Jackson Free Press

When Camp Best arrived at Aladdin's on Lakeland this morning, he was clutching an overstuffed portfolio under one arm and brushing off cat hair with his free hand (courtesy of his two cats, Little Man and Miss Pud). Best wears his good humor casually, and none of his warmth feels fake. He has bright eyes flanked with well-worn laugh lines that are fixed in a slight squint—like someone who has just woken up after a pleasant nap to find the afternoon sun glinting in his eyes. He is easily one of the most affable people I've ever met. Best has been in Jackson for a long time and in that time he has been (among other things) a left-handed child, a fridge salesman, a traveling wholesaler, and most recently, an artist and the executive director of the Fondren Renaissance Foundation. I myself am a newcomer to Jackson, and I don't know much about Best besides having overheard casual remarks about his devotion to Jackson's artistic community.

When we sit down together, I am most curious about how Best found his place in Jackson and why he cares about this city so much. As a turquoise-bedecked waitress places a second round of fragrant Lebanese tea at our table, I lean in to hear Camp's story over the tambourine-laden music coming from the speaker above us.

I Am Who I Am
One weekday morning in 1958, at McWillie Elementary School, a straw-haired little boy walks to the front of his first-grade classroom and picks up a piece of chalk with his left hand. As he writes a sentence in flowing cursive on the squeakily protesting chalkboard, his teacher, Mrs. Lyons, looks on from behind her desk. Both student and teacher are acutely conscious of Nathan Campbell Best's left-handedness. Especially so since Mrs. Lyons met with the boy's parents and refused to make him write with his right hand. "No," she'd said, "he's left-handed, and he writes beautifully, so please let him continue to write with his left hand." It was standard practice at the time to force left-handed children to write with their right hand, and this was what Best's parents wanted to do. But thanks to Mrs. Lyons, Nathan Campbell Best (called "Camp" by his parents) was able to keep his handwriting instead of being forced to use an awkward, right-handed scrawl.

In second grade, Best won an award for his handwriting, and he was asked to create a sample to be hung in the central administrative office for Jackson Public Schools.

Best still remembers Mrs. Lyons and how she stood up for him in first grade. We all have memories like this; small events in the mute distance of childhood that refuse to fade out and speak forcefully to us as we grow older. "Being left-handed has become symbolic to me," Best says. "It reminds me that I am an alternative spirit, a rebel who fights against the norm. I am proud to be left-handed, and I love my handwriting."

But Best wasn't always so proud to be different. Born and raised in Jackson as a Southern Baptist, he recalls: "I was a classic example of a white male in the South, in that I was not encouraged to explore my artistic and creative side. So for many years, I carefully repressed that side of myself." Despite his efforts at stifling his artistic side, Best knew that he had been born with a creative nature. When he struck out on his own as a young adult, seeking a vocation that was unconnected to the dubious realm of art, he was unsure of himself and undecided about his future. He enrolled at Ole Miss but jumped over to Florida State for a while before finally graduating from Millsaps College. He then went back to Ole Miss for a master's degree in urban planning.

Returning to Jackson, Best began working for the city-planning department in 1977. He was married and had children but was unwilling to stay at any one job for very long. Over the years he worked in retail (a store named "Fridges" in Highland Village), in the oil and gas business, and as a sales manager for a furniture and gifts wholesaler.

As a wholesale sales manager, Best traveled all around the country. Urban areas were always alluring to him: "I got to go to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas and Atlanta. It was a grand experience for me to see all of these other urban areas and sort of glean from them. I saw the artwork, the culture, the revitalization of certain areas and that kind of thing. It allowed me to expand my vision of what I could see and bring back to Jackson. Ultimately, it led me to my job in Fondren."

Evolution of a Neighborhood
It's easy to see that Best is completely in love with Fondren. He speaks about Fondren with unabashed enthusiasm and admits that when he worked for the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, he took on "a fatherly role, a very paternal role, especially to some of the young artists who moved to Fondren." The Fondren Renaissance Foundation began in 1996 as an organization of Fondren neighbors and business owners who wanted to revitalize their neighborhood. In 1999, they hired Best as executive director. Best saw an opportunity to be "captain of the ship, steering the ship by providing guidance and keeping the big picture in mind." That big picture was urban renewal, a daunting goal by any measure, but Best was convinced that Fondren was "the right place at the right time."

I wondered what had made Best so sure back then that Fondren was poised for rejuvenation. He replied: "In the evolution of all cities, there comes a time when you have the movement out of the city by the middle class and then, in this evolutionary process, you will have a rebuttal to that. You have a rising up of people who do not want to move out of the city, who love urban living, who love the energy and the challenges of urban living, and who want to preserve their neighborhoods. Then you'll find that among the people who moved out, there are those who want to come back when things start getting better again. I think that happens in all major urban areas. That's why I say 'the right place at the right time.' I think there's always going to be these certain urban neighborhoods that are the right place to make a comeback."

The Fondren Renaissance Foundation's plan was to encourage "the creative class" to move into the vacuum left by the middle-class exodus from Fondren. "The Creative Class" is the title of an influential book by Richard Florida that proposes a new class of knowledge-intensive workers, artists and intellectuals as the key drivers of sustainable economic growth. (Promoting and sustaining the creative class has been one of the abiding passions of the Jackson Free Press.) For Best, the term "creative class" refers to "young artists, the people that love music and art and literature and theater. ... Because of my interest in art and music and culture, I saw early on how important it was to bring that to the surface in Fondren. That was going to be the way to bring everybody together in Fondren and make it an attractive place."

Best brought his varied background to bear on every aspect of his new job, from negotiating with vendors to organizing events like Art Mix. His real talent lay in understanding the needs of Fondren's various interested parties and helping them to work together. But the main challenge was always the same: to attract the right residents to Fondren.

The artist remembers when Fondren showed the first signs of transformation "I won't forget," he reminisces. "Four or five years ago, I started to see more experimental clothes, some spiked hair and lots of piercing, and I got excited because I knew that meant the right thing was happening in Fondren. We were getting this new youth movement. Rather than being threatened by it, Fondren was energized by it."

A plan to "youthify" a neighborhood in a bid to rebuild it does not always work. A counter-example to Fondren is the Pearl district of Portland, Ore., where the youth moving in are very wealthy. There, youth are pushing out the original population rather than energizing the neighborhood and drawing long-term residents back in. Fondren, on the other hand, achieved a real Renaissance with broad-ranging benefits for the city of Jackson as a whole. But Best still has concerns about Fondren's future. "We worked hard to make Fondren open, diverse and caring," he says. "We never got caught up in the institutional definition of art. I hope that Fondren will never become elitist. I hope people will continue to embrace everyone who comes to Fondren. I believe that there can be a great synergy between the old guard and the new guard if both sides are open to each other. I would love for Fondren to be the center of the artistic community in Jackson for a long time to come."

An Artist With a Cause
Best can't remember exactly when or why he started painting. All he knows is that it was sometimes in the early '90s. That move, to lay paint to canvas, was an impulsive, out-of-the-blue decision, but Best has been painting ever since. Although he comes from a strict Baptist background, Best had long been seeking alternative answers to his questions of purpose and identity, and painting offered a promising new way to meditate on those questions. That quest for spiritual wholeness is an ongoing one for Best, who characterizes himself as a "tireless truth seeker."

"(One) can often see that search in my artwork because you often see light," Best says. "I feel like my intent is to be continuously moving toward this light. I use my paintings and the idea of light to speak about my spiritual journey."

Consequently, his creative process is fraught with tension and doubt, and is often emotional as well. "I don't just get overjoyed when I'm painting," he told me, throwing up his hands and shrugging. "I mean, there's angst and tension. I'm very demanding on myself. Making art is not always the most fun thing in the world to do, and I'm just so very happy as a lark, you know (laughs). It's frustrating! A lot of times, people look at artwork or photography and go, 'That looks so fulfilling and so wonderful.' And it can be, but getting to that finished product is often very frustrating."

That frustration, however, does not show in the final pieces. Instead, Best's paintings exude spiritual calm. Many of his works depict abstract landscapes that seem suffused by a diffuse glow emanating from behind the paint. Also, one often notices a distant light source hovering slightly above the center of the composition.

One of the places where you can be sure of seeing Best's paintings is at the Mississippi HeARTS Against AIDS benefit at Hal & Mal's this Saturday. "In Jackson, Mississippi, it is not easy to run an organization that is clearly fighting a battle that is not the most glamorous one, but is still one of the most important battles that needs to be fought," Best says. "I'm just so enamored with their effort and their dedication, so I always want to be a part of that."

Tolerance and openness were Best's main guiding principles in his work with Fondren, and he feels that HeARTS Against AIDS stands for those principles. From Best's point of view, the fight against AIDS is something that everyone should support, and he laments the fact that there is still a stigma against this cause in Jackson. "People are turned off by the connection between sexuality and AIDS," he says. "So therefore, I would say there are probably still people who would not support HeARTS Against AIDS because of their religious beliefs. Only in the last five years have people begun to press through that and begun to feel like it's OK for them to talk openly about supporting the fight against AIDS, or to support the homosexual community even if they're not homosexual. The churches are just now coming around. It's been primarily the Episcopal Church in Jackson, St. James and St. Andrews, I think. I mean, we're slow to change around here."

Characteristically, Best wonders about the future of this cause in Mississippi. Specifically, he wonders how the Jackson community will evolve in the fight against AIDS.

"It's an important fight," he insists, "and I feel it's more and more important for people who are visible in the community—who are well known to be a part of this battle—to show others that it's OK, that it's a good thing to do. It seems silly that you even have to say that; it seems silly that that's an issue. Hopefully, one day, its not going to be like that—we won't have to fight for the fight against AIDS."

A Lifelong Jacksonian
Although I've only known Best for a few hours, I'm disappointed that he's leaving Jackson. After seven years as the executive director of the Fondren Renaissance Foundation, he's headed to Oxford to become the director of the Yoknapatawpha Art Institute and to pursue a master's degree in southern culture at Ole Miss. Despite moving to Oxford, Best remains preoccupied with his hometown. He has particularly high hopes for the future of Jackson's artistic community, which he feels has been blessed with a talented and experimental younger group of artists. Accordingly, he foresees a period of change on the horizon.

"I think as the older crowd moves on, and the younger crowd becomes the predominant art community," he muses, "you're going to see more expansion of different art forms and people exploring less traditional art, like installation and mixed media. I think that will start to blossom here in Jackson, but it hasn't happened, yet. We are just so very different here."

Even though Best sees himself as an agent of change and wants to continue to challenge traditional assumptions about art and morality in Jackson, it seems that the very things that make Jackson "so very different" and "so slow to change" are what captivates him most. He is, he claims, for better or for worse, no matter where he lives, "undeniably, a lifelong Jacksonian."

Previous Comments

ID

80847

Comment

Fondren and Jackson have had no better friend than Camp Best. It's a great loss for our community that he's leaving... hopefully not forever!

Author

Scott Albert Johnson

Date

2007-02-12T12:29:59-06:00

ID

80848

Comment

Camp will be truly missed. Fondren and Jackson will not be the same without him.

Author

joiedevie

Date

2007-02-14T15:18:33-06:00