Advertisement
Published: January 10th 2012
Telfair Museum's Jepson Center
Designed by Moshe Safdie, it opened in 2006Telfair Museum
I spent today exploring Savannah historic sites.
I selected them for a combination of significance and variety.
The first was the
Telfair Museum.
Originally, it was the home of the wealthy Telfair family.
When the last member died childless, she willed it to the city to use as an art museum.
The museum itself is an odd combination of house museum and art.
Unlike the
Frick Collection in New York, where the owners actually lived with the paintings on display, here they were added afterward.
The house part of the tour concentrates on decorative arts.
The displays list most of the contents, where they came from, and how they got to Savannah.
I found it all repetitive after a while.
The art portion was better.
Much of it is contained in a specially constructed addition that was added in 1899.
The centerpiece is a grand room with a seventy food ceiling.
This is one of the most beautiful display rooms in any museum.
Sadly, the art does not equal the room it’s shown in.
Savannah is a conservative city culturally,
Les Chasseurs Volontaires Monument
Memorial to a regiment of free Africans from Haiti who fought and died in the Battle of Savannah during the Revolutionary War and the museum reflects this.
The work on display is
French Salon Art and
American Impressionism, both conservative movements designed to appeal to popular tastes.
Salon Art in particular is not seen in this country very often, but there is a reason for this.
The Telfair tries to make up for it with its modern art building, the
Jepson Center .
The building is a cube of white walls and soaring skylights designed by
Moshe Safdie, the most famous architect in Israeli history.
It reminded me quite a bit of Richard Meier and other modernists.
For anyone who has been to the Northeast or California, the building will look familiar, but in Savannah its opening in 2006 caused a scandal.
Here too, the art does not live up to the building that holds it.
With a few exceptions, the building holds temporary shows.
One of them was a show of contemporary bird art, which while certainly well done pushes no boundaries whatsoever.
Better was a traveling exhibition on
color-based work from the 1960s.
The work fell in two categories,
op art and
psychedelic art.
The former uses geometric forms and color juxtaposition to create effects in the viewer’s
First African Baptist Church
The oldest African-American house of worship, founded in 1777. The present building dates to 1846. vision.
Some of it was literally hard to look at the effects were so intense.
The latter is a successor to surrealism designed to look like a drug trip, and often made during one.
This art was very popular among hippies, for obvious reasons.
The show tries hard to promote this art as a serious subject matter, and partly succeeds.
First African Baptist Church
After the Telfair, I saw one of the Savannah’s most important historic sites, the
First African Baptist Church.
It was founded in 1777 by
George Liele, the first African in America to be ordained a preacher.
Since preachers had to know how to read, and most slaves were illiterate, the significance of this event cannot be overstated.
The church is the oldest African American church in the US, and it attracted worshippers from the entire area, most of them slaves.
The current building dates to 1846.
Slaves had to spend their days working for their masters, but at night they had time free.
The church leadership convinced them to use that time building the church.
The men created bricks on the Savannah River waterfront,
Owens Thomas House
The most impressive historic house in Savannah and the women hauled them to the church site.
It was, and still is, a steep walk.
Finishing the church took three years.
First African Baptist is thus the only building in the US created entirely by slaves for their own use.
Tours of the church are given by members, who are very knowledgeable of the history.
For example, the pews are curved instead of straight, so everyone will have an equally good view of the service.
The ceiling has a pattern of groups of nine squares separated by wider beams.
This doesn’t seem like much, but it’s actually highly symbolic.
Along the Underground Railroad, people with safe houses would hang quilts with nine squares on their porches.
Incorporating the pattern into the church showed that it was also a (spiritual) sanctuary.
The main room downstairs features the church’s most famous feature.
The entire floor is riddled with small holes.
They are always found in a specific pattern, a cross within a diamond.
Church members told visiting whites that the pattern of holes represented a Congo Prayer Cross, a symbol sacred
Owens Thomas House
Owens Thomas House, designed by William Jay in Congolese culture (which is true).
In reality, the holes were also air holes.
The church was a major stop on the
Underground Railroad, and under the floor is a crawlspace that could hold two hundred slaves.
A tunnel (now closed) lead from the crawlspace to the Savannah River and north.
As the guide put it “City Authorities never figured out what was going on, otherwise we wouldn’t be standing in this building today”.
Owens-Thomas House
The last major stop was the most impressive house museum in Savannah, the
Owens-Thomas House.
It was designed by William Jay, an English architect who went on to design many other colonial buildings in Savannah.
He got the commission because his sister was married to the client.
The original owner, Richard Richardson, lost his fortune in the early 1820s.
William Owen, the mayor of Savannah at the time, then bought it at a bank sale.
The house has a number of unusual features.
Coastal Georgia has no stone to speak of, so two man-made materials were used for early houses.
Brick houses are still found all over,
Tabby wall at Owens Thomas House
Section of wall with the stucco removed to show the tabby behind it. Tabby, a concrete made from crushed seaschells, was once widespread on the southeastern coast but houses made of
tabby, a type of concrete made with crushed seashells, are very rare.
The basement of the Owens-Thomas house is made of tabby.
In one spot, the stucco covering has been scraped away so the tabby shows through.
The house was the first in Savannah to feature indoor plumbing (in the late 1700s!)
The basement features a complex series of cisterns and lead pipes, including an early shower.
Most of the water was collected from the roof during rainstorms.
The next odd feature is a bridge.
The staircase is in the center of the house, creating a large open area.
William Jay designed a bridge over the opening to connect the two halves of the house.
Also worth noting are the fake windows and doors in several rooms.
Georgian style prized symmetry, and architects would put in fake features to match real ones on the other side of the room.
The final feature is the oval dining room.
William Jay apparently hated square rooms.
The walls in this room are curved.
They have curved doors to match.
The most significant feature
of the house is the least impressive visually.
The Owens-Thomas House is the only one in Savannah with its slave quarters intact.
The room is open, rough hewn, and stark.
The current look is partly a cheat, because the foundation does not know definitively what the quarters’ interior looked like.
The current setup certainly conveys the deprivation.
A very important feature is the color of the ceiling, which is stained purple.
In West African culture, purple was considered a sacred color, capable of warding off evil spirits.
Slaves in this area made purple paint from indigo plants, and then painted their quarters with it.
The ceiling here is the only one with the original color intact.
Jasper Green Ceremony
On the way back, I encountered one of this week’s more poignant events.
The official St. Patrick’s Day events in Savannah always begin with the laying of a military wreath.
It honors all people of Irish descent who died defending the US.
The ceremony is performed at a monument to an Irish immigrant and soldier who died during the Revolution, Jasper Green.
The event
Jasper Green Ceremony
The Jasper Green Ceremony. It honors all militray vetrans of Irish descent, and officially opens St. Partick's Day in Savannah itself consists of remarks from the commander of a nearby military base, a twenty-one gun salute, taps, and military music from an Irish band.
After that, the parade committee is introduced and the festivities can begin.
The ceremony will almost certainly be the classiest event I will see during the overall celebration.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.082s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 7; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0231s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
