Author: Ashley Johnston

Elisha Gold won the $1,000 Grand Prize for his sculpture in an overall competition among the 20 local artists chosen to exhibit at venues scattered among businesses in the heart of Memphis for the Unveil Downtown art walk and auction. His pieces are on display at Lansky 126.

A sculptor and painter originally from Mississippi, Gold received his bachelor of fine arts degree from William Carey College in Gulfport before earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Memphis in 2009.

Rebekah Laurenzi, exhibiting at Art Under a Hot Tin Roof, took home the second place prize of $500. While she considers herself mainly a sculpture and installation artist, Laurenzi’s current series are a mix of drawings and relief sculptures of crystalline landforms that aim to blur lines between the natural and man-made world. She lives and works in Memphis as an elementary school art teacher.

• Rebekah Laurenzi

Jimpsie Ayres was awarded third place with $250. Ayres is a Memphis native who studied fine arts at the universities of Tennessee and Florida. Her landscape paintings are inspired by her Southern childhood, and can be found at Thai Bistro.

Congratulations to these and all of the artists chosen to exhibit for Unveil Downtown! The auction to benefit the Downtown Neighborhood Association will continue until June 20th, so check out the great work and bid on a piece of art in the lobby of the building at 80 Monroe Avenue or online.

A solo exhibition of art by Alexander Paulus will open tomorrow during the S. Main Art District’s monthly Trolley Night from 6-9 p.m. at the Leadership Memphis Art Gallery on 363 S. Main. The show will be on display through the month of June. Michel Allen of Leadership Memphis approached Paulus to display his work in the new space beside the organization’s offices.

“I’m going to have a wide range of things. They will all be minimal in imagery and color, but conceptually heavy,” says Paulus.

Paulus put together an incredible show earlier this year for the Broad Avenue Spring Art Walk in April titled “Sorry,” featuring his own work along with art by Adam Farmer, Leanna Hicks, Johnathan Robert Payne, Joseph Kendrick, St. Francis Elevator Ride, and the collaboration of Hamlett Dobbins and Tad Wright. The successful one-night exhibition began with the loose idea to create pieces that dealt with space, open to interpretation by each individual artist.

“My past work was all about gods, religion, and science. From there I started thinking about outer space, and how older civilizations believed their gods came from the heavens and stars. I’m really interested in creation and evolution and the intertwining of the two in the formation of myth and religion. I also like sci-fi stuff too, so robots and laser guns made their way into the work as well,” says Paulus.

“Most of the pieces for tomorrow night’s show still address the concept of “space” but some are just weird things that happen to pop up in my brain.”

Jeni Stallings has been announced as the Fine Arts Poster Artist for this year’s RiverArtsFest. A native of Jonesboro, Arkansas, Stallings received her BFA in painting from the Memphis College of Art as valedictorian in 1996 and works as a practicing artist in Atlanta, Georgia. Her art has been shown at New York University, Asheville, Atlanta, Boston, Santa Fe, and of course, Memphis, and is included in the collection of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, where Stallings interned during her junior year at MCA.

She is represented in Memphis by L Ross Gallery, which will host the poster unveiling this coming Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. Signed and numbered RiverArtsFest 2012 Fine Arts Posters will be available for purchase.

Visual art has been the hallmark of the festival’s defining image each year since its inception, derived from the original work of an artist with close ties to the Memphis arts community. Previous poster designers include such celebrated locals as Dolph Smith, John Robinette, and George Hunt.

Overton Park and Rust Hall will become a playground for creativity on Saturday, as the Memphis College of Art’s Cinema 7 ensemble hosts an “art bike” parade and the (interactive) installation exhibit, ENTER=ACTIVE. Cinema 7 is a collective of MCA students comprised of an experimental video production class, taught by Associate Professor Jill Wissmiller.

In the past, the class was more studio-centric, but this semester, Wissmiller says that discussion of the concept of play led the tight-knit group to attempt to re-envision the conventions of a screen – originally with an exhibition at Power House for this year’s Live from Memphis Music Video Showcase, called Triggered. Using the interactive software, Isadora, the students created different programs as artistic games in which an outside user could control and compose both audio and video.

Setting the stage for adults to play like kids and thinking about art in a novel way became the focus of a larger project and the basis of ENTER=ACTIVE, on display from 8 to 10 p.m. at Rust Hall.

• Race to the Top

Kaitlyn Chandler created a piece for the sidewalk in front of Rust that acts as a full-body music-maker, wherein a projector and camera communicate to trigger sounds when someone dances on the colored grid below. Amanda Willoughby made a racing game for the facade of the building, where players will use standard video game controllers to navigate mazes, also mapped to color grids over Rust’s iconic screens. Working with the concept of digital painting, Stephen Harris’ piece will take viewers into the separate layers of a painting with a 3-D image projected onto a traditional canvas surface.

• Music Maker Grid

The bike parade is set to start at 3 p.m., with bikes decorated by MCA students as well as members of the community. Envisioned by Cinema 7 member, Aimee Easter, the parade is intended to promote awareness, encourage bicycle travel, and provide an unusual opportunity for creative expression. People are welcome to decorate bikes on-site and anyone can participate, with absolutely no registration required. Check-in for art bikes will take place in front of Rust Hall at 2 p.m. and live music will be going on all day.

The Memphis Brooks Museum was recently awarded a $44,000 Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to expand its unique Art Therapy Access program.

Targeted to at-risk youth, adults, and families in partnership with local social service organizations, the year-long program combines the personal, yet connective outlet of creating art with the social aspects of a museum environment to facilitate interactive and ultimately therapeutic group experiences. This year, the Brooks’ art therapy resources will extend to the Memphis Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, Youth Villages, and the Shelby County Relative Caregiver Program, with a specific focus on victims of trauma.

The Art Therapy Access program is tailored to meet the individual needs of selected participants – approximately 60 people in 2012 with 20 from each individual organization – who all receive a total of 45 hours of therapy, with some sessions held at the museum and some at the outside institution. The program will culminate in a public exhibition of participant artwork, on display at the museum for two months, as well as a website that will detail the benefits and outcomes of art therapy, to be used as a resource for other organizations.

Art Therapists Sarah Hamil and Karen Peacock are integral to the program’s ideals. Ms. Peacock, who previously worked with the VA Medical Center, has served as the Brooks’ Art Therapist since 2007 and wrote her master’s thesis on the particular benefits of art therapy within a museum setting. Ms. Hamil acts as Ms. Peacock’s clinical supervisor, and both are board certified professionals with substantial experience in art therapy and social work.

The Brooks has undertaken the multi-visit outreach since 2007, which includes art making sessions with licensed art therapists, museum tours, and an exhibition of the resulting work. Originally, the Brooks collaborated with Alzheimer’s Day Services of Memphis, then with the VA Medical Center in 2008, and in 2009 with Youth Villages. In the summers of 2010 and 2011, the museum teamed up with the Shelby County Relative Caregiver Program to offer instruction and experiences in the arts to children raised by a family member other than their parents.

The NEA was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, awarding more than $4 billion since its inception to support artistic innovation. Art Works was created to encourage and support the arts in terms of creation, public engagement, lifelong learning, and the strengthening of communities, with 788 grants awarded to nonprofit national, regional, state, and local organizations, totaling $24.81 million to date.

• Andrew Edwards

A talented group of friends and senior photographers at the Memphis College of Art recently formed a collective they’ve dubbed The New Memphis Photographers, composed of Elaine Catherine Miller, Yeinier Gonzalez, Amanda Gahan, Jonathan Rogers, Julie Kopel, and Andrew Edwards. The name seemed fitting as the group nailed down the very first, full-fledged gallery exhibition to be held at the Sears Crosstown building, coming up on May 11th.

“We like to think that we are the fresh faces in Memphis photography right now, and want to advertise ourselves as such. In the coming months some of us will be moving up to Chicago, while others may be staying here. We want to keep Memphis in our title to inform where our artistic roots were essentially established while also furthering a positive awareness of the city,” says Miller.

The collective’s self-titled show, The New Memphis Photographers, will undoubtedly make for a larger scale than Fotocopia, a week-long exhibition at the quaint Adam Shaw Gallery included in the recent Broad Ave. Art Walk, but the small showing was a wonderful reminder of the clean simplicity of thoughtful artistic vision. Each photographer has a noticeably individual style, in both subject and overall composition, yet when you step back and consider the pieces as part of a greater collection, you see how truly complementary the separate sets are; that these artists are all wrangling with the same issues, only on different fronts.

Elaine Miller exposes Americana with a diligence that seems to effortlessly bind modern issue to vintage atmosphere. Julie Kopel explores the uncomfortable implications of sadomasochism with a delicacy that somehow fully articulates the beauty of the feminine body. Andrew Edwards creates dark, layered depths that further clarify his photographs rather than drown out the image in shadow. And Yeinier Gonzalez brilliantly documents a quite personal basis of culture and family in Cuba.

“I feel like we each bring something new to the field and I really enjoy exhibiting with them,” says Gonzalez.

• Elaine Catherine Miller

• Yeinier Gonzalez

The Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes hosted the college’s Annual Juried Student Exhibition last Friday and Saturday, including a singularly entertaining performance piece from Johnathan Robert Payne that drew a small crowd of delighted students.

• Johnathan Robert Payne channels Billy Blanks.

According to gallery director and professor, Hamlett Dobbins, students enrolled in his gallery management class have selected pieces for the juried show for the last few years. They also chose the prize winners. The Senior Thesis Exhibition looks to be every bit as intriguing and goes up this week, opening on Friday from 6-8 p.m.

• Laurie Clotworthy, Overdose