Outside of Joe Frazier’s Gym in north Philadelphia, the sidewalk is littered with an empty handle of Gordon’s gin, a yellow flash of caution tape and scattered pebbles of broken glass.
More than a year after Frazier’s 2011 death, preservation advocates are seeking protective designations for the building in a campaign that is a sign of a larger cultural shift in the historic preservation community. At the movement’s heart is a push for inclusiveness in a field that has long privileged the stories and accomplishments of influential white men and paid little if any attention to anyone else.
“We’ve done an analysis over the past year,” said Stephanie Toothman, the National Park Service’s associate director for cultural resources. “The percentage of sites that specifically represent women and groups such as African-Americans, Native Americans and Asian-Pacific Americans ranges from 3 to 8 percent.”
Compared with the makeup of the U.S. population, that percentage is minuscule. Women make up slightly more than 50 percent of the population in the United States, and white men account for about 36 percent of the overall population, according the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“They often say that history is written by the winners, but it’s also narrated by the people who have the podium,” said Page Harrington, executive director of Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, the Washington, D.C., headquarters for the National Woman’s Party throughout much of the 20th century. “So if you have fewer women in leadership positions — in universities, or writing textbooks, or in Congress — you have fewer of those stories that are necessarily making their way into the public spectrum that the next generation of scholars looks at, and so on, and so on.”
The fight to save Frazier’s gym seems appropriately symbolic for a man who fought his way to the top. Frazier was an underdog before he became a champ. He worked in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse, where he practiced throwing punches on slabs of beef hanging in a freezing meat locker. Sylvester Stallone borrowed that training habit for a montage in the boxing film “Rocky.” And while Philadelphia erected a statute of Stallone’s fictional boxer, the fate of Frazier’s gym is uncertain.
Her photograph, "The Grape Escape," features tiny men picking a life-size grape and hoisting it onto a miniature pickup figurine. Then there's "Family Fun," which depicts a tiny figurine riding a giant bottle rocket as a crowd cheers.
"I just can't stop looking at them, I've never seen anything like it," said 32-year-old Rex Irving of Orlando, looking at another one of Honeycutt's collection on Saturday where miniature figures are standing atop a donut brushing on the glaze.
Irving was one of an expected 250,000 expected to come to the city's downtown today for the two-day Mount Dora Arts Festival.
Beth Miller, executive co-chair for the Mount Dora Center for the Arts, said it's not a surprise that such a picturesque city would attract large crowds.
This weekend's show has almost every type of art imaginable, including paintings, prints, sculptures and ceramics. Multi-media artist Kwang Cha Brown, a South Korea native, combines her personal philosophy with her American training to create color and image. She displayed a dozen of works Saturday, mostly oil paintings of landscapes with muted colors.
According to his online page at Bowling Green State University where he teaches painting, Briggs’ aesthetic focus is “Representational drawings and paintings investigating the nature of human vulnerability as it relates to subcultural social structures.” Threshold also got a $500 prize in a painting category.
Second place ($500) went to Jessica Summers for her inviting Cooking in Pajamas: Portrait of My Mother: In a golden hue, a gray-haired woman cooks up a storm, but it’s not breakfast. Summers also won $500 for another oil painting, a retro-riff called Self Portrait as Domestic Goddess, in which the dark-haired artist is garbed in a lacy black cocktail dress, holding her casserole in the kitchen. It took second place in the Findlay Art League’s contest in November.
Both of the two fiber pieces received nods. Monica Edgerton-Sperry’s Self Portrait is a cluster of shells, buttons, beads, leather, and embroidery on linen. Look at the eyes, the hair holding a paintbrush, and the tiny red beads in the upper right.
Susan Krueger’s large Guilt Quilt disturbs with its female target and selection of knives ready for tossing: Are they her guilts or the tools with which to attack her guilt?
Winning no formal prize other than perhaps the “did you see...?” is William Barry Roberts’ 36-inch-square oil/charcoal/pencil painting, Drunken Pirate Scoundrels Manning their Cannons. A little lewd and absurdly macho, two big-bellied, bearded chaps lift their shirts and push their flabby breasts together. One’s hair sports a peacock feather, the other has a lit fuse on either side of his head a la Blackbeard the pirate.
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