GREENSBORO — Maybe you’ve seen her.
She’s 15 feet tall, as willowy as a spiral of smoke, with steel rebar as her skeleton and steel metal trimmings for her skin, hair and legs.
And appropriately enough, she now stands at the spot known to some of us as the Whiskey District and Greensbo-hemia. But mostly, we call it The Corner, the intersection of Walker and Elam, a place where you’ll see anything — if you hang long enough.
It’s a spot with four restaurants, three bars, a Laundromat and a grocery store. You can do your laundry, people-watch on a patio, grab a beer and some grub in your flip-flops and spy a homemade flier about a lost cat named Stripe.
So, the 15-foot girl fits. Let’s call her Jeannie. She went up Wednesday in front of the Lindley Park Filling Station to give The Corner an introduction to something new called Art Attack!
Yes, exclamation mark included.
It’s an art show, and it’ll take place Saturday at the Filling Station. If Hanna cooperates.
Rain and wind from Hurricane Hanna could postpone the show for two weeks. But artists are gamblers at heart. So, Art Attack! will go on with Jeannie on the block as part of the area’s first art exhibit of this scale.
Thank The Fish Guy. It was his idea.
If you’ve been to The Corner, you’ve seen his school of metal fish swimming both inside and outside Fishbones. The Fish Guy is Lawrence Feir, the metal sculptor who organized Art Attack!
He talked to Sarah Keith, owner of the Filling Station, and she jumped at the idea.
Plus, she knows Feir. She calls him Larry. He hangs often at The Corner because he lives down the street, and he figured an art exhibit in his neighborhood would be “pretty cool.”
Pretty cool, indeed.
There are few places in Greensboro where you can see this: a skateboarder walking his dog, a family pushing a stroller, and a trio of barefooted musicians, on a bench, playing everything from Weather Report to Van Morrison.
Now, here comes Feir’s Art Attack! He rounded up some of his art buddies who work with wood and metal, and they’ll bring in their own quirky creations that’ll add to the built-in Bohemia of The Corner.
Reuven Fields will bring steel-necked horses; Jay Jones, his aluminum mobiles of manta rays; and husband and wife Ernie and Lois Rich, their steel-ribbon musicians they call the “Big Guys.’’
Meanwhile, wood carver Paul Nixon will bring in the cedar pole that carries the faces of his childhood: fairies, goblins and gremlins. Those are the characters told to him by his grandmother, a woman who lived beneath a mountain in Ireland where oil lamps were the only man-made light.
So, Jeannie will be far from alone Saturday at The Corner, that spot in Greensboro that captures that elusive aura of … well ... something.
Huh? Ask Ernie Rich. Like Feir, he and Lois live down the street, and no day goes by that he doesn’t head toward the intersection of Walker and Elam, with smoking pipe in hand.
“The whole Elam-Walker aura,” he said. “I don’t think it’s art and food, but whatever it is, it’s got it. It gets you off the couch. It’s got that indefinable something. It’s cool.”
Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com
What: Art Attack!
When: noon-8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Lindley Park Filling Station, 2201 Walker Ave., Greensboro
Cost: Free
Information: 274-2144
Etc: The rain date for Art Attack! will be Sept. 20, same time, same place.
Not all of the newspaper's content appears online.
*There is a fee for downloading some older articles.