Affairs of Plain Living

At the heart of the painting is a thick spine that reads Foxfire. The cover is only partially visible, listing the book’s contents: ironmaking, blacksmithing, flintlock rifles, and bear hunting. Halvorson’s father, John, was a blacksmith who installed woodstoves around Cape Cod for half a century. In this haphazard portrait, the book acts as a stand-in for his working life.

My dad also had Foxfire books—actually, they were the only books I knew him to care about. Our family gifted him one every holiday, birthday, and Christmas throughout my childhood, each one dated and inscribed “With love” in loopy kid-cursive. When he died, in 2021, the stack of Foxfire books was his only possession I wanted for myself. Now the dozen-some books reside in my Brooklyn apartment, where I glimpse them peripherally throughout my day.

Halvorson’s painting is both a memorial of her father and a meditation on transience itself: a picture of life arrested, made suddenly meaningful by her loving transcription of it. That real-life bookshelf must be packed away by now, or at least reorganized, destined, like everything, to change. While her painting may be a reminder that all things must pass, it also suggests that, if properly cared for, the things we live with can endure. The spaces we inhabit are always provisional and contain a random assortments of things—junk and treasure, by turn—given meaning by the lives they bind together and the qualities of life they enjoin.

Foxfire started in 1966 as a quarterly magazine made by a high school English class at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in rural north Georgia. The students named it after a local phosphorescent fungus that grows on decomposing wood. The inaugural issue has three sections. The first is devoted to oral histories from the people who lived nearby, including a transcript of a retired sheriff describing the Clayton Bank robbery of 1936, an interview with an “anonymous Rabun Gap Man” about moonshining stills, and assorted home remedies. The second section includes works by professional writers, such as the poet A. R. Ammons, with the third section reserved for creative writing by the students. It is illustrated by woodcut prints and amateur photographs, all laid out and produced as inexpensively as possible by the students themselves.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)