A striking exhibit built around the idea of finding inner calm through art is wrapping up its run at the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope, giving Baldwin County residents a final chance to see the work of a self-taught painter whose path to the canvas began in a laboratory. The show, titled “enCHANTment,” closes Jan. 10, and organizers say the artist plans to be on hand the afternoon before, at 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 9, to speak with visitors about the work and the story behind it.
At the center of the exhibition is a large-scale sculptural installation known as the Jolly Lama Peace Project, a 15-foot-tall figure of a robed monk draped in red and gold fabric beneath what the artist describes as a cascade of hummingbirds. The piece is not meant to be viewed from a distance. Visitors who step inside the structure are invited to write down their own prayers or wishes for peace, which volunteers then fold into origami birds to add to the display, so that the installation grows over the course of its run with contributions from the people who come to see it.
The interactive quality is deliberate, and it has traveled well. The same installation appeared in Birmingham last October during a visit from the Dalai Lama, drawing crowds eager to take part in the piece before it moved across Mobile Bay to the Eastern Shore Art Center for its current showing. The Birmingham appearance gave the project a regional audience; the Fairhope run has brought it to the Eastern Shore’s own gallery-going public.
From the lab bench to the studio
The artist behind the project did not start out as a painter. Trained as a biochemist, he worked in science before a chance meeting with outsider artist R.A. Miller changed the course of his career. Miller, whose raw, unfiltered folk-art style earned him a place in the canon of self-taught Southern artists, helped inspire a full change in direction — away from the laboratory and toward a life spent making things by hand.
That influence shows in the materials. The artist works primarily in house paint on tarpaper, a technique closely associated with self-taught Southern artists, who have long used whatever surfaces were cheap and available — roofing paper, scrap wood, found metal — as the grounds for their work. The approach produces bold, direct images with a texture that formal canvas cannot replicate, and it ties the artist to a lineage of Southern makers whose work now hangs in major museums and collections across the country.
Since making the switch, he has built a body of work that has traveled to galleries across the United States and as far away as Japan. The Jolly Lama Peace Project represents the sculptural side of that practice, an immersive piece designed to pull viewers into participation rather than leave them standing in front of a finished object. The hummingbirds that fill the space above the monk’s robes, and the origami birds added by visitors, turn the structure into something between a shrine and a community diary.
The Eastern Shore Art Center’s role
Located at 401 Oak St. in downtown Fairhope, the Eastern Shore Art Center has long served as a hub for regional artists and a venue for rotating exhibits that highlight both established and emerging talent from around the Gulf Coast. The nonprofit gallery anchors the city’s downtown arts district, a stretch of shops, restaurants and studios that has made Fairhope one of the Eastern Shore’s principal destinations for visitors interested in the arts.
The center’s programming extends beyond a single gallery. Rotating exhibits move through its spaces throughout the year, classes and workshops draw students of all ages, and the facility serves as a gathering point during Fairhope’s regular downtown art events, when galleries open their doors on the same evening and foot traffic spills out onto the sidewalks along Oak Street and Section Street.
For the “enCHANTment” run, the center has emphasized the participatory nature of the installation, encouraging families and school groups as well as longtime gallery members to add their own wishes for peace. Volunteers handle the folding, turning handwritten notes into origami birds that join the display, an element that staff say gives repeat visitors a reason to come back and see how the piece has grown since their last stop.
The tradition behind the piece
The idea of folding written wishes into birds draws on one of the most widely recognized traditions in origami, in which a folded crane is understood to carry a prayer or a hope. In Japanese tradition, a thousand folded cranes are said to grant a wish, and the practice has become a universal symbol of peace — one that travels easily across languages and cultures. The Jolly Lama Peace Project borrows that logic and scales it up: one visitor writes a wish, a volunteer folds it, and the finished bird joins hundreds of others suspended around the monk figure.
The subject of the installation — a serene, robed monk — carries its own resonance. The piece appeared in Birmingham in October during a visit from the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and the timing was no accident. A figure of a meditating monk, ringed by wishes for peace contributed by strangers, offered a fitting welcome for an event centered on a message of compassion, and the Birmingham crowds that passed through the installation during the visit gave the project its first large-scale public test.
Moving the work to Fairhope changed its setting but not its purpose. On the Eastern Shore, the piece has functioned as both an art object and an invitation, and the volunteers who fold the wishes have become part of the work itself — a collaborative element that distinguishes the Jolly Lama Peace Project from a conventional gallery exhibition.
Why shows like this matter in Fairhope
Fairhope has cultivated an identity as an arts town on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, and institutions like the Eastern Shore Art Center are a large part of why. The city’s downtown, with its walkable grid of Oak, Section and Fairhope streets, supports a concentration of galleries and studios unusual for a community of its size, and the art center’s rotating schedule keeps fresh work in front of a public that includes both Baldwin County residents and day-trippers from Mobile across the bay.
Exhibits that blend visual art with participation also serve an audience beyond conventional gallery-goers. Children can take part alongside adults; the act of writing a wish and watching it become part of the display requires no background in art. Museum educators and gallery volunteers across the country have found that interactive pieces draw visitors who might not otherwise enter a gallery, and the Fairhope run appears to have followed that pattern.
The center’s hours — Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. — give area residents several days each week to stop in before a show closes, and admission policies at the nonprofit are designed to keep the door open to the widest possible audience. The building at 401 Oak St. sits within easy walking distance of Fairhope’s restaurants and shops, making a gallery visit an easy addition to a downtown afternoon.
The final week
The “enCHANTment” exhibit is scheduled to close Jan. 10, which leaves a short window for anyone in the area who has not yet seen it. Organizers say the artist will be at the center at 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 9, the afternoon before the close, to speak with visitors — a chance to hear directly from someone who traded a biochemistry career for a life in art and built a practice that has reached galleries in the United States and Japan.
For Baldwin County residents, the closing also marks the end of a run that connected the Eastern Shore to a larger current in Southern art. The self-taught tradition the artist works in — house paint on tarpaper, imagery drawn from memory and spirit rather than academic training — has its deepest roots in the rural South, and its practitioners have increasingly found audiences far beyond the region, as this artist’s exhibition history shows.
The Jolly Lama Peace Project itself will move on after Fairhope, carrying with it whatever wishes for peace Baldwin County visitors added to the cascade of birds. The Eastern Shore Art Center, meanwhile, will rotate new work into its galleries as it has for decades, continuing its role as the anchor of the Fairhope arts scene and one of the central venues for contemporary and self-taught art on the Alabama Gulf Coast.
Anyone planning a final visit should note the center’s weekday schedule and the Jan. 9 artist talk at 3:30 p.m., ahead of the Jan. 10 close.