Number 48 - Keren Kroul

NUMBER:an independent journal of the arts fall 2005
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Greely Myatt, “Zip for MAX,” zipper, plaster, paint, fluorescent
light, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and David Lusk Gallery.
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Johnny Taylor, Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 2005. Courtesy of
the Jay Etkin Gallery.
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PAT R O N S
Bill Baucom & Susan Spurgeon
Leslie Luebbers & Fredric Koeppel
Adrienne Outlaw & David Piston
James Patterson
Carol Crown Ranta & Richard Ranta
Editorial #54
Big Changes in Mississippi
Leslie Luebbers
Ghost Ballet for the East Bank
Machineworks
Beverly & Sam Ross
Jeff & KC Warren
DONORS
Julie Whitehead
Susan W. Knowles
Robert Chapman
Henry & Barbara Cowles
Deborah Craddock
Kevin Scott Cuskaden
Beth Edwards
Alison England
Eclectic Eye
Kaywin Feldman & Jim Lutz
Jean Flint
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10
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Carolyn House & David Hinske
Jeff Mickey
Alan & Barbara Nadel
Patrick O’Sullivan
Sheri Rieth & Tom Lee
Mary Kay VanGieson
Renaissance to Rococo
Masterpieces from the Collection of the
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
MAX:2005
Art Museum of the University of Memphis
Gregory Crewdson
Twilight
Carol Knowles
Natalie Harris
WORKING ARTISTS
Lisa Francisco Abitz & Don Abitz
Carrie Bartlett
Lea Barton
Robert Burns
Natalie Harris
Jason Curry
Pinkney & Janice Herbert
Dana & Bill McKelvy
Annabelle Meacham
Charles & Sandra Nelson
Louise Palazola
James Ramsey
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Murray & Karen Riss
Linda Ross
Claudia Tullow-Leonard
S TA R V I N G A R T I S T S
Joyce & Lester Gingold
Virgina Overton
On Others
“Texas Medicine”
Hamlett Dobbins
J Ivcevich
Kathryn Skinner
BOARD
Philip Kobylarz
Joe Nolan
Carrie McGee
OF
DIRECTORS
James Patterson, P R E S I D E N T
Cheryl S. Bader, V P / T R E A S U R E R
Carol Crown Ranta, S E C R E T A R Y
René Paul Barilleaux
Sheri Fleck Rieth
Leslie Luebbers
David Thompson
Mary Kay VanGieson
Sherry Bryan
Leandra Urrutia
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Tad Lauritzen Wright
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The Fragile Species
focus of NUMBER: is on the contemporary visual arts in the tri-state
region (TN, AR, MS). Opinions expressed herein are those of the
David Hall
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GRAPHIC DESIGN
Editorial Nº54
flooded. The greater fear was looting, and museum staff
refused to vacate until a security force could guard the
building and collections. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art
of the University of New Orleans, a new and essentially vertical
facility suffered no damage and no loss of objects. The
Newcomb Gallery at Tulane, which has a splendid collection
of American Arts & Crafts material, is removing its textiles,
works on paper and ceramics, but there is concern about
objects in storage in an inundated area. The Contemporary
Art Center suffered some structural damage, but no further
reports are available.
Considering the enormous losses of life, livelihood and
property, the big question is how much the cultural institutions
will suffer in the long run. Will their audiences return? Will
their bases of financial support be diverted to the recovery
effort?
Tennessee suffered no serious effects from Katrina, but
several thousand evacuees are temporarily or permanently
living in our cities and towns. The Tennessee Arts Commission
is making its Special Opportunities grants available for arts
organizations to receive amounts up to $500 for ticket subsidies to allow evacuees to attend cultural events. Check the
TAC website, www.arts.state.tn.us, for guidelines and forms.
The TAC’s Governor’s Regional Conferences, annual events
designed to provide management education to Tennessee
arts institutions, will be held during October: October 13 in
Knoxville, October 19 in Dickson, and October 28 in
Germantown. The speakers and seminar leaders are a Who’s
Who of cultural management experts in planning, development,
community engagement—the nuts and bolts of successful
operations. All the information is available on the TAC website.
We can only wonder if disaster planning might be a late
addition to the agenda.
Look at the calendar. Whew! Much is happening, so get
out there and take part in the art.
Leslie Luebbers
Leslie Luebbers is director of the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM).
N U M B E R : 5 4
Business first.
The NUMBER board extends very special thanks to all those
people who responded to this summer’s sponsorship invitation
and generously sent CHECKS! Their names are listed in the
masthead column. Don’t fret about being left out; NUMBER
still wants you.
More serious business.
Presumably you are all keeping track of the art part of the
Katrina disaster, but it is difficult to assess news reports.
The best source at the moment is the American Association
of Museums website, www.aam-us.org. Click on AAM Latest
on the selection line at the top. The website includes museums
of every kind, including art museums, historic houses, zoos,
science centers and any institution that holds or exhibits
collections.
The greatest losses appear to have occurred along the
Gulf Coast. The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi lost much of
its nearly completed spectacular new building designed by
Frank Gehry. George Ohr’s “madly” beautiful pottery and
Gehry’s torqued design promised to be one of the world’s
most felicitous marriages of collection and container, before
the Grand Casino, swept inland by Katrina’s tide, landed on
the building. The collections, still in the old building, had
been moved and are safe. The Pleasant Reed House, a
museum of African American history, was also destroyed.
Reports from the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs
have been confusing, because writers have not distinguished
clearly between the museum and its collections and the
Anderson family buildings and collections. Evidently, the
institution and collections weathered Katrina, but family
buildings in the compound were destroyed and the vault that
held the family collections was inundated and the works
severely compromised. Efforts are underway to save and
conserve, but a great amount may be lost.
The condition of museums in New Orleans is varied. In
general, collections held within the museums seem to have
fared better than objects in off-site storage. The New Orleans
Museum of Art is on relatively high ground and was not
5
N U M B E R : 5 4
6
Big Changes in Mississippi
Jackson
One of the most visible arts organizations in Jackson,
Mississippi, closed shop last December, leaving Jack Kyle,
executive director for the Mississippi Commission for
International Cultural Exchange, to clean up the loose ends
and pay the last bills for the decade-old organization in the
wake of a $1.5 million deficit when the most recent exhibit
closed in September.
One of those loose ends was tied up in a bow when Jackson’s
mayor Harvey Johnson, in the throes of a re-election campaign
he lost, announced that the lease on the space would be
taken over by its next door neighbor, the Mississippi Museum
of Art, on July 1, 2005.
Betsy Bradley, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art,
noted that the plan to somehow expand exhibit space for
the facility had been underway for quite some time —since a
strategic plan had been developed back in 2003. “At the end
of 2004, we got word from the International Cultural Exchange
that they were not going to pursue another exhibition,”
Bradley said.
That announcement led to conversations about the future
home of the museum with the city of Jackson — which owns
both the Mississippi Arts Pavilion and the building housing
the Mississippi Museum of Art. Asked about the project just
before he left office, Johnson had this to say: “The Mississippi
Museum of Art has always been a great fit downtown, and as
we are thrilled that we were able to work out this arrangement.”
MMA will begin renovations this summer, investing at
least $2 million from state bonds in improvements to the
Pavilion. When completed in 2006, the facility will open
with a restaurant, sales gallery and exhibition, education
and reception areas. MMA will continue to operate in its
existing building until the opening of the new facility.
“This new facility and the investment the Museum will
make certainly ties the cultural district together, along with
the TeleCom Center, the Convention Center, and the Farish
St. Entertainment District and all the other wonderful public
and private investment that are occurring downtown,“
Johnson said.
Each development Johnson listed in his statement was
authorized, voted on, or funded during his two terms as mayor.
Work on TeleCom Center, a concept developed when WorldCom
was still based in Jackson and before news of massive
accounting irregularities came to light, continues with a
proposed opening date late in 2005. The Convention Center
funding referendum passed in November 2004, with city
residents increasing the restaurant and hotel sales tax by 2%
to fund the facility. The Farish Street Entertainment District,
a long-running project still a few years away from fruition,
continues to languish while Jackson and Performa Entertainment,
a private developer known for their work on Beale Street in
Memphis, negotiate the details of the renovations.
While the announcement was welcomed by business and
cultural leaders in Jackson, other expressed regret at the
loss of Mississippi Commission for International Cultural
Exchange, even as the MMA announcement was being made.
Bud Robinson, chairman of was philosophical in discussing
why the organization closed its doors after 10 years of
exhibits: 1996’s The Palaces of St. Petersburg: Russian
Imperial Style; 1998’s The Splendors of Versailles; 2001’s
The Majesty of Spain: Royal Collections from the Museo del
Prado and Patrimonio Nacional; and 2004’s The Glory of
Baroque Dresden.
“Had we gotten attendance of roughly 350,000, we would
have been fine,” said Robinson of the disappointing numbers
for Dresden, the final exhibition in the series. “As far as
exit interviews go, people were absolutely wild about it.”
That sentiment didn’t show up in the exhibit’s box office;
only about 133,000 visitors came to an exhibit that featured
Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyke. The show’s
numbers left the organization with a $1.5 million deficit that
is being covered by continued private donations, according
to Kyle.
The failure of Dresden to attract the kinds of crowds that
came for the first exhibit, The Palaces of St. Petersburg,
was perplexing on some levels, Kyle said. “We had the
highest quality of art but the lowest attendance in Dresden.
How do you explain that?”
On the other hand, Kyle saw the low attendance numbers
coming as early as the end of April 2004. Only 50,00055,000 tickets had been sold, half what had been sold by
the same point in The Majesty of Spain early in 2001. The
ominous sound of the phones not ringing with calls from
schools to schedule field trips was another early indicator
of trouble ahead. Due to gasoline price increases, school
groups — a mainstay of the early sales of past exhibitions —
were cutting back. “The cost of gas and diesel has impacted
their ability to take field trips,” Kyle said in May 2004, citing
teachers and principals who had called him.
Glenn Sanford, owner of Southern Breeze Gallery in
Jackson’s Highland Village, said that the exhibitions had
been good in spreading the word about Jackson as a cultural
destination not only for Mississippians, but other visitors as
well. “In years past, we’ve had a lot of people who visited
the gallery because they were in town for the St. Petersburg
exhibit. I felt that it brought a lot of attention in a roundabout way to Mississippi art. We sold paintings that are now
in Alaska to people who came for those events.”
The total numbers for all of MCICE‘s events speak for
themselves in that regard. According to Kyle, about 1.3 million visitors came to the exhibitions over the 10-year period
that the commission existed. The overall economic impact
of that many visitors was one of the selling points that
MCICE used to solicit funds from the Legislature. Mara
Hartmann, manager of communications and public relations
for the Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that
the four exhibits staged by MCICE had a combined economic
impact of $175 million.
Several governmental entities gave money to support
MCICE exhibits — the Mississippi State Legislature appropriated $3 million each for the Spanish exhibit and the Dresden
exhibit, while the City of Jackson donated funds for each
exhibit through the Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We did
give MCICE a sponsorship for each of the four exhibits,” said
Hartmann. Was that a worthwhile investment? “Yes,” said
Hartman, “it was a good investment for the CVB because its
educational and cultural attractions brought new visitors,
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in the state to do that and have always been able to do that,”
Kyle continued.
The role of the state in promoting MCICE events and the
concept of a “downtown cultural district,” which supporters
believe can be anchored by MMA for the visual arts and
Thalia Mara Hall for the performing arts, have been footballs
in local and state politics. The Dresden exhibit was criticized
by many as a waste of state funds, as well as vilified for its
focus on a German culture of the distant past. Talk radio
callers sputtered about the nudes on display and wondered
how Mississippians could support a display of German art,
given that country’s stance against the war in Iraq. The
vision of a downtown cultural district in Jackson has been
used to argue for projects as diverse as the Intermodal Union
Station project and ongoing efforts to renovate the old King
Edward Hotel, closed in the late 60s and home to pigeons
and vagrants ever since.
MMA found itself in the crosshairs of the political wrangling
once it was discovered that the 2003 legislature had approved
a bill that allowed MMA buy two lots in LeFleur’s Bluff State
Park, located at the edge of Jackson’s border with suburban
Flowood, for possible use in developing a new site for the
facility. The prospect of MMA moving out of downtown so
angered Rep. John Reeves (R-Jackson) that he amended the
2005 budget for the Mississippi Arts Commission to prohibit
the museum from doing so. At the time, museum officials
indicated that there were no immediate plans to move the
facility to the Lakeland Drive location.
Reeves needn’t have worried, it seems, the recent
announcement revealed how committed MMA is to the
downtown cultural district concept. “This move enables the
Museum to continue its mission: to attract visitors to a vibrant
downtown Jackson, to display more of its outstanding collection
of art from this state and beyond, and to educate even more
children in the visual arts,” said Jerry Host, chairman of the
MMA board of trustees.
At the press conference, the museum unveiled renderings
which depict the new museum facility as the fulcrum of a
downtown cultural district, extending from Thalia Mara Hall
to the Telecommunications Center, including the Arts Center
and offices of the Mississippi Opera, Mississippi Symphony,
Ballet Mississippi, Davis Planetarium and the planned
Capital City Convention Center.
The Pavilion offers many benefits to MMA, not least of
which is a state-of-the-art climate control system, along
with a loading dock, gallery spaces and double the square
footage of the current building. Even though Bradley loves
the ideas for the new space in the Pavilion, she mourns the
loss of MCICE. “The Commission did a lot of good for this
community. We always benefited when they had an exhibit
in the building behind us,” Bradley said. “We are positioned
to assume the mantle, so to speak.”
Julie Whitehead
Julie Whitehead writes about art and culture in Mississippi.
N U M B E R : 5 4
creating the possibility of repeat visits, and it did positively
promote the city’s and state’s image locally, nationally and
worldwide, so from a CVB standpoint, all that publicity is
wonderful!”
The critical factor in MCICE closing its doors after 10 1/2
years in Jackson was the reluctance of the state to continue
funding exhibits. Kyle was fully prepared to mount a fifth
show — he visited Europe in late October and early November
of 2004 to continue negotiations for another event. But the
state’s fiscal situation as viewed by incoming Governor Haley
Barbour precluded any more support. “He, like the other
legislators, didn’t see that the state could continue to do
even the support in the past, given the fiscal condition of
the state,” said Robinson. “You can’t do work of the magnitude
and scale of exhibits like we’ve been doing without legislative
support.”
“If it was a lucrative business, everybody’d be doing it,”
said Kyle. “I was just going to be butting my head against
the wall, and there was no point in my continuing it.” Kyle
believes that the MCICE achieved many of its goals during its
ten-year run, including educating the citizens of Mississippi
in art from all over the world. “What we were trying to do here
is cultural and educational, not necessarily entertainment,”
said Kyle. “There are people in society today who don’t want
that — but that’s all the more reason to present such events.”
“Some wanted us to focus on Mississippi and Mississippi
only. We have Mississippi art museums and cultural institutions
N U M B E R : 5 4
8
Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks is First Public Art Project
Nashville
Sculptor Alice Aycock will receive the first commission
under Nashville’s new “percent for art” ordinance, it was
announced at a Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission
press conference on July 21, 2005. Aycock was chosen from
a field of six semi-finalists including acclaimed public
artists Ed Carpenter, Christopher Janney and Dennis
Oppenheim. Speaking before Nashville’s Urban Design
Forum, she described growing up around construction sites
in Allentown, Pennsylvania and her natural affinity for abandoned industrial sites. The Nashville piece will be located on
a former barge-building facility along the Cumberland River.
Although Nashville’s “percent for art” ordinance was
passed in 2000, this is the Metro Arts Commission’s first
public art commission. After several years of lectures by
consultants and visiting artists acquainting the public with
the idea of large-scale public art and a visioning process led
by public art consultant Jack Mackie, a call for entries was
issued in Fall 2004 soliciting proposals for the $250,000 award.
Coinciding with the announcement of Aycock’s selection,
The Tennessean newspaper’s art writer jumped the gun with
Alice Aycock, “Ghost Ballet for the East BankMachineworks,” proposal images, two views.
results of an “online poll” announcing that a majority of
Nashvillians did not favor the proposed piece. How anyone
could have taken an online poll before the first public mention
of the sculpture remains a mystery. Nonetheless, the sensation-prone journalist managed (not surprisingly, given that
the City is facing an unpopular property tax increase) to
raise a hue and cry from a citizenry already skeptical about
unorthodox uses for public money.
Aycock’s “Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks,”
a 100-foot-tall by 100-foot-wide arrangement of metal
components, is a group of connected parts whose visual
allusions range from carnival roller coasters to the roving
spotlights once associated with Hollywood movie premières.
Elements will be mounted on two of the remaining gantry
cranes once used for lowering barges into the river. Aycock
hopes that the twisting and turning of the bright red ladderlike track reaching into the sky will bring a sense of excitement
to the riverfront and also serve to reinforce “the confidence
of a city that is comfortable with its identity as the home of
American music and one of this country’s true emerging
cities.”
While Aycock’s piece contains no visual or aural references
to music, several finalists’ projects did. Dennis Oppenheim
proposed a giant self-playing guitar that would translate the
natural music of the river into a song, and Christopher
Janney offered a series of sound and light columns along
the riverfront greenway that would create visual music in
response to visitor presence. Instead, Aycock hopes to
engage the public with her use of familiar industrial parts.
She anticipates that they will work their influence purely
from a visual standpoint, perhaps conjuring up an image of
what was once a beehive of barge-building activity.
Music or no music, the massive scale of “Ghost Ballet”
means it will immediately begin a conversation with the
sweeping elliptical curve of the Arena roof, the large concave
façade of Country Music Hall of Fame and the twin spires of
the BellSouth Tower, a.k.a. The Batman Building — a great
example of a once-ridiculed building that Nashvillians have
grown to love.
Susan W. Knowles
Susan W. Knowles is a Nashville-based curator and art writer.
9
make this portrait shine. In the hastily tied bow on her bodice,
the horticultural accuracy of the flowers in her hat, and the
precise detailing of the lace at her neck and wrists, Vigee Le
Brun proves that she is just as good a painter as any of the
boys, and perhaps better than most. Her image of strong
Nashville
femininity is a tour de force of the depiction of character.
Renaissance to Rococo, a selection of stunning works
Another compelling portrait found in the collection is of
from the collection of Hartford’s Wadsworth Athenaeum, is
Joseph Coymans, by Frans Hals. This work is distinctly Dutch,
the kind of exhibition that one expects to see at the Frist
from the application of paint on the canvas, particularly in
Center for the Visual Arts. Beautifully mounted and displayed the delightfully highlighted individual strands of the subby the staff at the Frist, this exhibition features paintings by ject’s beard, to the costume of the subject. Quite different in
Caravaggio, Goya, Anthony van Dyck, Hals, Lorrain, and
its intent than the portrait of the Duchess of Polignac, this
portrait stakes a claim to greatness, not on the part of the
Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, names well known to more
than just the art history student or enthusiast, and these are artist but on the part of the subject. However, like Vigee Le
Brun’s depiction of the duchess, Joseph Coymans possesses a
not obscure works by the artists, but celebrated examples.
In an exhibition where so much is outstanding, it is difficult spontaneous feel. In this portrait, this feeling is accomplished
to identify a strongest area. However, one broad category is through Hals’s sketchy application of pigment on canvas.
The smaller works in the exhibition are not minor. Although
portraiture. Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun’s “The Duchesse
full of larger scale masterpieces, such as Bernardo Strozzi’s
de Polignac Wearing a Straw Hat” is stop-in-your-tracks
“Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” from 1615, and Giovanni
stunning. A wonderful example of Rococo portraiture, the
Domenico Tiepolo’s “The Building of the Trojan Horse,” from
duchess is presented to the viewer in a traditional pose.
Dressed in the latest fashion, yet looking delicately flushed 1773-1774, works such as Cornelis van Poelenburgh’s “Feast
as if she might have just dashed in for the sitting, the details of the Gods,” from 1623, demand just as much admiration
and attention. This excellently rendered work measures a
mere 12 1/2 by 19 inches, yet it feels much grander in scale.
Depicting the gods in drunken luxury on top of the clouds,
it contains fantastic examples of foreshortening and a wonderful sense of spontaneity. The Caravaggio included in the
exhibition, “Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy,” from 15941595, is also on the smaller end of the scale, at least by
Caravaggio’s standards, but is nevertheless an interesting
example of the painter’s work. Its details are some of the
most amusing parts of the picture; one is almost distracted
entirely from the beautifully rendered figures of the angel
and Saint Francis by the scene in the background, which
would appear to contain a strange, robed figure and an
abundance of pixies. It is easy to ascertain why the Frist
chose this picture for its promotional material.
A commendable aspect of this exhibition is that the
selections making up the Rococo portion were particularly
strong and interesting for a period in art history typically
thought of as the cotton candy of European painting. Noel
Halle’s “Holy Family,” from 1753 is particularly touching, and
it is also an indication of how far the depiction of religious
subject matter had changed from the Renaissance to the
Rococo. This painting depicts Christ as a toddler on his
father’s lap, his mouth partly open as his mother attempts to
feed him from a spoon. Although it recalls other works in the
exhibition, such as Sisto Balalocchio’s “Holy Family,” of
1609-1610, the focus has determinedly shifted from dignified
formality to charming intimacy. Renaissance to Rococo
allows one to view the constants over a period of the art history and to identify adaptations pursued by artists in order
to keep the subject matter contemporary and pertinent. For
a small exhibition, it has a very large impact.
Natalie Harrris
Natalie Harris is a masters degree student in art history at the University of Memphis.
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, “The Duchesse de Polignac Wearing a Straw Hat,” Oil on canvas, 1782. Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, acquired in honor of Kate M. Sellers, Eighth Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, “Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy,” Oil on canvas, ca. 1594–95. Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund.
N U M B E R : 5 4
Renaissance to Rococo
Masterpieces from the Collection of the
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Frist Center for the Visual Arts
May 20– August 28, 2005
N U M B E R : 5 4
10
The Inner Voice of Art: The Journey
directive were good introductions to a show about inner
voice. “Come on in, we’re open,” it welcomed. Open up, wise
up (know thyself).
Low rumblings at AMUM’s reception desk sounded like
they
came from deep within the ocean, the earth, the body.
Memphis
They did. Robin Salant’s audio synthesis of whales calling,
“Do artworks have an interiority? Can we listen to this
icebergs cracking and humans chanting (“ant(i)ar[c]t’ica”)
voice, see its essence?” asked David Moos, curator of
and Bille Rowe’s cool blue neon invited viewers to go on a
Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in his call to
of
Art”
displayed
at
journey into mind and body. One of the most powerful stops
artists for “MAX 2005: The Inner Voice
AMUM late this summer.
along the way was Jean Flint’s evocation of “The Other
To find art’s essence and voice, 23 local and regional
Woman.” Twisted pieces of gray cloth wrapped with string
artists included in this biennial collaboration between AMUM hung like knotted intestines, turds and phalluses inside a
and Delta Axis sawed holes into gallery walls, hung fetishes hoop-skirt body. This bundle of guts and sexual parts may have
inside hoop skirts, blasted canvases with infernos of color
been an invective, or a fetish concretizing Flint’s jealousy
and energy and played songs from the Seventies. The exhi- and rage. Beneath stylized notions of propriety (embodied
bition’s layout showed us not only the fruits of the artists’
in the 19th century hoop skirt), beyond a desire to wound or
labors but also how they made the journey in.
judge, Flint seemed to be trying to demythologize and
Bill Rowe’s blue-on-blue neon, “Know Open,” hung above understand. What she found deep in the body of “The Other
the entrance of the museum. This work’s Socratic wisdom,
Woman” looked like the fragile, gut-churning regret and
desire of all humankind.
21st century style, its word play and its triple-entendre
MAX:2005
Art Museum of the University of Memphis
June 25 –September 5
Amber McGregor, “My Special Day, Week, Month,” projected video, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
Search for inner voice took Alabama artist Amy Pleasant
into spare, monochromatic space where tiny human figures
dotted a 60-by-48-inch gray-blue landscape (“Casting,” oil
on canvas). Most of the figures, created with two or three
deft swipes of paint, looked down. Relative to their size,
the distances separating them looked vast. Heads bent and
cocked, nearly lost in shadow, the tiny forms appeared to
be listening and remembering. Downcast? Casting about
for their bearings or an idea? Cast off like a minnow in an
ocean? Lonely and quiet as an Edward Hopper cityscape and
disconcertingly powerful, “Casting” evoked a sense of vast
psychological terrain.
With a voice that was both ancient and modern, Niles
Wallace posed a mystery by entombing an object in the
inner chambers of a polyurethane pyramid. Like the sphinx,
the puzzle could be solved. We found the answer in the title
of the work, “Level,” in the size and shape of the barely discernable object, and in the perfectly stacked and recessed
rectangles. Inside the long, sleek slabs that looked like
white marble steps leading up to a temple or monument,
Jean Flint, “The Other Woman,” mixed media, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.
11
white-hot yellows blasted through and melted down umber
arcs, the last vestiges of architecture. This mesmerizing
scene served a dual purpose. Loading on paint, slashing
through it, and scraping back down to the raw canvas
allowed Herbert to release some of the frustrations of 21st
century life and to depict modern warfare’s total destruction.
The inner voice of art in Hamlett Dobbins’ current work is
the voice of memory — how a piece of material felt in his
hands, how a friend’s hair fell around her shoulders, how the
emotional tone of a friendship changed. There were no literal
representations of figures, objects, or landscapes in Dobbins’
18-by-15-inch oils on canvas and linen. His visceral, emotional recollections were expressed with nuanced colors and
surfaces so fully realized you could slip into one of the
artist’s five small worlds, feel the globules of purple and
blue roll across your body in “Untitled (for P.H.)” and dive
further into “Untitled (for R.C.”) to reach that warm red glow
that seemed to emanate from the depths.
Noted Atlanta assemblage artist, Radcliffe Bailey heard
inner voice as “Joyful Noise” and covered 132-by-60-inches
Radcliffe Bailey, “Joyful Noise,” glass bottles, musical instruments, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and the Shainman Gallery,
New York.
of wall with dozens of glass jugs and antique brass horns.
Bailey’s joy was inflected with shadows. Museum lights shown
through the narrow throated jugs onto the patinaed brass
and created thousands of bronze and blue tinged aureoles
throughout the assemblage and a large halo around it. Like
his earlier multilayered collages that mapped out the black
American experience with vintage photos and written
phrases, “Joyful Noise” made some wry allusions to culture
and history such as whisky from illegal stills and jug bands.
Bailey’s voice beat out its own rhythms with enough jugs and
horns (those mouthpieces that both wail and celebrate with
fanfare) to make up a hundred bands.
In his life-size self-portrait (“#18609515020,” digital Cprint,) Dhanraj Emanuel neither patriotically waved nor
burned the flag he loosely held with his left hand. He looked
up, perhaps hoping for a clearer vision than he was getting
as immigrant “#18609515020.” His face was focused,
searching, questioning. There was no anger nor pride in his
expression, no threatening body language. Emanuael, an
immigrant from the Middle East who had been studying art
Amy Pleasant, “Casting,” oil on canvas, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York.
N U M B E R : 5 4
Wallace reminded us that art’s essence is at the edge of our
awareness and accessible when we pay attention and notice
subtle details.
For Cedar Nordbye, inner voices are feelings and attitudes
that can be excavated and understood. Norbye sawed a 13by-15-inch hole into the wall of the Egyptian Hall adjoining
the main gallery. On the joists inside he drew pictures.
Images that occurred to Nordbye as he carried out his “IEAA
(Idea Excavation Architectural Analysis)” included a man
sitting quietly in a yoga position, his body engulfed with
flames, and an armored vehicle moving toward boxed letters
which spelled out “MORE” and “MORAL.” Black ants marched
across the bottom of the rough hewn wood. Nordbye’s dig
into the inner voice of art and artists suggested that they are
inflected with a complex array of factors – instinct, hard work,
technological know-how, moral judgment and ideas so intensely
held they may be willing to give up their lives for them.
Pinkney Herbert is an abstract painter, but the highenergy and high-key colors of his oil on canvas reflected
some very real issues. In 90-by-72-inches of “Inferno,”
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in Memphis, was at a cross roads. In his lifesize, transparent
display of self, the artist was “the work of art” looking for its
essence, its voice and for an idea worthy of artistic passion.
Christine Conley looked for art’s essence in paint chips.
She pinned them like exotic insect specimens in a glass case
(“Taxonomy of Leftovers”) and painted an image of one of
the chips enlarged a thousand-fold (“Cornered,” acrylic on
styrene). Conley bent the styrene at vertical center and
hung the work in the corner of the Egyptian Hall adjoining
the main gallery. Did the artist’s 14-by-24-inch painting of
a chip she scraped from her palette or studio floor have
presence and voice enough to stand alone? Created with every
color on her palette (including limes, violets, burgundies,
forest greens) and filled with the twists and turns that
acrylics make as they ooze from tubes and are mixed and
spilled, Conley’s painting “Cornered” us and took us for a
complex, disorienting, garishly beautiful roller coaster ride.
In “A Line, a Journey” (watercolor on paper and handmade paper cutouts), Keren Kroul went far into essence and
worm-holed into a universe where evolution was a fanciful
synthesis of Darwin and the transcendent. Kroul’s whimsical
mix and match of phyla, geological time periods and designer
colors made for some haunting images as lime green slime
oozed off the arm of one figure and a huge reptilian tail
Virginia Overton, “Hot Child,” mixed media, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Wade Guyton.
snaked behind the back of another human female. For her
contribution to MAX:2003, Kroul’s tiny cutouts played out a
scene of anguish that looked like a Dantean Canto (“To Fly
Away”). In this more recent 103-by-93-inch work, afterlife
looked more relaxed, like another stage of evolution in
which hundreds of naked, winged cutouts with sexual parts
intact hovered close by, still processing evolution’s grand
experiment.
Ian Lemmonds found essence in two figurines left on a
window sill (“Untitled (Sill Horse),” 19-by-24 inch light jet
print). Bright sunlight nearly dissolved the keepsakes and
the curtain that hung lopsided in the window. Something
about memory and minute to minute beauty asked me to
pause and breath with the work for awhile.
Much like one of Barnett Newman’s large “Zip” paintings,
Greely Myatt’s “Zip for Max” vertically sliced 5’9” of monochromatic space. But Myatt’s color field was AMUM’s gallery
wall, and the line that divided it was a real zipper. Myatt
plastered his readymade into the back wall of gallery A and
placed a fluorescent light behind it. This functional, lighted
zipper had much to say about a sculptor’s process, Myatt’s
wit, and his impact on students, for example, gesturing and
cutting through space, defining parameters, incubating an
idea and bringing it to light and opening up the minds of
others. The zipper’s 5’9” length, Myatt’s exact height, also
evoked a sense of an artist opening self with each creation.
Gallery B, the room on the other side of the wall that Myatt
was unzipping, was filled with the artwork of Virginia Overton,
one of his former students, who also turned functional
objects into multilayered metaphor. Overton’s installation,
“Hot Child,” played tricks with time and space. An antique
phonograph perched on a large yellow pedestal sat inside a
12-foot industrial tube suspended from the ceiling. The
slightest movements, including setting the needle onto the
1970s hit record, “Hot Child in the City,” torqued the tube.
As we slow danced with the cylinder, moving in and out of
its path as it circled the room, the quality of the sound of
the pop tune and our relationship to space altered.
Mischievous and metaphysical, “Hot Child” looked like the
answer to the Zen Koan, “What is the sound of time moving
through space?” created by a mind that professor Myatt
helped to unzip.
For “My Special Day, Week, Month” Amber McGregor put
on full wedding regalia each morning last February. She
videotaped herself in white-on-white gown with train trailing
behind her as she shopped and ran errands. McGregor
talked with people along the way and clarified her feelings
regarding ritual and relationship, deciding what parts of
Cedar Nordbye, “IEAA (Idea Excavation Architectural Analysis),” mixed media, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
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tradition she would carry on and what she’d discard as
excess baggage.
The Max 2005 artists dug deep into art and life. Human
nature is complex, their works told us; life is ambiguous and
its joy is inflected with pain. Some of the art asked tough
questions (about country, about self) and took us deeper.
Much like the hero in mythologist Joseph Campbell’s crosscultural studies, the artists fought inner dragons and trekked
perilous terrain. They discovered that art is everywhere —
throwaways, in vast expanses of mind, on a windowsill,
within gallery walls and pyramids, and in the way light
imbues color. Other artists who layered insight with humor
provided the exhibition with wit and wisdom. Myatt unzipped
walls and shone some light on the matter. Overton played
with space and time and reminisced with a hit record from
the seventies. McGregor put her wedding dress back on and
rethought her attitudes about commitment and tradition.
Remember that sassy, sexy, untamed mind-set of young
adulthood? Curator David Moos and these artists know:
when you listen and go deep into art and life — the essence
and voice you discover will be your own.
Carol Knowles
Carol Knowles is a Memphis art writer and critic.
Keren Liebemuk Kroul, “A Line, A Journey,” watercolor on handmade paper and paper cutouts, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
Dhanraj Emanuel, “#18609515020,” digital C-print, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
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Gregory Crewdson
Twilight
Frist Center for the Visual Arts
May 20th - August 28, 2005
Nashville
In the exhibition Twilight, on view through the end of
August at the Frist Center in Nashville, Gregory Crewdson
invited the viewer into a very strange, yet oddly familiar
domestic realm. The artist is noted for the cinematic care he
takes in rendering his images, as well as his obsessive
attention to detail. Nancy Cason, the associate curator of
the Frist, compares him to Sam Mendes, director of
American Beauty, and David Lynch, the director of
Mullholand Drive and Twin Peaks. These comparisons are
apt, although the comparison to Lynch is closer to the mark.
Crewdson’s fascinating images seem deeply suspended in a
kind of alternate reality, a reality that due to the often
larger than life depictions, is difficult to take in all at once,
and therefore easy to miss completely. His pictures present
snapshots strange dichotomies, but, while their arresting
aesthetic and theatrical qualities invite the viewer to participate actively in looking, the images are only as complex
as the viewer’s investment of attention allows.
The most successful in this exhibition, oddly enough,
are the two that are least overt in their presentation of the
bizarre. “Untitled (boy with hand in drain),” 1999, offers a
scene of domestic curiosity enacted in a bathroom. Due to
the large scale and design of this image, it is easy to overlook the bottom of the photograph, which holds the most
intrigue, and establishes the subject matter. While the top
two thirds of the work presents an unsurprising suburban
setting, the bottom third of the work is cast in an eerie
green light. It has the look of a neglected fish tank with a
broken filter, mossy, wet and slightly in motion. There is
nothing but decay. In his act of reaching down the drain,
the boy’s arm has taken on similar sinister qualities; the
arm no longer belongs to the boy, but to a cadaver. The
meaning of this reaching is unclear. The Frist ventures an
explanation, because of the artist’s interest in Freud. But,
much like focusing only on the theatrical element of these
works will yield analogies to particular films, a Freudian
interpretation seems too simple.
The second work from this series that piques one’s
curiosity due to its benign nature is “Untitled (pregnant
woman in pool),” 1999. This image, at first glance, appears
to be the most straightforward of the group. However, much
like “(boy with hand in drain),” the normalcy of this image
falls apart in the details, specifically the way in which the
artist utilizes light. The scene itself is straightforward
enough, with a Magdalene-like woman standing in a blue
plastic wading pool, attended to by a woman who might be
her mother. A tree stretches over her, framing her in the
middle of three arches formed by its branches. In the background, houses glow with warm golden light. To the left of
the woman a youth lies on the ground in a position that is
almost fetal, surrounded by toys and covered only by a
towel. The woman, clothed in a white sundress, contemplates her burgeoning belly as shafts of light pour in from
the right. These shafts of light, much like those in “Untitled
(sleepwalker),” 1999, call attention to themselves for two
reasons. First, it would appear that this scene takes place at
the moment right after twilight and just before darkness,
making their presence illogical, and second, they highlight
the woman’s form, making her dress become transparent,
revealing her ripe form. Unlike “(sleepwalker),” however,
these shafts of light seem quite sensual. They sexualize the
moment, and yet they also call attention to its purity. The
dichotomy of this image is puzzling, and, like (boy with
hand in drain), demands that the viewer look at it more
than casually.
The one criticism to be made about this exhibition, it is
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (boy with hand in drain), Digital print, 48 x 60 in., 2001–2002. Collection of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
its placement. Located on the first floor of the Frist, in the
middle of the Renaissance to Rococo exhibition, it is distinctly out of place. Casual patrons of the Frist, coming in to
see a selection of beautifully depicted saints and society
figures of the Renaissance and Rococo, or the sweetly
painted little girls of Renoir were a little too challenged by
the Crewdson installation. More often than not, visitors
made a quick sweep of the contents, a circle of the room at
best, and then moved away in bewilderment. Evidently, this
ambivalence was anticipated by the Frist, as visitor information on the exhibition was quite thorough, and contained
one of the more thoughtful and extensive explanations that
I have seen for an exhibition that is not the main event.
Even if the explanation of the works was a little too
Freudian, the Frist must be given credit for showing work
that made unusually strenuous demands on its audiences.
This body of work is impressive. Fetishistic rendering,
sumptuous coloration, and dramatic staging all suggest that
these images were meant to provoke looking, to provoke
voyeurism, as Cason rightly points out in the accompanying
essay. One sees echoes of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film
Stills from the 1970s, and the curiosity of the surrealist
photographer Man Ray. Nevertheless, for their beauty and
obvious aesthetic accomplishments, it is difficult for the
viewer to understand the aim of the artist or the point of
the works themselves. In the end, one can only come to the
conclusion that the enigmatic feeling created by these
images is an integral part of how they are viewed. What is
going on? What are we supposed to be looking at? What is
important? The artist effortlessly raises these questions
without giving an answer. The brilliance of these images is
their elusive nature.
Natalie Harris
Natalie Harris is a masters of art history student at the University of Memphis.
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (pregnant woman / pool), Laser-direct C print, 50 x 60 in., 1999. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
On Others
Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN
October 21- December7, 2005
Irongate Studios, Austin, TX
January 13 – January 29, 2005
Sewanee
On Others, a traveling exhibit curated by Greg Pond,
assistant professor of art at The University of the South, makes
connections among a group of artists: Patrick Deguira, Melody
Owens, Jack Dingo Ryan, Steven Thompson and Pond himself. Engaging a wide-ranging discourse on the politics of
identity, civilization and the natural world, “On Others” is
the result of successful creating, packaging and marketing.
Pond envisioned the exhibit as “…the tightest show possible without having to be a “real” curator. I’m not a curator
by profession. I’m an artist.”
In “Objects Possessing an Historical Past, That is Renewed
By the Present and Persists Without End,” Pond sets two
identical miniature single-wide trailers face-to-face to
compliment and confront one another. This dialogue is reiterated in the mirrored windows and doors. Psychologically
speaking, the mirror image reveals the unconscious to the
conscious, bereft of the protective armor of the personality.
“Objects” lays bare the secret that “the house on the hill” is
a tenuous cultural construction futilely attempting to hold
the irrational chaos of the natural wilderness at bay. “Sugar
Candy Mountain: The Final Resting Place of Saint T,” consists
of rivulets of audio wires leading to mountain peaks of aluminum
matrices. Tiny speakers are interspersed along the inclines
while small branches sprout upwards and burst into blooms
of artificial flowers. “Sugar’s” composition is punctuated by
the interplay of artificial materials and their natural evocations.
Pond’s sculpture reminds us that man’s utopian impulse
toward artifice and technology is also an expression of the
natural world. The title of the piece calls to mind the Harry
“Haywire Mac” McClintock song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,”
and Pond’s use of a yodeling Bruce Springsteen on its audio
track conjures the everyman’s yearning for the song’s hobo
Paradise.
Pond’s big-picture point of view is complimented nicely
by Patrick Deguira’s more intimate work. In “Precarious Stack,”
DeGuira stacks 20 green teacups into a tower balanced on a
crimson volume of “Joy of Sex” that is in turn sitting on a
plain white chair. Although the eponymous precariousness
of this piece lends it an immediacy that captures attention,
this unease quickly gives way to the realization that, of
course, the structure is not about to topple. Deguira’s recent
work is concerned with parents and domesticity. In “’Stack,”
he is able to reflect opposing points of view: the sometimes
vague and fragile nature of family and home and the assurance
that these are our constant, most dependable connections to
the world and ourselves. Likewise, in his “Untitled” piece – a
quotation in orange acrylic that states “Come in…I want to
Pond acknowledges the efforts of the Ende, Dobbins and
Elizabeth Spear, cofounder of Irongate Studios in Austin, TX,
the third stop for On Others, “they’ve let me do part of their
job.” In addition to trusting Pond’s curatorial savvy, both the
venues in Sewanee and Memphis are cooperating to ship the
exhibit.
There is a remarkable integrity to the collage, sculpture,
drawing and video pieces in On Others and to the whole of
the exhibit as well. Whatever difficulties Pond, the artists
and venues have surmounted, the Southeastern audience
hungry for bold, sincere contemporary art is the ultimate
winner.
There are tentative plans to travel On Others to Arizona,
California and Oregon.
Joe Nolan
Joe Nolan is a poet, musician and freelance writer in Nashville.
Patrick DeGuira, “Precarious Stack.”
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University Art Gallery, Sewanee: The University of the South
August 19-October 9, 2005
hurt you!”- Deguira presents the dichotomies of voluptuous
invitation and hidden threat implicit in the human urge
toward intimacy.
Arlyn Ende, director of the University Art Gallery at The
University of the South, feels the traveling show is part of a
trend among entrepreneurial artists, “Is there any other
profession you can think of in which the individual has to do
everything for themselves?” Her interest in On Others came
from her feelings that “we live in such a materialistic and
martial culture. I feel like we are totally absorbed with the
self. Thinking about others subverts this whole idea.” The
underlying political implications of her observation are on
display in Melody Owen’s work.
“The collages are about both the encroachment of one
society upon another and the encroachment of civilization
upon the natural world”, explains Owen in her statement.
Owen uses images of the United States, Canada, the Middle
East and Russia appropriated from the scholastic social science
encyclopedia Lands and Peoples. In Owen’s puzzle-like
compositions, East and West entwine in complimentary
embrace and constricting threat. Disparate juxtapositions
force the viewer to make decisions regarding figure and
ground, becoming aware of the participatory nature of realities, both political and personal. Her use of a schoolbook as
source is a deft comment on the learned nature of patriotism, racism and xenophobia.
Hamlett Dobbins, director of the Clough-Hanson Gallery
at Rhodes College in Memphis, will be hosting On Others in
late October. Acknowledging the difficulty of juggling the
logistics of a traveling show, Dobbins points out that most
gallery spaces have “…no storage and up to two years
advance booking. That really puts a damper on it…Greg did
a really good job of working with me and Sewanee on dates.”
With “Deerstalker Hat,” a green, fur-lined hunting cap
with fuzzy earflaps, Steven Thompson explores the human
impulses that lie behind the mythic fictions of the pioneer.
Thompson’s sense of humor is evidenced by the fact that the
tweed, British cap associated with Sherlock Holmes was
designed by Henschel Deerstalker. Thompson’s titular pun
calls attention to the human process of “trying on” different
identities, beliefs and values as we search, like detectives,
for the “right fit.” Both “Deerstalker’” and “The Aegis of the
Green and Bold Cooperative” – a stunning full suit of cloth
and leather armor inspired by Homer’s “Odyssey” – remind
us of the ritual capability of a costume to bestow characteristics and powers upon the wearer.
In his statement, Jack Dingo Ryan notes that “at the root
of my ideas is an interest in the human experience.” His
sculpture, “Skull Shelf” consists of an upright human skull
balanced on a white shelf facing the wall. Visitors must
ascend a spiral staircase and walk to the far side of the
gallery’s balcony to view it. Ryan’s lively skull refuses to
represent death and rejects any number of necrotic clichés,
bringing to mind the buoyancy of memories and the
endurance of experience and evoking notions of perpetuity
and timelessness, “Skull Shelf” can also be seen as a fossil
from one of the avatars Ryan employs in his exquisite drawings: “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, or the empty space of his
landscapes.
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sense, the imagery becomes increasingly abstract and contemporary as one moves through the layers of each painting,
traveling from the inside out.
As physical objects, the paintings are quite compelling,
drawing one in and rewarding a close viewing. These are
richly layered and varied surfaces; where some areas are
Memphis
The work comprising Hamlett Dobbins’s exhibition, Early smooth and shiny, others are built up layers of light colors
Morning Paintings, conjures that particular time of day with dry-brushed over dark, the paint accumulating in sensual
all the richness it offers. The residue of dreaming recedes as nubs on the weave of linen. Dobbins’s color sings with a wide
the first stirrings of impulse and obligation sharpen. Worldly range of expressiveness, running the gamut from subdued
matters impinge upon private reveries. One moves between to vibrant, cool to hot. Dobbins can paint masterfully, and
he clearly loves the process, stirring up all the pleasure and
these states of consciousness, in touch with both.
There is a sense of improvisation and elaboration in these desire inherent in painting.
Interesting connections with painters, past and present,
sumptuous paintings. “Untitled (For NJP (orange),” 2005,
spring
to mind when viewing Dobbins’s work. First is the
begins with an irregular grid painted in luminous tones of
Austrian painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000),
orange and olive. Dobbins next paints an incrementally
both in a formal sense – rich color combined with intricate
brighter orange pattern of varying spheres, adapted in size
and shape to the array of spaces created within the underlying patterning also predominate in Hundertwasser’s paintings –
and in connection with the surrealist automatism with which
grid. On top of this, seven fidgety curvilinear shapes have
Hundertwasser was associated. Something akin to
been lifted out of the established pattern by over-painting
selected areas in an altogether different palette of cosmetic Hundertwasser’s idea of “Individualfilm,” in which each
pinks. The pulsating amber background of the painting, and individual possesses a wealth of memories, sensations, and
the pink shapes floating above it, feel like disparate worlds, images that can be brought into consciousness through art,
an intimate past colliding with an icy pop present. Flat rec- is present in Dobbins’s composing process. A more contemtangular shapes of olive and black cluster at the edges of the porary connection is with the abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski,
with whom Dobbins shares characteristics of painterly modesty,
pink shapes; these read as tabs physically connecting the
inventiveness and a permissive approach to decision making.
foreground shapes to the background. Or alternately, they
suggest aerial views of newly sprung-up building developments, Hamlett Dobbins is cultivating a particularly fertile area in
painting, one which
emblematic of modern life.
grants a great deal of
A dialogue about binary relationships runs throughout
room for movement
the work: deliberate and playful, natural and synthetic, old
in drawing from
and new. Dobbins is a collagist in his synthesis of diverse
what has come
material, commonplace and invented, to form a personal
before and what is
whole. This is particularly evident in the small paintings,
such as “Untitled (For MRM & E),” 2004, in which two layers available to him
now.
of chunky shapes, articulated in blue and then orange
Also on view was
stripes, hover on top of a complex mosaic-like background,
an exhibit of J
evoking bits of cloth or children’s sweaters. And yet the
Ivcevich entitled
visual language of the paintings, self-generated because
each layer forms a distinct response to the preceding one,
Crate Digger – A
is essentially abstract. Indeed, when regarded in a temporal Musical Meditation
Hamlett Dobbins, Early Morning Paintings
J Ivcevich, Crate Digger – A Musical Meditation on Vinyl Inspiration
David Lusk Gallery
July 5 – July 30, 2005
J Ivcevich, “Down Here on the Ground,” acrylic, resin on aluminum, 28 x 48”, 2004. Courtesy David Lusk Gallery.
on Vinyl Inspiration. Recently relocated from Atlanta to
Brooklyn, Ivcevich has been active as a DJ, in addition to
painting, and these works are rooted in music culture. For
this exhibition, Ivcevich presumably searched a great many
crates to cull inspiring album covers, which he then reinterpreted in multi-layered paintings made of digital photographs, resin and acrylic. The process of painting between
layers of resin produces a good deal of spatial illusion, and
the result is a collection of restrained and seductive paintings. While the musical choices appear to be random, viewing the pieces encourages memory games as the dots
between album covers, music and personal associations are
connected. Accompanying the paintings are two wallmounted wooden turntables and original signage in the form
of a large record painted on the wall. This work makes one
ponder source material and content, about how much has
been created and is already at hand, and the potential for
art making in collecting, sampling and recycling.
Carrie McGee
Carrie McGee is a Nashville artist.
Hamlett Dobbins, “Untitled (for N.J.P. Orange),” oil on canvas, 72 x 60" 2005. Courtesy the artist and David Lusk Gallery.
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J Ivcevich, “Surfing on Sinewaves,” acrylic, epoxy resin on board, 23 x 28.5”, 2005. Courtesy David Lusk Gallery.
Hamlett Dobbins, “Untitled (for M.R.M. and E.),” oil on linen on panel, 18 x 15" 2004. Courtesy the artist and David Lusk Gallery.
N U M B E R : 5 4
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to the show of 14 works. The piece features 12 manual typewriters, perhaps old Underwoods, painted in rows over a
multi-colored background that includes geometric shapes
suggesting abandoned warehouses (much akin to those that
array downtown Memphis) that are solitary but ripe with the
Memphis
promise of possibility. Bright reds, stark whites, verdant
When Bob Dylan sang “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the
Memphis Blues Again” and mentioned “Texas Medicine,” he green, and one of Taylor’s trademark colors that can only be
described as minty fluoride, define the typewriters and elevate
was referring to something a little more potent than drink.
them from the redolent yet somehow muted background.
Johnny Taylor, a Memphian and shining lone star, lifted the
What is suggested by such a pop culture-esque rendition is
songwriter’s words to name his recent show at Jay Etkin
Gallery. This exhibit expressed a vision that, through a medium the process of painting or of artistic selection itself, in this
of signs and recognized symbols layered over primary colors, case writing too, that the artist must locate and re-cast upon
the tabula rasa of a canvas. What the painting delivers is a
evokes the otherworldliness within the realm of ordinary
haunting metaphor that the viewer not only senses with the
things. Tempting the viewer into hallucination, Taylor’s
eyes and mind but feels in the gut. It’s no coincidence that
bright renditions evoke an aura of the unreal stamped and
posterized on the collective consciousness. His paintings are the piece is titled after a Joycean trope that refers to the flow
of the collective unconsciousness, as evinced in wordplay,
a mind-altering substance.
from one generation to those who will follow and flow after.
Taylor was born in Helena, Arkansas, in 1971. A Delta
Taylor’s work is a fusion of post-modern, Pop Art, and
background is in part the probable influence for his palette
neo-folk, with a heavy dash of psychological signifiers
of vivid colors: sky blues, fire hydrant yellows, hibiscus
reds, Nehi orange, watered grass green. Such resplendency thrown in the mix. His influences range from Basquiat to
dub music to advertising and marketing promo materials.
lights his paintings much in the way vibrant color schemes
Warhol’s serial photography is also a point of perspective.
drench and frame buildings and brick wall murals in the
Taylor’s paintings play on the viewer’s subconscious interDeep South. Encountering one of his works, the viewer is
pretations of advertisements, graphics unfolded at MTV speed,
issued a passport to places like the Club Champagne on
comic book illustrations and the poster-like quality of collecting
Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in Helena’s sister city of
cards. There is something Tarot-like about his paintings that
Clarksdale, Mississippi. Although Taylor has spent the bulk
of his thirty-something years in Memphis, references to his one almost wants to refer to as prints or imprints. His process
speaks of subtle irony; through these symbols and techniques
birthplace crop up in the shantytown hues.
One painting, “riverrun,” acts as centerpiece and anchor he is actually attempting de-logoization. Rather than selling
“Texas Medicine”
Jay Etkin Gallery
June 24-July 9
Johnny Taylor, “riverrun,” acrylic on wood panel, 2005. Courtesy of the Jay Etkin Gallery.
meaning through the accumulation of random signs, his collections of icons force the viewer to think about how meaning
is ultimately construed in favor of the unintentional, serendipitous nature of the artistic gesture rather than that of the
insidious marketing we are immersed in on an hourly basis.
Taylor takes such pop culture icons as soda bottles and
light bulbs, lines them up on checkerboards of vibrancy and
allows the viewer either to knock them down in a desire of
carnivalistic pleasure or to align them with deeper intent.
In what he calls “happy accidents” inspired by Duchamps’
mode of quasi-unintentional selection, Taylor’s juxtapositions
simultaneously eschew and foster heady, intellectual interpretation in a playful way. His vision explodes mundane
objects and transmogrifies his canvasses (sometimes planks
of wood) into something more visceral and immediate than
mere surrealism.
Although his style owes much to Basquiat, as he will readily
admit, Taylor, even more than his famous mentor, is obsessed
with signs and signage and the concept of the signature.
With his random assemblages of symbols — Victrolas, barcodes,
the Pisces fish, or a young girl with a meditative rictus, who
turns out to be the Morton salt girl – he is fascinated with
the immediacy of tagging or marking a visual language that
is as anonymous yet personal as a work of graffito. The aim
of the graffiti artist is always random, and in a sense,
authorless. Graffiti is a form of subtextual urban discourse:
bold visual images combined with a written/painted tag in
some uncannily recognizable but undecipherable hieroglyphic.
This type of gesture is much akin to Taylor’s objective – the
deeply personal cloaked in what is ultimately very public.
Untitled, acrylic on wood panel, 2005. Courtesy of the Jay Etkin Gallery.
Taylor’s ars poetica results in bold imagery, alphabetic renderings in the context of brightly
painted free space that itself is infinitely interpreted by sub-commentaries, and projected
echoes that suggest a manic form of doodling. Taylor’s paintings have the effect of beginning
a visual conversation that is pure stream-of-consciousness, pointed and counter-pointed,
ebbing, flowing and eddying toward drowning out the ordinariness of the subject matter while
seducing the viewer to respond via muscle memory. The overall sensation is almost one of
perceptual mysticism.
In the painting entitled “Ghosts of Electricity,” light bulbs, which are in fact representations
of the idea of light bulbs, are demarcated in bold, black marker-like lines that contrast with the
quilted background above which they seem to float as in a disembodied production line.
Squares of red/blue/green/orange suggest windows or further canvases of interpretation. The
piece seems to be a metaphor for the “great idea” or the ubiquitous self-consciousness that an
Edison would participate in to achieve the idea of the great invention. It is the thing itself, das
dingedichte of poetic fancy that Taylor portrays and redefines in a glowing, Blake-lit allegory.
Taylor’s paintings call for a large audience to maintain the visual/visionary subconscious
conversation going. Susan Sontag’s well-known words come to mind in considering the recent
dosage of Texas medicine: “Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old
furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans – the used things, warm with generations of human
touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized
landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.”
Johnny Taylor’s paintings respond to such a notion and refute Sontag’s critique of the mainstream. He proves that such phantoms, in the hands of an artist, unbound by the laws of gravity
and contextualization, can paradoxically hold much weight and meaning. Art that is truly emotive
and de-logoized by visionary preoccupations stamps itself into the recesses of the mind. Like
abstractions we assign to be typewriters, roosters, or signs of the zodiac, Taylor’s own vocabulary
of images, re-interpreted and highly patina-ed, is nothing less than essential, recognized, felt
and known, and, like all memorable works of art, brilliantly and endlessly portable.
Philip Kobylarz
“Ghost of Electricity,” acrylic on wood, 2005. Courtesy of the Jay Etkin Gallery.
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and no doubt many others. The exhibition rightly acknowledges
the resourcefulness and determination of contemporary artists
to uphold a consistent presence in the region. The DIY attitude
and autonomy (and a little rivalry) of these grassroots initiatives endow a particular vibrancy and momentum to the art
Nashville
I was in tears by the time I reached the freeway returning scene, what Scala calls “a very interesting moment in the
life of Nashville,” if a tenuous one.
to Memphis, after viewing The Fragile Species: New Art
Nashville. And no, not because I hated it. The exhibition —
“The infrastructure that comprises the art world in
its themes of transience and vulnerability, the thoughtfulNashville — which includes artists, of course, and galleries
ness of the selection and layout by curator Mark Scala, his
and commercial entities; it includes the idea that art critiobvious passion and outspokenness regarding the region’s
cism is important — all of that is very delicate. People leave
artists and, most of all, the work itself — is mesmerizing,
all the time; people come all the time. What does it take to
offering an entry into raw expression, impeccable craftsmake Nashville, in artists’ minds, a place that is really worth
manship and heartbreaking sincerity. Ruminations on the
committing oneself to?”
brevity and fragility of life, aging, emotional distress, the
Vulnerability and ephemerality are at the heart of
assault and deterioration of the body, lineage, in many
“Especially Considering Exposure” by Barbara Yontz, a skirt
case, intimately drawn from personal experience, dovetail
and blouse fashioned from onion-thin and lucent pig
seamlessly with concepts of the body politic, of sustainable intestines, the sort commonly used as sausage casings. The
infrastructure, of shared ideals and fears along with the
garments are suspended by thread at the darkened entrance
benefits of community.
to the exhibition; slight to the brink of evanescence, light
During a June Podcast from the museum , Scala remarked passes through them delineating every wrinkle, fold and
that over the last five years, he explored the city’s “ad hoc” hem. Dangling there like a specter ensnared in cobwebs,
alternative galleries, guerrilla exhibitions, secret shows and they evoke the tincture of a dank attic, the venerable ele“one night stands” (www.sitemason.com/site/b3qTuw). The gance of sallowed lace, the dissolution of memory and the
Fragile Species reflects the enduring impact of artists working ravages of time.
under the radar: a decade or so of Untitled events, Don Evan’s
Several artists create works referencing their own physihappenings, the Switchyard exhibitions at Zeitgeist Gallery, cal and emotional afflictions. The paintings of Carol Mode,
shoebox spaces like Ruby Green and Rule of Thirds, bombed- “Haunted” and “Wave,” bear a passing resemblance to
out artists studios like the (condemned) Fugitive Art Center Gerhard Richter’s pulled and folded abstractions, but they
The Fragile Species
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts
June 17-September 25, 2005
Mark Hosford, “The Departure, Screen print, 14 x 18 in., 2003. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Tony Walsh.
are in fact representative of her degenerative eyesight,
where “intra-retinal hemorrhages” cause her to “see planes
and veils of atmosphere, interrupted by ‘floaters,’ small dark
spots that move around the field of vision.” The writhing and
ruptured torso of “Use It” by Erin Hewgley, cast from her
own body, makes reference to the rape she experienced
years ago. Isolated upon a low pedestal, the artist vented all
of her spleen, as the ghastly object emanates anguish, fury,
desolation and horror.
Jack Dingo Ryan’s installation “Blood and Guts Forever”
is an array of hundreds of cast doll ears, densely gathered
where two walls join, then dissipating in scale and frequency
as they radiate in either direction. The artist has gradually
lost his hearing as a result of otoscierosis and says that this
work is a ”visual metaphor for my isolation that occurred
slowly over a period of years…my loss of hearing seemed to
be more of a receding into my own head, a private world. I
was interested in the distortions and revelations, the magic,
brought on by isolation.”
I first encountered the work of Kristina Arnold attending
her exhibition Infectious at Ruby Green in 2003, an installation
inspired by her background in research at Vanderbilt’s
Department of Preventive Medicine. Her contributions to
The Fragile Species likewise draw upon that experience, but
whereas her efforts a few years ago were certainly monumental,
if somewhat overwrought, this work is concise and devastatingly
beautiful. “Drip” is composed of an arrangement of multiples,
each a ruby-red glass drip emerging from a translucent vinyl
packet pinned to a freestanding wall, while a metal basin of
Carol Mode, “Haunted,” Acrylic on panel, 15 x 15 in., 2004. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Tony Walsh.
water at its base casts shimmering reflections among the cellular forms.
Lain York is a longtime fixture of Nashville’s art scene, not only as an artist, but as a member
of Fugitive and the gallery director at Zeitgeist. York is tireless in his zeal to promote artists in
the region. York’s own paintings resemble spirit masks, particularly of African origin, and in the
past, I must admit being perplexed at this appropriation. But his canvases here, “Fing” and
“Riprap” move away from mimicry, to embodying a good dose of spirit in and of themselves.
The masks are abridged and undifferentiated to the point of apparition, yet imbued with certain
power by the frenzied and intuitive handling of paint.
This only scratches the surface of this phenomenal exhibition, which includes the excellent
work of Michael Baggarly, Patrick DeGuira, Kathryn Dettwiller, Kristi Hargrove, Emily Holt, Mark
Hosford, Andrew Kaufman, Adrienne Outlaw, Leslie Patterson-Marx, Billy Renki, Julie Roberts,
Chris Scarborough, Victor Simmons, and Tom Thayer.
The associations of the human body — its beauty, complexity, health and well being — to
that of society is an unmistakable subtext of The Fragile Species. Scala is to be applauded for
his willingness to broach so plainly the subject of resources and access in Nashville’s burgeoning
art scene, saying “the community of artists is itself a fragile entity that benefits from support.
And without that, without acknowledgement, without appreciation, it could very easily go away.”
David Hall
fall 2005 schedule of
EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS
EWING GALLERY
1715 Volunteer Boulevard
Knoxville, TN 37996-2410
(865) 974-3200
www.ewing-gallery.org
OF ART & ARCHITECTURE
September 2-25, 2005
The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City
Provided by the Nashville Civic Design Center
September 10, 2005-November 5, 2005
Enduring: The Social Conscience of Eleanor Dickinson
Exhibition Preview and Reception with the Artist:
5:00-9:00pm, Friday, September 9, 2005
September 30, 2005-November 10, 2005
Girl Culture: Photographs by Lauren Greenfield
Lecture by Lauren Greenfield: 7:00pm, Thursday, September 29, 2005, Tennessee Auditorium,
University Center (Exhibition preview and reception with the artist will follow.)
Lecture by Lauren Greenfield is sponosred by Canon, USA, Inc. and by the Haines-Morris Endowment, College of Arts & Sciences.
Girl Culture is circulated by Greenfield/Evers LLC and the Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles.
Hall is an artist and writer who lives in Memphis
November 12, 2005-December 20, 2005
Alternative Typestyles: An Homage to Vernacular Letterforms
Exhibition Preview and Reception with the Artist:
5:00-8:00pm, Friday, November 11, 2005
November 18, 2005-December 16, 2005
Three Paths to Abstraction: Pinkney Herbert, Whitney Leland, Carol Mode
Exhibition Preview and Reception with the Artists:
5:00-8:00pm, Thursday, November 17, 2005
106 South Gay Street
Knoxville, TN 37902
(865) 673-0802
Barbara Yontz, “Especially Considering Exposure,” Hog intestine, thread, pins, and Plexiglas, 144 x 60 x 60 in., 2004. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Tony Walsh.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
Albers Art
NUMBER: recommends that visitors call in advance or view websites for open hours and potential changes in exhibit schedules.
N U M B E R : 5 4
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1102 Brookfield Rd, Suite 103/Rear, 901.683.2256
www.albersgallery.com
Artforms at Grace Place is now L. Ross Gallery
See new listing below: L Ross Gallery
Art Museum of the University of Memphis
Communication and Fine Arts Bldg, 901.678.2224 www.amum.org
Perfect: a group exhibition. Through October 15
Samuel H. Crone: Questions and Answers.
Through October 15
ArtLab: Memento, installation by Nick Nelson.
Through October 15
Case Works: Terri Jones, Sense and Nonsense.
Through October 15
The Red Thread Project
Performance: University of Memphis Library Plaza
500 people, 500 donated knitted hats, one
common thread, October 8, 10 am.
Red Thread: Visible and Invisible, Lindsay
Obermeyer, October 22-December 15
Opening reception: Friday, October 21, 5-7:30 pm
...that you may behold the moon..., Susan
Lezon, October 22-December 15
Opening reception: Friday, October 21, 5-7:30 pm
ArtLab: Brooke White, Passing Over and
Through, October 22-December 15
Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects
1500 Union Ave., 901.278.6868
Dixon Gallery and Gardens
4339 Park, 901.761.5250 www.dixon.org
Redefining Genre: French and American Painting
1855-1900, September 24-November 26
Durden Gallery
408 S Front, 107 (Entrance on Huling St ) 901.543.0340,
www.durdengallery.com
When Little Things Accumulate: Paintings by
David Hinske, October 28-November 20
Opening reception, Friday, October 28, 6-9
Informal artist talk, Sunday, November 13, 11-3
Elder Performing Arts Center’s Gallery
1381 W. Massey Road Lausanne Collegiate School,
901.474.1056, [email protected]
Front Street Gallery
269 S Front, 901.544.1432
The Gallery at Palladio
2169 Central, 901.276.3808
Jay Etkin Gallery
409 S Main, 901.543.0035 www.jayetkingallery.com
Group show featuring Keith Bland and Gregory
Burns, Through October 18
Pam Cobb: New Paintings, October 28November 22
Opening reception, Friday, October 28
Jeff Scott, photographs from the new book
Elvis: The Personal Archive, November 25-end
of 2005
Opening reception, Friday, November 25
Center for Southern Folklore
Joysmith Gallery and Studio
119 S Main St, 901. 544.9962 www.southernfolklore.com
46 Huling, 901. 543.0505
Beverly and Sam Ross Gallery, Christian
Brothers University (lower level of Plough Library)
Lisa Kurts Gallery
650 East Parkway South, 901.321.3432 www.cbu.edu/library/gallery
Images & Artists Link, October 7-November 18
Opening reception, Friday, October 7, 6-7:30 pm
Clip Joint Gallery
3534 Walker Ave 901.452.8363 [email protected]
Painters Three: Martha Stephens, Marty
Dickerson, Willy Wood, October 1-November 12
Opening reception, Saturday, October 1, 7-9pm
Picks and Points: David Tankersley, CB Jolley
November 19-January 28
Opening reception, Saturday, November 19, 7-9 pm
Clayworks Studio and Gallery
2116 Vinton, 901.340.7247, www.memphisclayworks.com
A to Z. Tessa de Alarcon and Patty Zachery,
September 18-October 23
Opening reception Sunday, September 18, 1-4 pm
Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College
2200 N Parkway, 901.843.3442 Contact: Hamlett Dobbins,
Director [email protected]
TL Solien, through October
“On Others”, Greg Pond, Patrick DeGuira,
Melody Owen, Steven Thompson, Jack Dingo
Ryan, October 21-December 7
Opening reception Friday, October 21, 6-8 pm
Artist panel lecture Thursday, October 20, 7 pm
Blount Auditorium, Buckman Hall
766 S White Station, 901. 683.6200 www.lisakurts.com
Peter Opheim: Pleasure, Through October 15
Jeff Aeling: South Meets West, October
Marcia Myers: Recent Paintings, November
Levy Gallery at the Buckman Performing and
Fine Arts Center
60 Perkins Ex, 901.537.1483
Entre Amigos, un Dialog Visual (Among
Friends, a Visual Dialogue), Curated by Maritza
Davila, September 16-October
Public Talk - Thurs, September 29, 7 pm
New Works by Sowgand Sheikholeslami,
October 24-Dec 11
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 23, 5-7 pm
L Ross Gallery (formerly Art Forms at Grace Place)
5040 Sanderlin Ave, Suite 104, 901-767 2200, www.lrossgallery.com
Grand Opening reception with exhibit by
gallery artists, Wednesday, November 12
768 Brookhaven Cir E., 901. 767.8617
David Lusk Gallery
4540 Poplar, 901.767.3800 www.davidluskgallery.com
Recent Work/Json Myers, New Paintings/Carol
Sams, through October 1
Recent Paintings/ Robert Yasuda, Recent
Paintings/ Daisy Craddock, October 4-29
Opening: Friday, October 7, 6-8 pm
Recent Sculpture/Carroll Todd, New
Photographs/Jeane Umbreit, November 1-26
Opening: Friday, November 4, 6-8 pm
New Paintings/Freida Hamm, November 27December 23
Preview: Sunday, November 27. Opening:
Friday, December 2 6-8 pm
D’Edge Art and Unique Treasures
550 S Main St, 901.521.0054 www.d-edgeart.com
Paintings/Collages, Allison Furr-Lawyer.
August - mid September
Wayne Russell’s opening of musical images
and Delta scenes. September
George Hunt’s “something new, something old
style” paintings. October
Luon St. Pierre wood creations, tables and
chairs, wall hangings etc. November
Art trolley tour is the last Fri of each month,
running year round.
Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts
on the street, Memphis College of Art Downtown Gallery,
431 South Main
Alumni Exhibition: Leah Jones and Billy Reilly,
October 10-November 14
Closing reception: Friday, October28 6-9 pm
MFA Thesis Exhibition, November 28-December 9
Midtown Artist Market
2027 Madison, 901.726.0052 [email protected]
New Photography by Paige Melvin Martin,
October 7-November 14
Paintings by Erin Morrison November 18December 31
Annual Cooper Young Artists Invitational at the
New Ballet Ensemble at the Icehouse,
September 15th 6-9 pm, Curator Wendy
Sumner Winter
2166 Central Avenue
Contact info: Michele Johnson - 276.7222
National Civil Rights Museum
450 Mulberry, 901. 521.9699·www.civilrightsmuseum.org
“The Whole World is Watching” Collection of
documentary photographs accompanied by
interpretations from 20 renowned writers that
trace the history of America’s peace and social
justice movements in the 60’s and 70’s.
November 12-March 4
National Ornamental Metal Museum
374 Metal Museum Drive, 901.774.6380 www.metalmuseum.org
Contemporary Cast Iron, through September 18,
Curated by LeeAnn Mitchell and Jim Buonaccorsi
September 19-24 closed
Master Metalsmith Elliot Pujol, September 25November 6
Artists reception: Fri, Oct 14, 7-9 pm. Gallery
talk: 8pm
Repair Days October 14-16
Painted Planet Artspace
2169 Young Ave 901.728.6278
Material
2553 Broad Avenue, 901.219.1943
Clayton Colvin, Through September 29
Ray Vunk, October 7-30
Opening: Friday,October 7, 6-8 pm
Bryan Blankenship, November 4-28
Opening: Friday, November 4, 6-8 pm
Memphis Arts Council
DCI GALLERY
Visiting Artist Lecture: Phillip Pearlstein,
Thursday, November 3, 7 pm, Callicott Auditorium
Visiting Artist Lecture: Sandy Skoglund, Friday,
November 4, 10 am, Callicott Auditorium
Another Voice Political Illustration Exhibition
October 10-November 11
Opening reception: Thursday, October 13, 6-8 pm
Visiting Artist Lecture: Sue Coe, Thursday,
October 13, 7 pm, Callicott Auditorium
Illustration Department Exhibition, October
24-November 11
National Portfolio Day, October 30
Holiday Bazaar, Friday, Nov 18, 6-9pm;
Saturday, November 19, 10am-3pm
BFA / MFA Exhibition, Nov 22-Dec 10
Reception: Thursday, December 1, 6-8 pm
Paul Edelstein Gallery
519 N Highland, 901. 454.7105
Penczner Fine Art Studio and Gallery
1436 Poplar, 901.278.3217
Peabody Place Museum
119 S Main, 901.523.2787
Perry Nicole Fine Art
3092 Poplar, 901.405.6000
8 S Third, 901.578.2787
Memphis Botanic Gardens
Rivertown Gallery
Delta Axis Power House
45 GE Patterson, 901.578.5545
Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art
1200 Forest /Park Dr, 615.356.8000 www.cheekwood.org
The Compelling Frontier: Selections From the
John A. and Margaret Hill
Collection of American Western Art, September
10-December 31
Westen Charles, Found objects, sculptures,
paintings, September 30-December 31
Opening reception: Sept 30, 6-8 pm
Cumberland Gallery
4107 Hillsboro Circle, 615.297.0296
www.cumberland.citysearch.com/1html
Hand colored photographs, Susan Bryant and
Joan Almond, September 10-October 8
Ceramics, Ann Wells and Judy Barie, October
15-November 12
TBA, Nov 19-January 7
December 25-January 2, Closed for Holidays
Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Cumberland Exposures: Student Nature
Photographs, Through December 31
Deborah Aschheim: Neural Architecture
Through January 8, 2006
Hudson River School: Masterworks from the
Wadsworth Athenaeum, Through January 8, 2006
Murano: Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection,
October 15-January 29, 2006
Architecture Film Series - September 8, 22, 29
Films about Santiago Calatrava, Philip Johnson,
and Daniel Libeskind
Brooks and AIA members - $5, non-members - $7
Ernest Withers Family Day, October 1, 10 am-1 pm
Free for the entire community
Ernest Withers Lecture, October 1, 2 pm
Free with museum admission
“Inventing Van Gogh: Art on Stage”
Collaborative performance between Brooks and
Playhouse on the Square, 7 performances,
October 14-21
$15 for Brooks members and POTS subscribers,
$20 for non-members
Morisot Family Day, November 5, 10 am-1 pm
Free for the entire community
Plowhaus Artists’ Cooperative
211 South 17th Street, 615.262.2224, www.plowhaus.com,
[email protected]
One Wall One Artist, Danielle Duer, Harry, Tiffany
Denton, Jack Coggins, Wendy Alexander, John
Partipilo, September 24-October 9
Plowhaus Fundraiser, all day and evening @
radio cafe, October 9
The Push Pin Show, photography, October 15October 23
Day of the Dead, Group Show October 29November 27
Holiday Group Show, December 3-24
Ruby Green Contemporary Art Center
514 Fifth Ave S, 615.244.7179 www.rubygreen.org
You Are Here: Curated by Julie Roberts, Arman
A. Means and Anderson, October 15-December 3
Contemporary Glass, December 17-January 21
The Visual Arts Gallery The Renaissance Center
1930 Poplar, 901.726.4085·www.mca.edu
855 Highway 46 South, 37055, 615.740.5519 www.rcenter.org
Rust Hall Events
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE
SEWANEE, TENNESSEE
The University of the South
Georgia Ave., Guerry Hall, 931.598.1223, [email protected]
On Others: An exhibition of new works by Greg
Pond, Jack Dingo Ryan, Melody Owen, Patrick
DeGuira and Steven Thompson, August 19October 9
JONESBORO, ARKANSAS
Bradbury Gallery, Fowler Center
Arkansas State University, 870.972.8115
Glimpse: Selected Works from the Museum of
Contemporary Photography, Columbia College
Chicago, September 8-October 9
2005 Delta National Small Prints Exhibition
October 20-November 18,
Opening reception: Oct 20, 5 pm
SECAC Individual Artist Grant Recipient Carol
Prusa, September 9-November 13
Strauss Gallery, Arkansas Art Center
University of Arkansas at Little Rock 2801 S. University
Avenue, Gallery I & II (First Floor), Gallery III (Second Floor)
Fine Arts Building www.ualr.edu/~artdept/gallery/index.html,
Brad Cushman, Gallery Director & Curator,
[email protected], 501.569.8977
Gallery III
Domestic Vacations & Mind Games Color and
Black & White Photographs, Julie Blackmon,
Through September 30
Gallery II
Highlights from the Susan Pfeifer Collection,
Sept 21-Oct 31Gallery I
SECAC Members Juried Exhibition, Laura Heon,
Juror, October 16-December 2
Gallery III
Small Works on Paper Traveling Exhibition,
October 3-30
Organized by the Arkansas Arts Council
Thesis and/or Senior Shows November 5December 15
Lisa Mantle, Thesis MA Exhibition - Nov.
Gallery III
215 5th Ave. N. 615.254.2040 or 292.4975 www.tagartgallery.com
Sculpture and Photography Group Show,
September 17-October 8
New Works by Mr. Hooper, Kate Barrere and
Martin McMurray, October 15-November 12
Mark Mothersbaugh’s 2005 Postcard Diaries
November 19-December 31
CHATTANOOGA , TENNESSEE
Memphis College of Art
Nancy Cheairs Painting Exhibition, Sept 19-Oct 7
Opening reception: Friday, September 23, 6-8 pm
TAEA Exhibition, September 26-November 11
Tag Art Gallery
23rd and West End Ave, 615.322.060
www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/arts/gallery/html
DICKSON, TENNESSEE
1327 Circle Park Drive, 865.974.2144 mcclungmuseum.utk.edu
Gallery II
Vanderbilt University Fine Art Gallery
Perspectives on Nature: Sally Brogden, Marcia
Goldenstein, & Anita Jung, September 21November 4
Reception: Fri, Sept 23 from 5:30-8 pm
Eye Candy: AVA Juried Member Exhibition,
November 9-December 31
Reception: Fri, Dec 2, 5:30-8 pm
McClung Museum, University of Tennessee
9th and Commerce Street, 501-372-4000. www.arkarts.com
Stories: Paintings by Greg Creswell
Thru January 14, West Gallery
Flow: Freda Coffing Tschumy, East Gallery
November 6-January 29
6560 Poplar Ave. 901.761.0810
30 Frazier Avenue, Chattanooga, TN 37405, 423.265.4282
www.avartists.org
Enduring: The Social Conscience of Eleanor
Dickinson, September 10-November 5
Preview reception September 9, 5-9 pm
Alternative Type, November 11-December 20
Arkansas Museum of Art, Arkansas Art Center
Memphis Jewish Community Center
The AVA Center Gallery
106 South Gay Street, 865-974-3200, www.ewing-gallery.org
Centennial Park, 615.8628431 www.nashville.gov/parthenon
Second Floor Contemporary Art Gallery
Events
University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery
LITTLE ROCK , ARKANSAS
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Eric Knoote, Kim Hindman, Carolyn Bomar,
September 16-October 5
Trail of Tears Scottish artists Prairie Oyster,
October 7-16
Jeff Mickey, Bobby Spillman, October 21November 13
Joey Slaughter, November 18-December 11
Girl Culture, September 30-November 10
Three Paths to Abstraction: Pinkney Herbert,
Whitney Leland, Carol Mode, November 18December 16
The Parthenon
1st Floor Sarratt Student Center, Vanderbilt University.
515.322.2471 · www.vanderbilt.edu/sarratt/gallery/htm
Ernest Withers and Memphis: Capturing a City,
Through October 15
Un/Bound, An Exhibition of Artists’ Books,
Through October 23
Berthe Morisot: An Impressionist and Her
Circle, October 7-January 29
1715 Volunteer Boulevard, 865.974.3200
440 Houston, 615.2945776 www.fugitiveart.com
Sarratt Gallery
431 S Main, 901.521.1514
The Ewing Gallery of Art, University of Tennessee
Fugitive Art Gallery
119 S. Main 901.527.7573
Overton Park, 901. 544.6200 www.brooksmuseum.org
Accommodations of Desire: Surrealist Works on
Paper Collected by Julien Levy
September 30-November 27, 2005
Design Lab: Liz Collins, October 21, 2005January 29, 2006
Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim
Campbell, December 9, 2005-March 5, 2006
919 Broadway. 615.224.3340 www.fristcenter.org
750 Cherry Rd, 901.685.1566
639 Marshall Ave, 901. 901. 522.9483 www.deltaaxis.org
Gallery hours are 1-5 on Saturdays or by appointment
Carving.Bronze.Canvas. Brush.,
Through October 7
Two Break-Away Painters: April Street,
Mohammed Lekleti, October 15-December 31
Leiper’s Fork: New Paintings by Anne Goetze,
Through November 12
As I see It: The Private Eye of John Loengard,
November 19-December 31
Nine Years and Counting, December 17-31
Jin Soo Kim: roll-run-hit-run-roll-tickThrough October 6
Misleading Trails: Ai Weiwei, Xiaoze Xie, Hong
Hao, Vernon Fisher, Enrique Chagoya, Dan
Mills, Hai Bo, October 13-December 9
Watkins College of Art and Design Gallery
2289 MetroCenter Boulevard, 615.383.4849
Zeitgeist Gallery
1819 21st Avenue South, 615.256.4805 www.zeitgeist-art.com
Fresh Art, Work from 3 New Artists, Jonathan
Fenske, Tim Dooley, Rob Lentz, September 10October 15
Exploration of Images and Assemblages, Alicia
Henry, Richard Painter, October 29-January 21
Wooden Vessels, John Davis, December 3-31
The Arts Company
KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE
215 Fifth Avenue of the Arts, North, Nashville, 37219,
615.254.2040. www.theartscompany.com
Knoxville Museum of Art
1050 World’s Fair Parkway, 865.525.6101 www.knoxart.com
Senior Shows, November 4-Mid December
Decorative Arts Museum, Arkansas Art Center
411 E 7th, 501.372.4000. www.arkarts.org
CLEVELAND, MISSISSIPPI
Delta State University
Art Department and Wright Art Center Gallery,
662.846.4720, [email protected]
“Turn”, Sheri Fleck Rieth, September 11October 7
Artists’ Reception: Sept 11 4-6pm
DSU Art Alumni Exhibition, October 10November 9
Artists’ Reception: October 29, 10am - 12n
Faculty Exhibition, November 13-December 12
Opening Reception, November 13, 4-6pm
DSU Art Alumni Exhibition, October 1November 9
Artists’ Reception , October 29, 10am-12n
Faculty Exhibition, November 13-December 12
Opening Reception On November 13, 4-6pm
NUMBER: Inc P.O. Box 11008, Memphis, TN 38111-0008
email: [email protected]
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI
Mississippi Museum of Art
201 East Pascagoula St, 601.960.1515
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI
The University of Mississippi Museums
5th & University Avenue, 662.915.7073. [email protected]
The University of Mississippi
Gallery 130, Department of Art, Meek Hall, 662.915.7193
www.olemiss.edu/depts/art, [email protected]
MFA Thesis Exhibition: Kathleen Moore,
November 7-November 16
Reception: Thurs, November 13, 4:30-7 pm
Holiday Art Sale Friday, November 18, 9 am-7 pm
MFA Thesis Exhibition: Ashley Chavis,
November 28-December 9
Reception: Thursday, December 1, 4-6 pm
Southside Gallery
150 Courthouse Square, 662.234.9090 www.southsideoxford.com
Jere Allen (paintings) and Keith Fondren
(mixed media, sculptural paintings),
September 25-October 29
Opening reception: Thursday, Oct 6, 6:30-8:30 pm
Rod Moorhead (sculptures and paintings), and
Zandy Mangold (photographs), October 31December 3
Opening reception: Thursday, November 10,
6:30-8:30 pm
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