Artwork Details
- Title
- River House
- Artist
- Date
- 1980
- Location
- Dimensions
- 23 3⁄4 x 16 1⁄2 x 14 in. (60.3 x 41.9 x 35.5 cm.)
- Credit Line
- Gift of Benjamin P. Nicolette
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- wood, construction board, paperboard, metal, and dirt
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Object — other — sign
- Architecture Exterior — detail — stairs
- Architecture Exterior — commercial — grocery
- Object Number
- 1994.92
Artwork Description
William Christenberry bases most of his sculptures on structures that he has seen and photographed in his native Alabama. River House, on the other hand, recalls the artist’s “evocative feeling of a childhood memory” of fishing on the Black Warrior River in West Central Alabama. After spending a lazy morning catching catfish, Christenberry and his father often docked at this riverbank restaurant to enjoy Vienna sausages, crackers, and Coca-Cola. The red soil, which Christenberry collects on his yearly trips home, draws an immediate connection between the artwork and the Alabama landscape of the artist’s youth. For Christenberry, memorializing this scenery is an act of ownership. “If I can’t possess the real thing,” he explains, “I’m going to make something that comes pretty close.” (Interview with the artist, December 20, 2005)
Works by this artist (338 items)
Audio
River House
1980, wood, construction board, paperboard, metal, and dirt
WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY
Born: Tuscaloosa, Alabama 1936
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Videos
An interview with the artist William Christenberry. As a young man, William Christenberry often traveled the back roads of the South with his father. He studied painting as a graduate student at the University of Alabama until he discovered James Agees book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Christenberry was moved when he realized that the tenant farmers in Walker Evanss photographs were people he remembered from growing up near Hale County, Alabama. Although Christenberry creates many different kinds of art, ranging from photographs to drawings to sculptures, his experiences growing up in the South serve as the subjects for most of his artwork.