This event was recorded on July 6, 2023 at Anderson Ranch Art Center during the 2023 Summer Series, in partnership with Aspen Public Radio.

Rebecca Morris (b. 1969 in Honolulu, Hawaii, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter deeply committed to abstraction, her work evolving and developing through an interrogation of materials, forms, processes, and outcomes. A showcase for her extensive arsenal of techniques and ideas, her ambitious large-scale canvases contain a personalized language of forms and compositions in differing manners of mark-making. Her work inventively explores questions of frame dynamics and figure/ground illusions, often within a remarkably shallow pictorial space. The results are enlivened by a sense of painterly improvisation and grounded by an underlying rationale – a combination that imbues the work with a feeling of the contemporary world while referring back to the very foundations of modernist abstraction.

Morris is the subject of a solo exhibition opening this September at the MCA Chicago. The show, curated by Jamillah James, is traveling from the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and looks at the past 21 years of Morris’ practice. Other significant shows include those at the Blaffer Art Museum, (2019); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland (2014); The Renaissance Society, (2005) and 356 Mission Rd. and LAXART in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2018); the Hammer Museum (2016); and the Whitney Biennial (2014). Her work is in various public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum ; The Hammer Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art; The Cleveland Art Museum; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; and the DePaul Art Museum.

Jenelle Porter is a curator and writer. From 2011 to 2015 she was Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she organized Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present and Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams, as well as monographic exhibitions of the work of Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, Christina Ramberg, Mary Reid Kelley, Arlene Shechet, and Erin Shirreff. Her exhibitions have twice been honored by the International Association of Art Critics. Most recently, she organized Kay Sekimachi for the Berkeley Art Museum; Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design for the ICA/Boston; and Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting for the Mike Kelley Foundation at Hauser & Wirth, New York. As Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005–10), Porter organized Dance with Camera and Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, the first museum surveys of Trisha Donnelly and Charline von Heyl, and numerous other projects. She has authored books and essays on art and artists including Kathy Butterly, Viola Frey, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Jay Heikes, Margaret Kilgallen, Liz Larner, Liza Lou, Ruby Neri, Stephen Prina, and Matthew Ritchie.

Porter is curating a survey for Los Angeles performance art pioneer, Barbara T. Smith, for ICA LA, opening October 2023. Among other book projects, she recently completed An Indigenous Present with artist Jeffrey Gibson (to be released in August 2023), a 450-page compendium that presents the work of 60 Native American and Indigenous visual artists, musicians, writers, architects, historians, and more.

This story begins outside Nashville, where country music legend Jimmy Fortune plays and records. Recently the Nelson County native got a call from a fan who wanted to commission a bronze statue in his honor. Woody Greenberg, with the Nelson County historical society, picks up the tale.

“Jimmy said he would allow a statue of him if he did one of Earl Hamner as well, because Jimmy considers Earl his inspiration for the story-telling that he does in his music,” he explains.

Earl Hamner is the area’s best known playwright – renowned for his story of a big farm family living in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the Depression and the Second World War. The Waltons would air on American television for nine seasons, winning an Emmy, a Peabody award and a suggestion from President George H.W. Bush that Americans should be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. Each episode began with some lines read by Hamner himself.

“There is something within us that tells us all we will ever know about ourselves. There is a destiny that tells us where we will be born, where we will live and where we will die. My people were drawn to mountains. They came when the country was young, and they settled in the upland country of Virginia.”

But it was likely the ending that Americans find memorable, as each member of the family wished the rest a good night, and the lights in their home blinked off.

The Waltons aired on CBS and was sold to Canadian television and the BBC. It was set in a fictitious community based on Schuyler in Nelson County where Hamner grew up and where Jimmy Fortune started his musical career. Again, local historian Woody Greenberg.

“Jimmy was playing up at Wintergreen, and Lou Dewitt from the Statler Brothers happened to be there, and he heard Jimmy sing. He was about to have surgery, so he recommended Jimmy to the Statlers, and they figured okay, when Lou Dewitt is out, Jimmy can take his place.”

After his surgery, Dewitt decided he would retire. Jimmy Fortune stayed with the Statlers for 21 years, enjoying his own moment of fame and following the fortunes of Earl Hamner.

“Jimmy considered Earl a kind of an idol, because he had made it so big,” Greenberg recalls. “He said when he was touring with the Statlers he would always try to find a Waltons TV show when he was in the hotel room. Jimmy comes from a big family. I think he was number 7 of 9 children, so I think he kind of related to the Waltons.”

This summer, the historical society had planned an exhibit on the musical heritage of Nelson County when Greenberg got a call from the man who commissioned those bronze statues of Fortune and Hamner. Would the organization like to have them? You bet! They’ll unveil the larger-than-life sculptures this Saturday.

“Jimmy’s not a tall person, but this statue looks like he’s about six and a half feet tall!” Greenberg says. “Earl was six feet tall, and Earl is sitting on a bench. Jimmy is standing across from him with his guitar, and it appears that Jimmy is singing to Earl.”

Before Hamner’s death, Fortune did play for the playwright, and he’ll do so again at the historical society on 29 South and at the high school Saturday night where he’ll be joined on stage by many of the musicians he knows from the neighborhood. That show is sold out, but the public is welcome to attend the unveiling of the statues at 11 a.m. and to tour exhibits on Hamner, Fortune and on other musicians of Nelson County. Organizers say Kami Cotler, who played Elizabeth Walton, will be on hand along with six other cast members on Zoom.