Month: May 2018

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The New Normal: Stopping the Scourge of Mass Shootings

CREDIT: REUTERS / Loren Elliott

Another week, another shooting. I might be becoming desensitized to gun violence, but when we live in a world where news of mass shootings is a regularly occurring trending topic on social media, it’s hard not to.

It’s easier to just sum it up as just another day in America. Almost no place is safe any longer — not malls, diners, movie theaters, concerts, churches, nightclubs, or schools.

REUTERS / Loren Elliott

Santa Fe High School student Sierra Dean mourns the death of her friends killed in a recent shooting.

Seventeen students dead at a school one day and then 10 another day. How many will it be next time? Even one is too many. Of all places, schools should be a safe harbor, but they’re starting to seem more like a war zone in this country. There have been 23 school shootings in the United States in the first 21 weeks of 2018, according to a report released by CNN. That’s an average of more than one shooting per week.

I hate to admit it, but it’s tempting to accept that this is just the way things are going to be in this country from now on. Kids will go to school fearing for their lives, wondering if one of their classmates will decide to pull the trigger on them and their friends. All the while, lawmakers and the NRA sit back and let it happen.

Mass shootings don’t come as a shock anymore. It’s become normalized. We shouldn’t accept that, though. Instead, we should be outraged that this has become the new normal. Everyone (with an ounce of humanity) should be appalled that young lives are senselessly taken by gun violence week after week, month after month, year after year.

Clearly, some lawmakers value gun rights and the NRA’s lobby money more than they do innocent kids in classrooms. But at some point, it becomes the government’s responsibility to do something to curb this mass shooting epidemic. A good place to start would be working to change how easy it is for someone to get a gun in this country. It’s pretty backwards that Walmart can sell guns everywhere, but in some states can’t sell liquor.

It makes absolutely no sense there are ways to purchase a gun without first having to go through a background check. Currently, only nine states and Washington, D.C., require background checks for all gun sales, meaning in 40 states, anyone, criminal record or not, can purchase a gun from an unlicensed seller. You could be a most-wanted criminal or on the verge of a psychotic breakdown, and because of this country’s haphazard gun laws, it can still be quite easy to acquire a gun.

Or, as in the case of Dylann Roof, who killed nine South Carolinian parishioners in 2016 with a handgun he should have never been allowed to possess, you can own a firearm in three days’ time without ever even passing a background check.

It’s bad enough to consider how accessible these weapons are, without even taking into account the different types of guns people can buy. Assault-type rifles with high-capacity magazines designed to kill as many people as possible and as quickly as possible, should in no way be allowed in the hands of an untrained civilian. Why does anyone need a military-grade weapon in everyday life? That’s a recipe for disaster. The Constitution gives people the right to bear arms, but an AR-15? Really? No one needs an assault rifle to scare off a burglar or hunt deer.

To add insult to injury — literally — you only have to be 18 to buy this kind of weapon in most states. No, son, you can’t drink that beer, but you can be the proud owner of an assault weapon.

We need better and stronger gun control laws now. The “guns don’t kill people, people do” argument is old and tired. Blaming mass shootings on mental illness is similarly old and tired. And using the Second Amendment to justify owning military-grade weapons is a nice try, but tightening laws on such weapons to protect human life doesn’t infringe on anyone’s rights.

The NRA is buying our legislators’ support and has gotten a level of clout it doesn’t deserve. It’s past time for politicians to stand up to the NRA and diminish the organization’s influence over gun control policies in this country. It’s time a decent concern for human life trumped money and politics and the gun lobby.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Lois Akers Freeman

Lois Freeman did not make it to the age of 100, as Lewis Donelson had before his death last year. Nor was she the publicly recognizable cutting-edge personality that Donelson had been for most of his passage through life.

But Lois Akers Freeman, who died week before last at the age of 96, had as direct and memorable an effect on those who knew her and on the Democratic Party, whose faithful servant she was, as Donelson, the GOP’s grand old man, had on his fellow Republicans.

A transplant to Memphis from her native East Tennessee, she made a core contribution to the politics and civil life of Shelby County that was part of a continuum including her late husband Max Freeman, a lawyer who was an important behind-the-scenes presence in public affairs for many years, and her son John Freeman, an indispensable aide to numerous well-known Democrats — U.S. Representatives Harold Ford and Harold Ford Jr., and former Mayor AC Wharton, in particular.  

Lois Freeman first achieved special notice in 1964, that year of epic change in Memphis’ civil rights landscape, when she became an integral member of a biracial group of women who began, methodically and staunchly and effectively, the racial integration of the city’s restaurants in Memphis, simply by eating together at a different establishment each Saturday.

She next turned her determination and skills to voter registration drives, locally and across the state line in Mississippi, focusing on minorities and women. Decades later, she continued to be certified as an official election observer by the Department of Justice.

As president of the Memphis Women’s Political Caucus, Lois Freeman worked hard to get outstanding women to run for and serve in public office. The rolls of officialdom over the years, continuing to this day, contain a plethora of women, recruited by her, who have distinguished themselves in office.           

Lois Freeman co-founded the Equal Employment Opportunity Council of Greater Memphis and the Public Issues Forum. She was a member of the Governor’s Committee for the Handicapped, and she was well ahead of the curve in dealing with the issue of abused women, chairing the Abused Women’s Services Committee in the early 1990s.

Children, too, were a special concern of hers, and at the time of her passing, she was still an active member of the board of Tennessee Mentorship, a group that worked with at-risk children of pre-school ages. And she was prominent with EdPAC, an organization that does watchdog services for public education and evaluates and endorses school board candidates.

But, for all her administrative roles of consequence, Lois Freeman was most conspicuous for the simple fact of being there in every aspect of events, helping set up for meetings beforehand, catering for them, participating in them, and using elbow grease to help clear out the premises later on. Few indeed were the Democratic and nonpartisan races that she did not play an active and crucial role in.

She epitomized the idea of leading by example, and, as much as anyone else in these parts, was the very model of an active citizen.

A memorial service will be held for her this coming Saturday, June 2nd, beginning at 3 p.m. at Serenity Funeral Home, 1638 Sycamore View Road.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Nazi Party

Times certainly do change. When Mel Brooks’ multiple Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of his satirical 1968 film The Producers opened on Broadway in 2001, it was gobbled up whole by critics who praised it as comic manna from show-business heaven. The slobbering reception had to be sweet vindication for Brooks, a master parodist who won a best screenplay Oscar for the original film, only after watching it tank at the box office amid nearly universal critical outrage.

A scant two decades after the end of World War II, mainstream America still wasn’t prepared for the intentionally offensive story of two Jewish swindlers (brilliantly played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who concoct a plan to bilk a million bucks from investors with a glitzy Broadway show called Springtime for Hitler, a song-and-dance musical celebrating the glorious achievements of a handsome young fuhrer and his hip, hypersexualized Nazi Party.

Flash forward another 50 years and Brooks’ once-reviled parody has evolved from cult classic status to actual classic status. Brooks himself transformed it into a hit Broadway musical. That musical was then transformed back into a film, also called The Producers. And somehow out in the real world, while The Producers was making its journey from fringe to center stage, young Nazi-hipsters made a roaring comeback!

Is Springtime for Hitler still funny in the shadow of a surging alt-right and new authoritarianism? In a recent interview with Indie-Wire, Brooks, a WWII vet who wrote for Sid Caesar before creating iconic parodies like Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and High Anxiety, doubled down on his long-held belief that, if you can make people laugh at tyrants like Hitler, “then you’ve won the day.”

50th anniversary screening of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” Sunday, June 3rd, at 2 p.m. and Wednesday, June 6th, at 7 p.m. at Malco paradiso.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

The Collector

Marty Stuart won’t be in town till next week when he plays an intimate concert at Graceland’s Guest House Theater with his band the Fabulous Superlatives, but a portion of the musician’s extraordinary collection of country music artifacts is already on display as part of Graceland’s Country Road to Rock Exhibit. Even more will be available June 9th, when Stuart cuts the ribbon on “Hillbilly Rock,” a new exhibit, written by Stuart and showcasing artifacts of Hank Williams, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, Lefty Frizzell, and more.

“I like what they’re doing across the street,” Stuart says of Graceland’s expanded exhibit space. “[‘Hillbilly Rock’] is about evolution, and passing it on,” says Stuart, whose personal collection of country music artifacts contains more than 20,000 pieces including Johnny Cash’s first black performance suit, the handwritten lyrics for “I Saw the Light” and “Cold Cold Heart,” and the boots Patsy Cline was wearing when her plane crashed.

“My first memory on this Earth is being in my mother’s arms crying,” Stuart says, explaining how even the rigors of the entertainment industry couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm. “I know what the fabric on her dress felt like. I couldn’t remember why I was crying, but I later found out it was the church bells. They were coming across the breeze in Philadelphia, Mississippi, from the Methodist church across tile town … That’s my first memory on Earth. And nothing has changed. The right piece of music can reduce me to a puddle of tears in a heartbeat. Or get the goosebumps on me. Even through all the ups and downs and victories and defeats. After 40-something years of doing this, I still feel like a 9-year-old kid.”

In addition to pieces from Stuart’s collection, current Graceland exhibits feature artifacts belonging to James Brown, Kiss, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, and countless other 20th-century pop icons.

Graceland Exhibits are open daily. Marty Stuart and his Fabulous superlatives play the Graceland Guest House Theater Saturday, June 9, 8 p.m. $35 Graceland.com

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

“They’re Animals”: Trump Plays to His Base’s Worst Instincts

President Trump’s “animals” comment on May 16th clearly reflects his views on immigrants and immigration from the global south, and it successfully shifts focus away from a presidency fully engulfed in criminal investigations.

Whether the president was referring to all immigrants as animals or only MS-13 gang members hardly matters: What matters is the rhetoric and the political objectives from a man known for exuberance rather than eloquence.

The wholesale dehumanization of vulnerable societal groups is dangerous. History smolders with disingenuous demagogues selectively targeting (and dehumanizing) socio-political opponents to gain/maintain power, while incentivizing others to slaughter the innocent: Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, Guatemala in the 1980s, and Rwanda in the 1990s are but a few examples. While epic killings won’t begin anytime soon in the U.S.A., Trump’s focus on immigration is a source of solace for his loyal base. Their percolating anger holds real consequences for people “not” in the base camp and represents a troubling trend in Trump’s political calculus.

Kirstjen Nielsen

For example, in early May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that folks crossing into the U.S.A. (usually at the southern border we share with Mexico) without inspection will be prosecuted, using the criminal — not civil — code. Generally, criminal prosecution for entering the U.S. without proper documentation was reserved for those who enter illegally after having been previously deported. Now, anyone caught without proper documentation entering the country, even for the first time, will face criminal, rather than civil/misdemeanor charges. Criminal prosecutions can result in incarceration. Under the civil code, those unlawfully present face deportation and a bar to reentry.

Trump’s administration is seeking to incarcerate those who, in Jeb Bush’s words, are engaged in an “act of love”: They come to the U.S. seeking an opportunity to free their families from grinding, generational poverty or seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.

This aggressive, Department of Justice-sanctioned approach will separate families; Sessions also announced, earlier in the month, that people who cross our border with their children will be prosecuted for smuggling — and separated from their children. The Trump administration is preparing to place the children of those detained parents (awaiting criminal prosecution) on internal military bases. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense is studying the feasibility of sending children under 18 years of age to four or more bases in Arkansas and Texas, reminding some of Japanese Internment during World War II. For those familiar with 20th-century history, the thought of a powerful nation dividing families and placing children at military installations congers up an even darker past, from a distant continent.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen has energetically supported this plan, despite reports of a recent public “dressing down” by the president, she remains a champion enabler. She reflects the administration’s most loyal voters, those who feed on Trump’s cruel demonization of immigrants. These migrants are mostly poor, brown-skinned people who seek asylum, work, or a better life in the United States given that their own countries (especially Honduras, El Salvador, and segments of Mexico) have been ravished by gangs, violence, and drugs. The United States’ recent and historic policy toward the region has exacerbated the upheaval; we’ve provided military and police training to some of the most repressive elements of those societies; and America’s insatiable appetite for illegal narcotics, which drives the illicit markets there, needs no further comment.

People are not animals; even the worst people are still people. People are never “illegal”; they sometimes commit illegal acts. Murderous regimes, like the Third Reich, which categorized their neighbors as “subhuman, inferior races” are not remembered fondly. Demagogues, like Cuba’s Castro, referred to those who disagreed with him and fled the Marxist island he commanded as escoria — literally, scum.

President Trump, the leader of the free world, must do better than referring to people as animals. The comment is shameful, but the real shame is born by all citizens of this nation who willfully refuse to understand the magnitude of the dangerous demagogue dug-in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is time to act, and the most significant next step in restorative justice, for our nation, takes place on Tuesday, November 6, 2018.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1526

Dammit, Gannett

I planned to fritter away most of this week’s Fly on the Wall column having a goof on WMC’s time machine.

See, this well-intentioned tweet notes that the city of Memphis was created 199 years ago (in 1819) and goes on to note that WMC has been “in love ever since,” even though the 70-year-old media company was founded in 1948.

But who has time to dwell on that while Memphis still has a dying daily newspaper to kick around? Especially when that newspaper has a time machine of its own.

And instead of going back in time and not completely screwing itself up, the Gannett-owned sadness brought back Houston High’s 2015 soccer team to win the state championship.

This weird and probably misplaced act of heroism seems to have adversely affected the timeline, devolving Gannett’s copyediting staff to the point they can’t spell the name of their own damn newspaper.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Pinkney Herbert: 30 Years of Paintings

If you’ve never seen a Pinkney Herbert painting, now is your chance to see a lot of them. Herbert’s work, including drawings, is on view in two shows: “Distilled: The Narrative Transformed” at Crosstown Arts and “Arcadia” at the David Lusk Gallery.

“It’s all about Pinkney,” jokes Herbert, 64. “I’ve got the big head. It’s all me.”

Herbert’s work has been displayed in national and international collections and in the permanent collections at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, and other museums. Herbert, who taught painting and drawing at Rhodes College and the University of Memphis, is founding director of the Marshall Arts alternative gallery. He’s president of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts-France, a residency program in Auvillar, France.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Herbert has painted from an early age. “In kindergarten I learned how to finger paint. I’ve been finger painting ever since.”

He moved to Memphis in 1973 to attend Rhodes College. In the 1980s, he and his wife, Janice, moved to New York. “I had graduated from the University of Memphis with an MFA,” Herbert says. “And Janice and I decided we’ve got to go to where all the art activity is going on. We had some friends up there. It was my best education — becoming an artist and being able to go to museums and art galleries.”

One of his daughters, Suzannah, a documentary filmmaker, was born in New York. His other daughter, Waverly, is a fiction writer. “They both went to NYU and have lived in New York the last 10 years. We’ve been subletting different places in New York. We have a dual citizenship.”

Herbert’s Crosstown Arts show is a retrospective that includes his work from the early 1980s to 2018. “It’s about my move. I was a narrative allegorical storyteller painter. I was a figurative painter in college and continued to paint the figure in the 1980s. In New York, it’s sort of autobiographical paintings dealing with childhood memories. I was reading all of the big books — Moby Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, Carl Jung — influencing energy in those story-telling paintings. Then the work became more abstract.”

The earliest piece in the Crosstown Arts show dates to 1983. “It’s an oil painting on canvas I did right when I moved to New York City in 1983. It’s the first painting you’ll see when you walk in the gallery.” It’s called “Maelstrom” and Herbert says the painting is about “moving in Times Square when it was crazy and dangerous and my body felt like it was caught up in a whirlpool of activity.”

The David Lusk show features Herbert’s latest work. “The more recent work is influenced by being in New York with the energy and the velocity of the city,” Herbert says. “The architectural influence and the subway and being below the ground. It’s just this musical, noisy place.”

But Herbert says he also “loves and carries with me in my bones the whole Memphis music scene. Memphis is real. Memphis is base. A great place to create. Look at the history of writing, music, and the visual space. It’s a fecundity.”

Herbert named his Lusk show “Arcadia” because he feels New York is an “urban Arcadia.” “I still have feelings of desperately loving it and hating it at the same time. We lived there in the 1980s when it was dangerous. Now it’s a pretty safe place, but it still has the energy that inspires and motivates me.” “Distilled: The Narrative Transformed” will be on display through July 4th in Crosstown Arts’ East and West Galleries in the new space at Crosstown Concourse, Suite 280. “Arcadia” will be on view through June 23rd  at David Lusk Gallery at 97 Tillman.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Quest for Grocery Store Porn — Testing Diane Black’s Theories About School Shootings

Bottom right. Easy access at Walgreens.

Diane Black, a U.S. Representative from Tennessee, has been getting a lot of media attention for her belief that grocery store porn is a “big part” of the “root cause” of why school shootings happen.

Or something like that. 

“It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store.” she said. “Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there.

“All of this is available without parental guidance,” the 67-year-old Republican candidate for governor added. 

Puzzle porn at Kroger.

I decided to see if there was anything to Black’s claim. Saucy glossies are still in demand, if greatly diminished in number since the Internet made just about anything you can imagine in this arena free and available on our phones. But can you really get it in every grocery store easily and without adult supervision?

Not at my Kroger (Pop/Cleve 4-evvs). Unless you’re talking about Cosmo.

And whatever you think about the Cosmo is Porn campaign, we’re pretty sure any smutty advice they may or may not have printed about “polishing your partner’s assault rifle” was pure metaphor.

Newsweek had a really super-naked picture.

There were Sudoku puzzles, sports rags, teen-crush mags, Little Golden Books and a Wonder Woman coloring book on the bottom shelf. I asked an employee where all the porn magazines were. She looked at me suspiciously (cant say that I blame her) and said these were the only magazines she knew about.

This one caught my eye though. 

What kind of gun is that dude pig hunting with? It makes me feel all funny down there, if you know what I mean.

So maybe Black misspoke. Maybe she meant corner stores or pharmacies. Some of them sell groceries too. So I went to the Walgreen’s across the street.

You know, I do remember a time when porn seemed to be everywhere. I remember being eight or nine years old and looking at the dirty magazines on the bottom rack of a musty general store in Malakoff, Texas. I was a chubby kid and shirtless, wearing a big black cowboy hat with a big red and black feather band. It was the ’70s, man — even youngsters like me were letting it all hang out.

US Rep. Diane Black R-Tennessee

The pinch-faced prude behind the counter didn’t tell me to put down the porn or say “This ain’t a lending library,” or anything like that. “Developing young ladies should cover themselves,” is all she said to me. So, yeah, I was introduced to porn, and body/gender issues on the same sunny afternoon in Texas.

Porn magazines started losing “readers” in the ’80s — when video became cheap to manufacture.

At some point, magazine porn did get wrapped and placed on top shelves. And then it seemed to disappear from a lot of places where it used to be ubiquitous. I couldn’t even find porn at convenience stores where you can buy homeopathic sex pills and bongs.

“Try Walgreen’s at Poplar and Cleveland,” one convenience store employee suggested. Clearly I live in a porn desert.

Walgreens was also a bust, with content similar to what I’d seen at Kroger. Stuff on the top shelf included news magazine special editions and Popular Science. A few titles did catch my eye though down on the bottom shelf, in more or less the same part of the magazine rack where 8-year-old me first encountered porn way back in the disco era.

Check out Sniper. So. Hot.

And this Guns & Ammo AR-15 “pistol edition” with an assault pistol the cover. Or, whatever.

Precision Rifle Shooter has yet another sexy rifle on the cover.

And then there’s all the 2018 Handgun Buyer’s Guides right where little hands can reach them, free from parental guidance.

Long story short: Black’s weird claim just doesn’t seem to be true. Can we please get back to the time-honored business of blaming society’s ills on comic books, Atari, and satanic messages hidden on Black Oak Arkansas cassette tapes?

UPDATE: Similar porn deserts identified in Nashville.

Categories
News News Blog

Group to Offer 50 Free Bike Safety Classes Over Summer

Revolutions Bicycle Co-Op, the educational partner of Memphis’ new Explore Bike Share system will host a series of free bike safety classes throughout the summer.

Beginning this week, Revolutions is offering three different classes around the city “to give riders the confidence” to “navigate our city.”

In Bike Share 101, participants will learn how and when to access Explore Bike Share’s fleet, and about riding distances, time, and calorie burning as well.

The days, times, and locations of the sessions are as follows:

-South Memphis Farmers Market, Thurs., May 31st from 5 to 6 p.m.

-First Congregational Community Church, Tues., June 5th from noon to 1 p.m.

-High Cotton Brewing Co., Tues., June 5th from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

The second class, Commuting 101, will focus on how to commute as a cyclists, teaching participants how to route plan, navigate inclement weather, and transport items on a bike. The class will be offered at two different times and locations:

-Medical District Collaborative, Fri., June 1st from noon to 1 p.m.

-First Congregational Community Church, Fri., June 8th from noon to 1 p.m.

The third class, How to Ride in the Street, will be delivered in two parts. Part one will focus on bicyclists’ role when navigating traffic, including signaling, traffic laws, and potential hazards. Locations and times:

-Medical District Collaborative, Wed., May 30th from noon to 1 p.m.

-Knowledge Quest, Wed., May 30th from 5 to 6 p.m.

-South Memphis Farmers Market, Fri., June 1st from 5 to 6 p.m.

-First Congregational Community Church, Wed., June 6th from noon to 1 p.m.

The second part of the class will pick up where the first left off, offering additional tips for riding safely and confidently on the streets. The class will be offered twice:

-Medical District Collaborative, Thurs., May 31st from noon to 1 p.m.

-First Congregational Community Church, Thurs., June 7th from noon to 1 p.m.

All classes are designed for adults who already know how to ride a bike, Revolutions notes. The group plans to offer additional classes throughout the summer for a total of 50 sessions.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Memphis Could Learn From Glasgow’s “Miracle”

CREDIT: Jaime Pharr | Dreamstime.com

The alarm blares and the baggage carousel starts moving. It is Friday, opening night of the Beale Street Music Festival, and my fellow passengers from the Toronto flight chat excitedly of heading straight downtown to catch the action. Me, I’m just happy to be back home.

I’ve just returned from Glasgow, Scotland, after experiencing a cultural extravaganza of a different kind: the Glasgow International. This 18-day feast of contemporary art brings together 270 artists taking part in 80-plus events in 80 different venues and attracts visitors from around the world to see a plethora of boundary-pushing works.

This high-profile biennial is just one facet of the sprawling creative landscape that has helped transform the Scottish city. And with Memphis currently at something of a cultural crossroads, I keep asking myself what lessons we can learn.

Since the 1990s, Glasgow has been a major European hub for contemporary art, a timescale that encompassed the so-called Glasgow Miracle, the transformation of the city from a struggling industrial backwater into an international cultural powerhouse.

Unemployment has fallen significantly, and vacant and run-down buildings have become galleries and studios housing creatives from every artform.

Greater Glasgow’s population is similar to that of Memphis. Creative industries now represent a larger sector than life sciences, employing more people than the energy sector. In real terms, they contribute £4.6 billion to the Scottish economy.

The creative and economic boost for Glasgow cannot be underestimated. Young artists, musicians, and writers come from all over the world, increasing tourism and growing a wider cultural economy and bringing business to bars, restaurants, clubs, and hotels. Glasgow is a destination that woos young creatives with its comparatively cheap rental property prices. The people are charming, and being a small, cozy city — like Memphis — gives it many advantages over the likes of London. Glasgow’s DIY work ethic and cultural transformation have put it on the world stage.

Jaime Pharr | Dreamstime.com

Glasgow School of Art

The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) — alma mater of the architect that so defines Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh — has been central to this recent transformation, just as it has been at the heart of the city’s cultural landscape for 150 years. It is one of the highest-ranking post-graduate visual art schools in the world, and its MFA program is what brought me to the city in the first place.

As well as world-renowned artists — including five winners and 30 percent of the nominees of the prestigious Turner Prize in recent years — the school is just as well known for the musicians and bands that have attended, including Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand, and the Vaselines, Nirvana’s favorite band. Interestingly, all were influenced by our own Big Star. GSA continues to play a pivotal role across the city’s arts scene.

And yet Memphis is about to lose its own art school, the Memphis College of Art, which has played a similarly important role in our city’s cultural life.

Earlier this year, I corresponded with the director of GSA, Tom Inns, about the current situation at MCA, specifically his approach to fund-raising. He said that when looking for funding and support he always emphasizes the importance of the arts in building the economy, as well as growing the wider collective narrative of Glasgow. One question he asked hit me hard: “How can you possibly be a global city if you don’t have an art school? Wherever I travel, particularly to rapidly developing dynamic economies like China or South East Asian countries, cities are trying to establish art schools, not close them.”

I don’t have an answer for his question. But I’ll ask it of all Memphians in a different way: How can we maintain our respect and influence in the world while losing a vital part of our city’s history and culture?

The city’s art school is set to close, yet Memphis has three art districts that MCA helped create and maintain. The school’s legacy and impact have been intertwined with the music the city has been so famous for making for more than 70 years. We need to ask ourselves what the future will hold without one of our cultural pillars — and whether we are truly prepared to let MCA fade away. And if so, why?

Why allow this legacy of art and culture to be covered up like the recent covering up of the new murals painted around town? Why are we downgrading the global status of our city?

I don’t know that saving Memphis College of Art will give Memphis a Glasgow Miracle. What I do know is that it is less likely that something miraculous will happen without it.

Sabe Lewellyn is a conceptual artist based in Memphis and Glasgow.