Author: Kevin Lee

It’s easy to see where artist Lisa Johnston Hancock’s concerns originate. It’s an hour north of Mobile, where rural seclusion spawned reflection. “My thesis show for graduate school was based on our property, our land that’s been in our family a long time, in Leroy. Just kind of walking through the forest there and our connection to the land and all the families that had lived on the land since the 1920s,” Hancock said. Those deep ties bear an innate link with the natural world. The sensibilities they generate are evident in her July exhibit at Mobile Arts Council’s...

The June ArtWalk crowd at Mobile Arts Council was captivated by artist Conz8000’s exhibit. It’s not the first buzz he’s made with his work, but it was a bang that almost did him in. No metaphor — the noise was a head-on collision with a truck on Moffett Road just a week before his opening. Conz said it totaled the car, “pushed the motor in” on the passengers and the odor of imminent explosion arose. “When I opened the door, all I saw was tombstones. I’m thinking I’m dead, but he hit us right in front of a monument...

Ask Foley author Kathie Farnell about the changes her native state has undergone, and they readily come to mind. “Things are more homogenous now. We have a lot of chain stores. Everybody sees the same movies and there’s chain restaurants, so I think to some extent you may have lost a sense of place,” Farnell said. Time’s sweep is on her mind these days with the publication of her first book, “Duck and Cover: A Nuclear Family.” Its series of vignettes us drawn from her Atomic Age childhood, a nexus of shifting cultural standards and historic perspectives. Farnell will...