Oct 22, 2007

Art gallery shines light on folk artistsBy Alexandyr KentShreveportTimes.com

The home’s clapboards were falling down. The roof was caving in. Drywall was crumbling. The kitchen’s floorboards were gone.

“The grass was all growing up, and there was a raggedy, raggedy fence,” recalled folk artist Alania Osborne-Currie.

In other words, the dilapidated home at 7102 Line Ave. was exactly what she sought.

“I didn’t see the raggedy house,” Osborne-Currie said. “I saw it like the perfect vision of what I wanted to do.”

It took her and husband Robert Currie eight months to simply acquire the property, a few weeks in summer 2005 to get it off the city’s demolition list, and two more years to turn it into the Little Shanty Folk Art Gallery.

Open six days a week, the Little Shanty Folk Art Gallery now sells and exhibits the rustic works of more than a dozen folk artists.

Had the Curries not stepped in, the gallery and its surrounding garden would probably be an empty grass lot.

Today, three roosters named Shanty, Jolene and Miss Beanie patrol the metal-fenced perimeter as “guard dogs.” Wooden pigs, clotheslines, a rusted bike, scattered hay and palmetto palms surround the renovated shotgun home.

In look and feel, the Little Shanty Folk Art Gallery is supposed to stand as a time capsule from a place where Line Avenue traffic was nonexistent and a time when eggs came from the chicken coop.

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