The conference logo—an imagining of John Henry and the North Star, in reference to Huntington’s role as both a rail center and an Underground Railroad waystation—was created by Charlie Umhau.

 

Charlie Umhau, “the Cowboy Prince,” is a self-taught, southern Vernacular Artist, tailor & apprentice farrier based in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Charlie has a deep-rooted passion for the history, arts, and culture of Appalachia, the result of his childhood roots in Virginia and his undergraduate studies with conference program chair, Paul L. Robertson.

 

In his work, Charlie is madly in love with living life through his hands, remembering stories through material culture, and a penchant for the “meticulous-ridiculous” courting of slow old-time processes—the making of living folk tales enriched by the wrinkles of age, time itself becoming a texture in art.

 

For this year’s conference logo, Charlie wanted to specifically pay homage to the Underground Railroad’s North Star shining south; the African Appalachian American folk hero John Henry, who was pivotal in building West Virginia’s Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railroad, with his two whalebone handled sledgehammers singing as they drove clear through the mountain’s rock. In creating the logo text, Charlie took great inspiration from the black and white blur of passing coal cars, and the tradition of hobo boxcar graffiti, as they lay a patchwork topography of steel rail line ribbon unfurling across the hills, where people don’t let the dry truth get in the way of telling tales the way they actually happened.

 

Charlie’s art can be viewed on his Instagram account.