Lifetime of art, fossils, pottery featured at sale
Posted on Monday, January 5, 2009
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RUSSELL POWELL Kate Askew of the Arkansas Bookseller picks up a book that is part of the Sam Dickinson estate on Saturday. An estate sale set for Thursday-Sunday in the Tanglewood Shopping Center in Little Rock includes Arkansas and Louisiana archaeology items, books and paintings. More photos are available at focus.arkansasonline.com.
The lower Mississippi Valley American Indian pottery shards Sam Dickinson spent decades collecting sit neatly compacted, bagged, and partitioned in a storefront leased by Roy Dudley Estate Sales.
Dudley and a business partner, bookseller Kate Askew, found the items in a detached garage outside Dickinson's lifelong Prescott home, about a year after Dickinson's November 2007 death.
"We swept them off the floor," Dudley said, showing off the collection Saturday with Askew.
Now they lie beside fossilized shells and dinosaur vertebrae in Little Rock's Tanglewood Shopping Center, some of the many possessions of Dickinson, a teacher and journalist with a passion for anthropology and archaeology.
He published six books, including two translations of accounts from 18th-century French explorers in Arkansas.
The estate sale is Thursday to Sunday at the storefront.
"We're trying to bring out the 10-year-old boy in everybody," said Askew, smiling and pointing to the artifacts.
Born in 1912 in Nevada County, Dickinson studied anthropology in college and in 1933 attended the equivalent of graduate school in Mexico, where he helped excavate a Toltec pyramid. He collected Spanish colonial art, including santos, or wood carvings of religious figures, and found a bayonet piece at the seaport of Veracruz, the site of a massive U.S. amphibious assault during the Mexican-American War.
Dickinson, a lifelong bachelor who did not own a car after 1938, read Spanish, French, Portuguese, Latin and some German, Askew noted, thumbing through some of his 1,200 books and pamphlets, but spoke only English. "The last time I tried to speak Spanish I got lost in the middle of a sentence," he told the Texarkana Gazette in 1987.
Folk art and outsider art, made by those "outside" mainstream society, Dudley said, play a prominent role in the 250-300 pieces Dickinson owned.
Adorning the storefront's gallery walls are seven paintings by Mose Tolliver, an Alabama man who began painting when his legs were crushed in a factory accident - some of his works are hung by beer tabs - and five paintings by Clementine Hunter, a seamstress whose 40-year painting career, which she began at 54, earned her the moniker "Grandma Moses of the South," Askew said.
"She would paint on anything - on tin, on wood, on whatever she could find," Askew said.
"I think [Dickinson] was re- ally drawn to that non-refined love ... somebody who isn't necessarily a trained artist producing something so meaningful," Dudley said.
Dickinson possessed photos of some paintings being purchased from the artist.
A painting by folk artist Opal May with apocalyptic tones features a white-haired woman flanked by two giant grasshoppers.
"We were joking that the rule is Cher and cockroaches will survive a nuclear disaster," said Dudley, laughing. Now, they say Cher and grasshoppers do.
Estate sale prices range from $10 pamphlets to a $10,000 Hunter painting.
After a four-year stint, from 1934-38, in which Dickinson "taught practically everything that nobody else wanted to teach" at what is now Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, Dickinson became a journalist. During his 28-year career he was as an associate editor at the Arkansas Gazette, Arkansas Democrat and the Shreveport Journal, he told the Texarkana Gazette.
In 1948-49, he wrote a series of feature articles for the Arkansas Gazette - "Ten Thousand Years of Arkansas History" - delving into the state's archaeology, geography, and folklore, an interest shown by his 40 topographic maps and books such as Ozark Magic and Folklore.
In his collection is a wooden desk owned by William Woodruff, the early 19th-century publisher of the Arkansas Gazette, a slave-made puncheon, or hewn half-log bench, a parlor set owned by Augustus Garland, the 11th governor of Arkansas, and a Japanese-style carved cypress wood panel found at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Desha County, where 16,000 Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.
After they left, Dickinson and a friend visited the camp and found the panel nailed to a wall.
Dickinson, who after his retirement lived with his mother until she died at 107, once observed the Corps of Engineers dredge a part of the Mississippi River where he suspected a Civil War battleship had sunk, Dudley said.
Dickinson sat and waited all day for a battleship piece to surface, finally absconding with a metallic remnant.
He took it back to a 1,400-square-foot house filled with "ephemera" such as land deeds from early 19th-century Desha County and a receipt signed by Texas patriarch Stephen F. Austin, stuffed with art "floor to ceiling, wall to wall, hanging on the backs of doors" and in closets, Askew said, and brimming with books whose titles include The Cheerful Ascetic and Must You Conform?
The estate sale is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. More information is available by calling: (501) 666-5856.
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