REED ESTABROOK – AMERICAN ROADSIDE MONUMENTS
2021-10-18American Roadside Monuments is really about a Yankee kid’s encounter with the vastness of America and the American West. People of my generation would routinely travel across the country via automobile. I’d round-tripped it twice by the time I graduated college. But in 1971, in my first teaching job at the University of Illinois, I found myself on the prairie. I could look out my bedroom window and see the Panama Limited train headed south from Chicago to New Orleans. The tracks were six miles away: flat is an understatement. Every summer, we would escape the tyranny of green by driving west, and these structures became dominant. They are literally “MONUMENTS,” often handmade, quintessentially American, linking one to the life and lives of that place, and standing dramatically against the blue of the sky. They embodied that wonderful shared experience of roaming and discovery.” – Reed Estabrook.
Opposite – untitled, from American Roadside Monuments, c.1975
Exhibition runs through to November 27th, 2021
Joseph Bellows Gallery
7661 Girard Avenue
La Jolla
CA 92037
