The wooden oak drum seemed to be a heavy burden for the auction-house table on which it sat. It was laden with cast-iron metal from top to bottom that surprisingly gave it a lovely patina…
Month: September 2016
What the heck are these, I thought, when I saw snatches of brown and cream items in a plastic Ziploc bag on the auction table. The bag was cloudy so it was hard to tell…
The children were just adorable. Photographer John W. Mosley had captured them in their fashion best, on their way perhaps to church on an Easter morning in early spring. They were a proud group, marching…
I had just handed the auction-house assistant an item I had been examining when I spied the two wooden blocks embracing each other. It was hard to tell what they were, but they seemed to…
I remember going to a movie theater in South Jersey soon after I moved to Philadelphia in the 1980s to see the cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” with some friends. I had heard…
Whereabouts of historical busts at 1st black shopping center
Posted in Art, Black history, and history
I came across the artist James M. Washington Jr. by chance. I was searching for artwork by Philadelphia ceramicist Frances Serber among 1970s photographs of public art compiled by the Fairmount Park Art Association. That’s when I saw the…
I’d seen clean sun-bleached skulls of cows and steers at auction, so I was not surprised to find some laid out on a table at this auction house. What surprised me were the plastic cartons…
I knew the image by heart. An enslaved African man, one knee bent, hands folded and arms in chains, his eyes looking to heaven to rescue him from the hell he was living on Earth,…
Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles will be selling that slinky see-through gown that Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang a sexy “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy in 1962. The “skintight, sheer, flesh-colored dress that sparkled…
Can you guess what these antique kitchen & tool items are?
Posted in Antiques, collectibles, and Kitchen
All of the items were rather lovely in their simplicity. On first glance, I was totally befuddled about the identity of three of them, and the fourth was so similar to its contemporary counterpart that it was…