About the Author

Chip Cooper is Artist-in-Residence in the Honors College at The University of Alabama and coauthor of Silent in the Land and Common Threads: Photographs and Stories from the South. Ben Windham is the former editorial page editor ofThe Tuscaloosa News.

Robert Farris Thompson is the Colonel John Trumball Professor of the History of Art at YaleUniversity and the author of Flash of the Spirit.

Georgine Clarke is Visual Arts Program Manager at the Alabama State Council on the Arts and founding Director of the Kentuck Arts Festival in Northport, Alabama.

Reviews

Charlie Lucas's sculptures are like kudzu: they remold the silhouette of an object, casting it in a different light. His subjects are the African mask, the slave, chains from the past, and the industrial future. His totem-like figures trace Alabama's Native American culture though the blood-baths and bloodstreams, wrought and welded in iron and steel. His junkyard complex comprising acres of rusting machine bits, sculptures, and the occasional grazing cow, is as terrifying as it is beautiful, and it reminds us what happens to man and his inventions when nature has 'had enough.' - NALL