, film, and paint.
Standing 20 feet tall, 30 feet long and 15 feet wide is the commanding work Barn (2004), painstakingly dismantled from a property owned by Earl and Juanita Harbour in Cameron and rebuilt, piece by piece, by Ellis, Mike Houston, Martin Mazorra, and several others of the group. Covered in paper and poison ivy out in the field, the structure was smartly re-designed (several additional features were added and the shape was altered to fit the space). Once a fading monument to the labor infrastructure that originally supported its upkeep, the barn now receives an almost continuous painting process on its south side. Each stroke of activity, including the dismantling in the field, rebuilding in the museum, all of the painting, the de-installation, and the reconstruction back at the original site is being digitally recorded for a future time-lapse film, with images snapped every seven seconds. While each of the Barnstormers paints on the barn one at a time, the film will serve to document the entire process, visible to the those who watch only after the barn is re-recycled back to its home.
Four other films, No Condition is Permanent (2001), Apostrophe (2002), Letter to the President (2003) (the group’s only political statement to date), and Joey Garfield’s The Barnstormers, a work in progress, (2004), are shown continuously, either on old TV-monitors, or in one case, projected down from the ceiling inside the barn. Except for Garfield’s work, these fifteen-minute motion paintings were recorded in time-lapse sequence with a ceiling-mounted camera shooting down over room-size canvases as members of the group, scurrying around like bees, produced a range of images from lush traditional oriental line-work to pigs and chickens, abstract shapes, and cryptic wordplay.
Outside the museum, perched on a raised hill, is a road-tested 18-wheeled tractor-trailer truck painted by several of the artists emblazoned with everything from several commingling patterns inspired by the fluid lines made by a skateboarder in motion to large multi-faceted diamonds. The abstract rolling work, lent to the museum by Midway Truck Rentals, a local company headed by Zeno Marshall and his son, will sustain an afterlife traveling throughout the country after the show closes. Mimicking the actual structures installed inside and out the building are the works House (2004) and Truck (2004), two billboard-size banners which again are receiving the never-ending group painting process . Both explode with a constantly changing array of bold pop culture icons, tiny delicate graphic images, and futuristic calligraphy, all thrown in the mix and somehow working together in a way all societies of the world should.
Imitating by the inventive make-do, keep-alive aesthetic of the poor, the Barnstormers fabricated Hive Mind Sound System (2004), a 150-speaker cabinet ghetto-blaster of absurd proportions made from recycled cast-off refrigerators, washing machines, automobile car tires, dining room tables, and other debris. This hillbilly wall-of-sound is perched on three, hand-built, wheeled wooden platforms pulled across the gallery floor by a refurbished International Harvest tractor. Musical selections, chosen by the group, pump out hundreds of hours of sounds via one iPod. This work, amongst other things, juxtaposes the rapid advances in technology in certain parts of the world with comparative stagnation in other areas. The work also helps support the Barnstorming process itself. Ellis agrees, “I conjure much of my content by turning up the music and just flowing. I collect a vast quantity of reference materials and consult it like an oracle but my biggest influence is my crew.”
In part homage to his father, a retired minister who has maintained a lifelong admiration for the purple martin, Ellis and crew created Gourd Tree (2004) and Gourd Line (2004), which feature 30 of the hard-shelled fruits that received the ‘Stormers treatment. High-hanging groups of gourds, painted a stark white, are used extensively throughout the South as important nesting places for the migratory purple martin and several other species of birds. Because of its crisp resonating qualities, the gourd has been used for centuries as musical instruments, such as the African kalimba or thumb-piano. Recognizing this quality, the enterprising Ellis has begun manufacturing the Gourd Speaker which is available for purchase via the Internet.
Rounding out the exhibition are twenty-four large-scale photographs by the artist GION, that chronicle many of the painted barns the group have worked on over the years in Cameron. Viewed through the glass windows in the hall leading to the gallery is an outdoor, ram shackled structure of doors, roofing, and wires titled Chicken House (2004), complete with live chickens, honking ducks, a rabbit, and one turtle.
With the advent of a four-lane expansion of U.S. Highway 1 that will be completed later this year, Cameron will soon be a turn-off, a destination site between Raleigh to the north and the golfing community of Pinehurst to the south. As the culture of this town continues to evolve, as the slowed down lifestyle begins to disappear, we can only hope that the community remains curious and open to groups like the Barnstormers and the wondrous effect this small community had on them.