Chapter One: Reflections

Main Street was a little oasis of charm. I later called Boston, Georgia, “Mayberry with Spanish Moss.” The downtown, such as it was, consisted of a two-block long strip of brick storefronts. Several antique stores, the City Hall and two cafés were all lined up together. The vacant train depot sat at one end of the street and the police station guarded the other, like rusty bookends. A small park nestled in one corner with a picnic table.

My wife, Lori and I had moved to South Georgia only two months before. I was offered a position teaching art at Thomas University in nearby Thomasville. After a whirlwind of packing and unpacking and settling in to our new house, we started venturing out to the surrounding communities to see what we could find. Several acquaintances had recommended Boston for its personality and quaintness.

The first shop Lori and I walked into was Reflections Antiques. It was housed inside the old post office building. The original wooden counter and mail slots were still intact. Exposed brick and cracked plaster walls surrounded glass cases and stained wooden shelves. The musty aroma of old books filled the space. At the back there was a staircase illuminated by a single light fixture leading to the second floor. After browsing for several minutes we made our way across the large room and up the stairs. On the second floor, boxes and shelves crammed with notebooks and pillows were stacked around. A series of walking paths were carved through the clutter. It felt more like a forgotten attic in an abandoned house than part of the store. After a while of stumbling through the maze of dust and adjusting to the dimly lit space, something caught Lori’s eye.

In the corner, resting on top of a rugged wooden crate filled with ledgers and papers was a collection of several loosely bound sketchbooks and a wide layout pad. Lori quickly realized the pages were filled with original pencil sketches and studies. Underneath the pads there was a seemingly endless mound of other tattered drawings and watercolors. They obviously had some age to them. The style of the work had a distinctly Regionalist flavor. Whoever drew them had been well trained. After a little poking around, we found a couple of signatures of the artist, Jack Adams. Without knowing the history of the building, the family, the town or anything, we instantly fell in love with the artwork.  It was a tantalizing mystery. Who was this person? Why were these drawings left behind? Did the artist who made these go on to be someone significant in the art world? Was the artist still alive? For me, this initial fascination slowly grew into an obsession.

Together, Lori and I thumbed through all the artwork we could find. Mostly there were landscapes drawn in various media from pencil to compressed charcoal to ink wash and watercolor. Many of them were half-eaten by mold and mildew. Even the ones that were intact had some degree of water damage. There were incomplete sketches and fully rendered compositions. In addition to drawings there were a few pages of color linoleum cut prints sandwiched in the back of one pad along with several copies of one etching of a strip mine.

Musk of time and forgotteness

A taste of sweet death lingers on the floor

Seeping into wood grain

Shadows stain across these remnants

Calling them back to primordial clay

Lori and I picked out a small stack of our favorite pieces and carried them downstairs. We offered the lady at the register $25 for the lot and she agreed. In passing, I asked her if she knew anything about the artist. She said she didn’t know much, but that someone at the library might be able to tell us more. She remembered that some of the family had just been in town the week before for a funeral.

With our curiosities piqued, Lori and I walked down the block to the Boston Carnegie Public Library. The librarian on duty explained that one of the surviving members of the Adams family happened to be a friend of hers. She told us she was glad to give us her friend’s contact information, but she would need to make sure it was okay before doing so. The librarian asked us to call or come back the next day.

As soon as the library opened the following afternoon I called and spoke to the same woman. She was able to give me the telephone number for her friend, Mary Ann Mayo Brown, a second cousin to Jack who lived in Florida. The librarian also confirmed that Mary Ann had been in town for a funeral just the week before.

The following weekend I gave Mary Ann a call. A pleasant voice answered the phone. After some initial cordiality I explained my reason for calling. I asked her to clarify who Jack was. Mary Ann patiently walked me through a rough outline of the Adams family tree. She explained that her great-grandparents, JC and “Big Mama” Adams, had two sons, Redden and Roy. Redden was Mary Ann’s grandfather. Roy was the father of Jack Adams, the artist that had created the artwork. Mary Ann seemed favorable to my intentions of learning more about the artist, but I sensed there was only so much she was willing to share about him. Before we ended our conversation, Mary Ann gave me the names and phone numbers of Penelope Penland and Deanna Ramsey, sisters that were Jack’s nieces related to his side of the Adams family.  She mentioned that Penelope was the one who had been closest to Jack and was the better person to ask.

In spite of what Mary Ann had said, I first tried to contact Deanna because she lived in Thomasville. I thought she would be easier to reach. I called a few times over the course of two weeks and left a couple of messages on her answering machine, to no avail. I decided to quit trying before I was accused of harassment. Instead, I gave Penelope a call. But, again, I had to leave a message and did not get a response. At that point I thought the trail had run cold.

Silence is a way of denying the past

Ignoring present and stifling the future

It is louder than words ever will be

                                                    

Six months after finding the artwork, I met a group of artists who were interested in starting a cooperative art space in Boston. At our first official meeting, we decided to call ourselves the Accidental Gallery. It was a perfect name for us as we were a mixed bag of artists with vastly different interests and backgrounds. By coincidence, we found out there was another Accidental Gallery. It happened to be located in Boston, Massachusetts. Someone from our group contacted the other gallery to ask if they thought it was a problem for us to share the name. Needless to say, they had no issue with it.

At that time I was fixated on the idea of exhibiting Jack’s artwork in public spaces around Boston. I wanted to showcase the artwork that had been created by one of Boston’s citizens who seemed to be forgotten. At that point I had not stopped to consider why he might have been forgotten. Soon after our Accidental Gallery opened, I shared with the other member-artists my idea to have an exhibit of Jack’s work. They all seemed in favor of it. Sandi Shaw, the organizer and defacto leader of our group marked it down on the list of future events.

At one of the gallery’s first organizational meetings a friend of Sandi’s, Ann McCrickard, was in attendance. Ann was the owner of the old post office building and had originally opened Reflections Antiques, the shop where Lori and I found Jack’s work. She later had someone else take over the business. By the time the Accidental Gallery formed, Reflections Antiques had closed. As a member of several community organizations, Ann was still heavily invested in efforts to revitalize Boston’s downtown area. She was interested in being involved and helping the gallery succeed.

That night we spoke briefly about Jack Adams and his artwork. Ann was curious how I had come to own some of the drawings. She explained to me that she instructed the woman running the antique store not to sell any of the drawings. When Ann and her late husband, Michael, bought the building it was a disaster area. They had to launch into a massive cleanup effort to make the space suitable for turning into a store. Their long-term goal was to have a shop downstairs with a living space above. During this process they found Jack’s sketchpads. Upon Michael’s insistence they took most of them home with the intention of preserving the artwork.

Though she never said so, I could tell Ann was hoping somehow to get the work back from us. She may have hoped I would offer to return it. But, as I shared with her my desire to preserve the work properly and exhibit it throughout Boston, Ann seemed to make peace with the idea of us having part of it. Meanwhile, I was excited to learn there was more of his work that survived.

Ann whole-heartedly supported the exhibition. She agreed to lend what she had in her collection for the show. At a later meeting Ann brought her stack of Jack’s sketchbooks for me to look through. I took them home to examine them more closely. The images she and Michael had saved consisted primarily of figure studies. Many seemed to be classroom studies of live models. Others were candid poses of people working or sitting in public spaces. They all demonstrated the same level of quality and technical facility as the landscapes.

After studying all of the drawings and watercolors together, Lori and I chose twenty pieces that best represented Jack’s work. About half of them were from our collection, and the other half was Ann’s. The work was mounted on white mat board to emphasize the crude edges of the paper. Then, they were secured in black wooden frames.

The date for the opening reception of the exhibition was set for February 17, 2012. The show was entitled, Jack Adams: Boston’s Native Son. It happened to be the first event scheduled in celebration of Boston’s 175^th Anniversary.

I wanted to write a short biography of Jack Adams for the show based on what information I could find out about him. In an effort to help me with this, Ann visited the Adams family gravesite at the Boston Cemetery. She gave me the correct birth and death dates of all the family members buried there. As the date for the exhibition drew nearer, I still felt like I needed to have more information about the artist.

I had to try contacting Penelope once more. This time, with a little searching around on the Internet, I found an email address for her. I sent her a short message explaining who I was and that I was contacting her to get information about Jack. Luckily, within a day she responded enthusiastically to my message.  We agreed on a time to have a conversation by phone to discuss Jack and his artwork.

As it turns out, Penelope was the missing piece to the puzzle. Penelope was very willing to share her memories of Jack, whom she dearly loved. At first, she explained in general terms that Jack had been a student at the University of Georgia and studied under Lamar Dodd. He had been drafted into the Army and served during World War II. Sometime after the war Jack moved to New York City. She hesitantly mentioned he was gay and had been estranged from his family in the last years of his life. In fact, Penelope acknowledged she was the only one in the family to maintain a close relationship with him after he moved to New York. 

After listening to Penelope’s recollections of Jack, I realized the exhibit was not about rediscovering one of Boston’s lost treasures. It took on a new significance. The show was about redeeming the name of someone the town had tried to forget. Jack Adams was not Boston’s native son. He was the black sheep of a family who did not want to claim him anymore.

During our conversation I told Penelope that I was curating an exhibition of Jack’s drawings. She immediately grew very excited and offered to help in any way she could. Penelope had been the executor of Jack’s will. She had saved many photographs, papers, letters and small personal trinkets from his estate, but she never knew about the existence of the sketchbooks.

About two weeks later I received a package in the mail. On my request Penelope sent a CD of scanned photographs of Jack at various points in his life. She also included copies of letters from his mentor, Lamar Dodd. After reviewing all of the material I picked out several photographs and had them printed and mounted on foam board for display. I copied the Dodd letters and arranged them in a notebook. The photographs and letters became part of the exhibit and served to contextualize the artwork.

A few weeks before the exhibition I mailed postcards announcing the exhibition. I made sure to include Penelope, Mary Ann and Deanna. Sandi and Ann arranged an article in the local newspaper. Flyers were also distributed to local businesses. The show was gathering steam and creating quite a stir in the community.

Mary Ann confirmed she would attend the exhibition and agreed to bring the few pieces of Jack’s artwork that were in her possession. One of them was an oil painting on canvas of her mother, Mary Adams. Mary Ann explained, “I believe the portrait Jack did of my mother was done when she was around 21 years old. It may have even been a wedding gift, but certainly it was done around 1936-38.” This was, of course, during the years that Jack was in school at University of Georgia.

Haile McCullum, a well-known designer and business owner in Thomasville, also received an announcement about the exhibit. She contacted the gallery to ask if we were interested in displaying a drawing of Jack’s that she owned. Interestingly, Haile had come upon Jack’s work in much the same way Lori and I had. She happened to be visiting Boston one day and stopped in Reflections Antiques to shop around. She described making her way up to the second floor and walking gingerly around the boxes and shelves. She found the same stack of sketchbooks piled on top of the wooden box hiding in the corner. She picked through all the notebooks and remnants just as Lori and I had. The piece that caught her eye was a matted and framed drawing of the New York skyline, titled Manhattan Morning and dated 1936.

Sandi convinced the gallery’s landlord to let us use the vacant retail space next door for the exhibition. This meant we were able to hang the Adams work in one room and have the gallery member’s work on display right next to it. Logistically, this proved to be a great decision.

On the day of the opening, I arrived several hours before the reception. In the room with Jack’s work, I unfolded a table to display the letters and a guest book. I propped the photographs of Jack on tabletop easels. I also brought in several large painting easels to present the artwork lent by Mary Ann and Haile. I spaced the easels around the gallery among the framed pieces that hung on the wall. 

A respectable crowd of people from the community attended the reception.  The mayor of Boston made an appearance, as did several of my colleagues, including Dr. Gary Bonvillian, President of Thomas University. Some of my students also came, lured by the promise of extra credit. Mary Ann and her husband, Jimmy, drove several hours to deliver their paintings and see the show. Deanna and her husband, Richard, arrived later in the evening. All the member-artists pitched in to make it a flawless evening.

After the gallery exhibit was over, Ann and I talked about hanging the work in locations around town so others in the community could experience it. We chose locations with the highest traffic. Ann secured a place in the lobby of City Hall to show three of the watercolors. The owners of the Main Street Café, a popular local restaurant, agreed to hang six drawings in their dining room. A week after the reception Ann and I delivered the chosen pieces to their respective venues. The remaining work stayed on the wall next door to the gallery. 

The success of the event only fueled my desire to uncover more about Jack Adams. I was interested in digging further into what had happened to strain the relationship between Jack and his family. I also had to find out if there was more of his artwork out in the world. It seemed hard to believe that Jack would have just quit painting all together.