For its springtime “Hindsight is 20/20” exhibit, the local art league challenged its members to submit works offering “..artists the opportunity to reflect on all that we’ve been through over the last year, together and alone; both the triumphs and the tragedies, that which we’ve lost and that which we’ve gained. What has 2020 taught you? The BRC craftsman cultivated an idea to submit a banjo that metaphorically represented the unpredictable and confusing climate of a global pandemic. Over the ages, the study of astrology has been used as a compass heading to plot, understand, or predict the course of human events. Because the novel Covid-19 virus and its mutations have regularly mystified mankind over the last year, the BRC founder fashioned a 5 stringer entitled “Not in the Stars.”
The instrument was designed on a minimalist format with some of its standard guidepost features conspicuously absent to signify our lack of understanding or control of the events around us during the last 13 or more months. The peg head and fingerboard feature zodiac signs which guided some peoples ancient and modern but are of scant utility in the post millennium era of the coronavirus infestation.
On the lower fretboard, a conventional inlay is absent from the 5th fret space (red arrow) which usually serves as a traditional guidepost to orient the musician to that location.
In the upper fingerboard, a bold landmark inlay uniformly at 12th fret space indicating the location of the octave is absent (red arrow). Only small pearly dots along the side of the fretboard identify the significant musical scale intervals for the banjoist. The 22nd (and final) fret space at the neck-pot junction is also left blank, as 2020 could be called the Year of the Information Gap.
For the eyes only of the musician, the heel of the neck (red arrow) is a routine location for a signature BRC inlay, but this personalized emblem is missing. The number 83 indicates this instrument is the 83rd banjo repaired, restored, or built in the BRC workshop. What has 2020 taught you?
A gallery visitor studied “Not in the Stars” and remarked, “Hindsight is always 20/20 in the rearview mirror.”
From the BRC: It is said that after the Plague comes the Renaissance.
Located in Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, the Windsor banjo factory manufactured thousands of banjos over its lifetime until it was destroyed during World War II by an air raid in 1940. Hussey eventually donated his banjo, signed by all the crew, to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. In 2013, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, the Great British Banjo Company was founded and launched its commemorative “Shackleton Banjo” model which became a runaway best seller.
