LETTERS READ

Introducing Season 7. Letters Read director, stationer, Nancy Sharon Collins talks about this year’s theme: the two very different cities that she loves. And, a lagniappe as they say in south Louisiana. A little something extra to maybe pull at your heartstrings, just a little.

Audio production is by Steve Chyzyk, ⁠Sonic Canvas Studio⁠.

Premiering 6:00 pm EDT New Years’ Eve 2022, LEMONS TO LEMONADE. And available here thereafter.

Finishing up the Lady Louisiana Artist series for 2022 is a true lemons to lemonade story. Magen Raine Gladden. Commercial artist. She was born into a hippy dirt road collective along River Road in South Louisiana with a lifetime of health challenges. Now a leader through the lens of workplace equity and inclusivity rights. This podcast goes live on  December 31st. 

Shadow Angelina Starkey reads as Gladden. Shadow is a Cajun poet and photographer whose family has called New Orleans home since 1727.  

Geoff Munsterman—poet, editor, & book artist from Plaquemines Parish now living in New Orleans’ Holy Cross neighborhood—narrates. 

Find out more about six full programming seasons at LETTERS READ.

Want to support this compelling series, we'd love you to. Go to https://lettersread.net/donate/.

As our name suggests, Letters Read focuses on letters. Personal and business. From institutional archives and special collections, private and commercial libraries. In addition to letters, in our programming, we read other forms of written correspondence. Like faxes, text messages, emails, and now this collection of letters literally picked up off of New Orleans streets. 

Describing these as letters may be a stretch. The best manner of talking about them is as missives. Notes. Notes to self. Lists. To-do lists. Some reading like poetry. Formulas, recipes. 

This is one of our incubator presentations. Works in process. Experimental. It is dedicated to Diana, a great lover of poetry. And supporter of this project.

Heartfelt thanks to Bob. You will hear more about him in the podcast.

Co-hosted by Neal Auction Company.

Angela Gregory was born to the New Orleans intellectual white elite in 1903. A time when proper ladies accompanied their mother to country club tea. With her parent’s blessing, Angela took a different path. At an early age, she knew that she wanted to be an artist. Not just an artist, a sculptress in stone, to be precise!

Her earliest influence was her mother, Selina Brès Gregory. A Newcomb College alum and recognized Newcomb Pottery artist. Angela was precocious. When 14, she learned clay modeling and relief casting from Ellsworth Woodward at Newcomb. She also took classes from Albert Rieker at the Arts and Crafts Club in New Orleans and spent a summer working in the New York studio of Charles Keck. She graduated from Newcomb in 1925. With her parent’s patronage, she moved to Paris to study art.

It is to be remembered that in 1925 it would be rare if not impossible for a lady to travel abroad alone without a husband, brother, or other trusted chaperone such as a matron auntie. Life as in independent individual was squarely the privilege of men. For the determined Angela, this was no barrier.

In Paris, she became the only American ever to study in Antoine Bourdelle’s stone sculpture studio. Angela Gregory credited her unusual success as a an early lady artist to Bourdelle’s tutelage and belief in her as an artist. In the middle of the twentieth century when women had just been granted the vote, Angela Gregory became the “doyenne of Louisiana sculpture”. Producing major public and private art commissions significant today.

This podcast quotes from Gregory and Nancy Penrose's biography of Angela Gregory, from which the image can be found, A Dream and a Chisel.

Angela Gregory’s artwork, and that of many of her influences such as Selina Brès Gregory, William and Ellsworth Woodward, Newcomb pottery, are prized valuable pieces of art today. Her independent drive also influenced artists living today such as lady Louisiana artist, Jacqueline Bishop. Many Louisiana artists in this podcast are supported by Neal.

First in the 2022 mini-series, Lady Louisiana Artist is letters and missives to and from eco-feminist artist, and Letters Read Executive Advisory Board member, Michel Varisco.

Our subject in this recording creates photography, assemblages, and installations that bear witness to our relationship with nature as observed in architecture, engineered, and the wild.

Varisco writes further about the promotional image for this listing...“Sr. Alison McCrary, the radical nun and lawyer is holding a dead yellow warbler. She had told me she was mourning the slow death of the Catholic Church, while I mourn the disconnect of religion for the environment and the future of all sentient beings.” —2019 King Tides exhibit, Good Children Gallery, New Orleans, LA.

In addition to letters from Varisco’s wide family of friends, cohorts, fellow artists and collaborators, this podcast includes edits from the email exchange between Letters Read Director and lady Louisiana artist, Jacqueline Bishop. Bishop contributed in an advisory manner for this production. Her work reflects on complex connections between climate change, species extinction, and migration.

Christopher Kamenstein, co-artisic director of Goat in the Road Production, reads Varisco's letters and other correspondence of interest. The audio production is by Steve Chyzyk, Sonic Canvas Studio.

About the image: WARBLER, thermal dye print on aluminum, by Michel Varisco. Of this piece, Varisco writes, “I used a warbler ... Ersy's gift stuck in my mind, just not that specific bird. this one I froze years later to use."

Wrapping-up the previous programming season, Doing Business in New Orleans, we present the story of Clay Shaw. On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested him on conspiracy charges. Shaw was a beloved, successful, local businessman, and closeted queer man.

On January 29, 1969, Garrison tried Shaw in Orleans Parish Criminal Court on three conspiracy charges. A little over a month later the jury took less than one hour to acquit Shaw.

After, “…jurors expressed their bewilderment as to motive. Respectable socialite Clay Shaw, it strained credulity as to why he would become involved in the murder of the President. Jim Garrison believed that Shaw was acting as Oswald’s shepherd in New Orleans, under instructions from CIA. But he couldn’t prove it, certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt.” —Joan Mellen.

Many theories swirl around these, now infamous, Big Easy characters. Both Shaw and Garrison. This reading strives to represent the man who was Clay Shaw and, to a lesser extend, who was Garrison.

Robert Valley reads as the voice of Shaw, David Zalkind is Jim Garrison. Audio production is by Steve Chyzyk, Sonic Canvas Studio.

PHOTO: 1956. Clay Shaw dressed for Mardi Gras. From an original 35mm slide in a boxed tray labelled, “Carnival, 2/14/56. Sally Del Sue Ray.” Property and copyright of Letters Read.

Wrapping-up the 2021 Doing Business in New Orleans season is a true, rags to riches story. Another incubator-style, informal production, with stuff found along the way. That may or may not fit into full-length Letters Read, Louisiana and New Orleans-centric, programming. This material surfaced while researching the Clay Shaw story. That story is postponed until 2022. Shaw is referred to more than once in this reading because there’s a rhyme in it, a theme that repeats in this story, and in Clay Shaw’s. Throughout, the reader is Letters Read Director, Nancy Sharon Collins. Additionally, a link to the 2008 panel discussion referred to in this broadcast is HERE. And a link to the other referred-to party, a Letters Read Executive Advisor, Michel Varisco, is HERE.

Premiering Thursday, November 25, letters and ephemera created in 1962 by a local professional association for graphic designers.

If you liked the TV show, Mad Men, you’ll love the real thing, New Orleans-style. Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans (ADDA) was chartered in 1961. Illustrators, lettering artists, art directors, photographers, commercial artists, and graphic designers banded together and promoted themselves to advertising executives throughout the Gulf South.

Central to this was a promotional slideshow presentation. Digitized in 2008. You can view an animation of it HERE.

If you are curious about the then new-fangled entertainment gizmo, slideshows, watch the Mad Men scene about their origin, HERE.

In this compelling podcast, join reader Colin B. Miller, himself a practicing graphic designer, as he continues the 2021 programming theme, Doing Business in New Orleans.

For this production, thanks are given to Steve Chyzyk and Steve Himelfarb, Sonic Canvas Studio. To Paul Broussard for additional recording. To Antenna, the project's fiscal partner. Thanks always to major funders, Corner and Reba Judith Sandler Foundations, Mark Cotton, Robert Heriard, Gayle Boudousqie, and to our executive advisory board Bill Hagler, Cole Halpern, Chris Kamenstein, and Michel Varisco. Additionally, thanks to Letters Read alum, Adam Newman. The very last ADDA vice president and, to this day, a practicing graphic designer.

Special thanks to the first president of ADDA. Don Smith, now 92. Who physically gave the slideshow presentation to Mrs. Collins, project director. Thanks to Don’s work chum back in the day at Knox Reeves Fitzgerald, Ron Thomson, now President - Marketing, Beuerman Miller Fitzgerald. The current agency from who Knox-Reeves Fitzgerald evolved. Thanks to Dave Walker, THNOC. Big thanks to Kure Croker, Loyola University Special Collections and Archives for ongoing support of the History of Graphic Design in South Louisiana physical archives and to Jennifer Abrams, director, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History for her unwavering support of the oral history part of that project. 

Intro and outro-music are from the reel-to-reel audio tape recording of the original jingle composed and performed in 1961 by Paul Guma.

Image: Slide 32 in the 1962 Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans slideshow presentation.

As prelude to the Thanksgiving, 2021 reading, we share advertising executive Ron Thomson's story about the letter he wrote to motion picture actress, Audrey Hepburn, and the friendship that ensued. Thomson is President - Marketing, Beuerman Miller Fitzgerald, Inc. The oldest agency in the southern United States. By the time they met, Hepburn had already starred in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charade, and My Fair Lady. Winning Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.

When Thomson sent the pivotal letter, Hepburn was devoting herself to UNICEF. Her work with UNICEF was the reason Thomson became emboldened enough to write to the famous Hollywood star. 

Back in the day (1960s) Thomson worked with Don Smith, art director and fellow adman at Knox Reeves Fitzgerald in New Orleans. It was the largest advertising agency in the South. The Letters Read Thanksgiving podcast tells one story about the old ad-days Don and Ron share.

Image: Paramount-photo by Bud Fraker - eBayfrontback, Public Domain.

Welcome to this reading from a handmade, 1906 photo-album compiled in response to the last documented yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans and the United States. 

The podcast is fourteenth in the ongoing, Letters Read project. Readers are William Bowling and Grace Kennedy with audio production by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas Studio. Antenna is the project’s fiscal partner, and, 2021 is the fifth consecutive season.

In photographs and text, “Quarantine Tour of Central America and Panama by Health Authorities as guests of The United Fruit Company” presents the idea that bananas imported by the largest importer of them in the world at that time were safe and did not promote the spread of yellow fever.

What was the real purpose for this curious piece of ephemera compiled and produced in New Orleans? Documentation of United Fruit’s best practices in sanitation and mosquito abatement? Merely propaganda? Follow along online in the digitized album at The Historic New Orleans Collection Williams Research Center. 

The album is large, slightly crumbling. After the covers and end pieces, it contains 83 individual pages. 69 are photographs, 14 are text, letterpress printed. The cover boards are faux leather, a composite of some sort, and the title gold-foil-stamped on it in a calligraphic lettering style reminiscent of Looney Tunes or Bugs Bunny cartoons titles. The spine is leather in matching burgundy red. The physical article is at The Historic New Orleans Williams Research Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.

All of the photographs are black and white, mounted by hand, with a black paper border on alpha-cellulose paper. 

Through the album’s lens, we see orderly ports and company towns, infrastructure like steam shovels, roads and railways being constructed; agriculture, maritime, and river industries; hospitals and quarantine stations. New, Colonial-style buildings and, except for members of a few brass bands, a couple of inhabitants of a “Native Hut”—or three, “Hospital Nurses”, “Natives Marketing Bananas”, and soldiers representing the “Honduras Army Stationed at Cortez”, there are very very few locals represented. The only people photographed, pretty much, are white, North American representatives in rumpled suits. Where were all the workers? What were their working conditions? Other than brief textual descriptions of United Fruit’s best practices, not a single practice was photographed.