VOICES 1
Ed Haddaway
by Ann Landi | Apr 2, 2017 | Under the Radar
“Even as a kid,” Ed Haddaway remembers,“I was really into making things. My parents would stick us in the back yard and we had hammers and nails and boards. There was a basic primal need to put things together from about the age of five.” Haddaway, a bearded burly man who speaks with a distinct Texas twang, grew up in Fort Worth—“very mundane middle class,” as he puts it. His father was an investor in the stock market who regularly took time off to hunt and fish; his mother was a homemaker. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be an artist, I just didn’t know what else to do.” One of his three siblings, a brother, had ambitions as a concert pianist. “I would wake up every morning and he was playing the piano,” he recalls. “My persona became that of the artist. For whatever reason, I haven’t quit yet.”
I WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE ALL THE AUTHORS FROM VARIOUS PUBLICATIONS WHO HAVE GRACIOUSLY SHARED THEIR KNOWLEDGE , THOUGHTS, AND OPINIONS WITH OTHERS
ED HADDAWAY
Funny Art, Part One
You need this. You really need this. You need this right now!
Ann Landi
Ed Haddaway, Early Morning Walk, painted steel
In the midst of all the harrowing hellacious news blasts from Washington and elsewhere, I was delighted to get an invitation to the inauguration of sculptor Ed Haddaway’s Early Morning Walk in Salida, CO, this past Friday. I opened his email and burst out laughing, as doesn’t happen often enough these days. Imagine the good folk of Salida encountering this larger-than-life sculpture on their own early-morning walks or evening strolls or maybe just cruising through town.
Though I could not attend the dedication, which would have meant about a six-hour drive round-trip in bad weather to and from Taos, Ed’s announcement set me to thinking about other funny art and artists of my acquaintance. When I was a wee lass studying art history at two esteemed institutions threatened with defunding by the Trump administration, I seldom encountered objects of amusement in survey courses of art down through the ages. With the possible exception of a few cut-ups like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “fine” art wasn’t supposed to make you guffaw or smile or giggle.