Author: Carol Knowles

Branded an opportunist, a charlatan, and a third-rate artist by some critics during his lifetime, Andy Warhol is now recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. This “Pope of Pop” transformed celebrity photo-ops and commercial logos into fine art. He captured the best and worst of America with symbols that still resonate.

Many of Warhol’s most famous works — including Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Colas, car crashes, wallpaper cows, camouflage, and celebrities — are currently on view in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s blockbuster summer show, “The Prints of Andy Warhol.”

Faces of Marilyn Monroe cover the far right wall of the exhibition. These are Warhol’s most cogent comments about commodity and how Hollywood packages its stars as products. A keen observer of color as well as celebrity and consumerism, Warhol captures Monroe’s many personas with hues ranging from forest green to hot pink. The fire-engine red face is Marilyn the sex goddess. Color her brown-gray and she becomes a goddess with face-and-feet of clay. Bright-yellow hair crowning a soft-purple silhouette transforms Marilyn into Hollywood royalty.

Soft purple also backdrops two silk-screened images of Jackie Kennedy mourning her husband. The faces in the 1966 print Jacqueline Kennedy II are identical except the one on the right is fading, reflecting perhaps the end of the charismatic reign of Jackie and JFK and the passing of a presidency often compared to Camelot.

One of the most unsettling works in the show is the smudged, gray-toned, image of an electric chair sitting in a dingy, otherwise empty room. The leather straps have been unbuckled in this old photo, whichWarhol appropriated and silk-screened in the late ’70s when almost all first-world countries, except America, had abolished the death penalty.

Steinunn Thorarinsdottirs contemporary sculptures, on view on the grounds of the Dixon

During the last year of his life, Warhol painted and then silk-screened large prints of camouflage. They’re hanging on the far back wall of the Brooks exhibition. Some of the prints are government-issue green and gray. Some are bright red, orange, and yellow. No longer obsessed with celebrity or consumerism, Warhol is playing with color and form. He’s commenting on the difficulty of ever really knowing ourselves or the world. And no matter how bright the lights of celebrity or saturate its colors, Warhol also seems to be remarking on the facile quality of fame.

Fast-forward to the 21st century: Celebrity and commodity still consume the American psyche, our prisons overflow, political rhetoric camouflages truth, and the lives of the rich and famous are tracked 24 hours a day on cable television and the Internet. As his iconic images encapsulate the world ever more powerfully, 21 years after his death, Andy Warhol proves not only to be pop art’s “pope” but also its prophet.

“The Prints of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again,” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through September 7th

Like Warhol’s screen prints, the works of Icelandic sculptor Steinunn Thorarinsdottir can be seen worldwide. You’ll find her roughhewn, cast-iron figures morphing out of the walls of Icelandic churches, standing next to European boulevards, and leaning toward the sea in memorials to drowned sailors. This spring, her figures were in Dublin alongside the sculpture of Dale Chihuly and Henry Moore. This summer, in Memphis, they’re standing among the oaks on the sloping south lawn of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Thorarinsdottir’s lean, androgynous, life-size figures tilt slightly forward. Their heads cock to the side, expressing equal measures of awe, introspection, dignity, peace, isolation, and strength.

Take some time to walk among the figures on the Dixon’s lawn, stroke their rough skin scarred by millennia of experience, and look into the shafts of translucent green glass that pierce their bodies at heart level. You’ll glimpse your own reflection and see all the way through the cast iron to trees and grass on the other side. We are — Thorarinsdottir’s art reminds us — both matter and light, dust and stardust, and an integral part of the mosaic of all life.

At the end of the lawn, one of Thorarinsdottir’s figures stands on the other side of a small wooden bridge. This reinforces our sense that these creatures are making connections, bridging new levels of understanding, and evolving perhaps to future generations of humankind who go beyond consumer goods and celebrity to contemplate the whole of creation.

“Steinunn Thorarinsdottir: Horizons” at the Dixon

Gallery & Gardens through August 30th

Photographer Ian Lemmonds’ curating skills are as visionary and playful as his signature artwork in which white ponies vanish into sunlight and minuscule humans stand in awe of luminous goldfish. Lemmonds has put together “The Girls Club,” an L Ross Gallery exhibition that uses the international signage for women’s restrooms as its logo. This is just the right touch of whimsy and insight to describe five young women, who, like Virginia Woolf, have created private spaces in which to generate art straight from the gut.

Our Tiny Graces by Emily Walls consists of an 18-by-20 hand-knit afghan, two oversized chairs built by the artist, and an invitation to climb on and under the installation. The work takes us back to the moment we pulled a blanket off our beds, draped it over chairs much taller than ourselves, and crawled into a private space to enjoy our first work of art.

A young man lies on a pale-blue slab in Pixy Liao’s untitled C-print. A shaft of light hovering above his body creates pitch-black shadows and powerful metaphors regarding life’s brevity and the hope for transcendence. The man is lying on an air-hockey table, and that long glint of light comes from a fluorescent bulb. Perhaps he’s been injured in a poolroom brawl. Perhaps he’s sleeping in a fraternity game room after too much study or too much beer. Whatever the particulars, Liao’s perceptually challenging, richly symbolic work reminds us of life’s pathos, its pleasure, and its pain.

In Women on Washington, Niki Johnson delicately and accurately sketches the portraits of the American presidents’ wives on small pieces of vellum. Each sketch is placed on top of George Washington’s face on the one-dollar bill. The bills (all 39 of them) are relief-mounted on the wall in the shape of a pyramid. Here are just a few of the questions this beautifully executed, conceptually complex artwork asks: On what foundation do we build our homes, ourselves, our country? With greenbacks? With the ideals of early statesmen (and stateswomen)? With trickle-down economics? With the labor of women who often earn substantially less than men?

Other notable works in the show include Gate 3, a breakthrough painting in which Lauren Hamlett reaches a subtle, original level of abstraction, and Rebeka Laurenzi’s soft, porous, surprisingly beautiful sculpture made out of thousands of strips of corrugated paper.

The Stale Calm of Utopia by Marcus Kenney at David Lusk

L Ross Gallery, through June 30th

Four young artists in David Lusk’s current show, “Crowded,” have also mounted original, thought-provoking work.

From a distance, Mike Force’s work is striking and lyrical. Up close, his paintings tell a dark story. The American flag has become limp noodles that swarm like snakes through many of his works. Impastos of burgundy are human hearts that roast on open spits and spew noxious fumes from truncated arteries like factory smoke stacks. This artist’s tattered flags and hearts serve as graphic reminders for ways overzealous patriotism and unchecked corporate interest can bend and bloody democratic ideals and compassion beyond recognition.

An untitled C-print by Pixy Liao on view at L Ross Gallery.

Pale-blue rectangles that narrow at the top of Shawn Mathews’ tall, slick painting Therapy bring to mind high-rise apartments, multiple arteries of freeways, and shipping lanes. Beneath thick layers of resin, Mathews’ scumbled brown background conjures up faces and monuments carved into now crumbling stone. Modernity, backdropped by a palimpsest of ancient forms, suggests no matter how high or technologically advanced we build our structures and infrastructures, they too shall crumble.

In some of the most interesting syntheses of art and space we’ve seen this year, Cordy Ryman screws, stacks, and Velcros enameled slats of wood into the corners of David Lusk Gallery to create floor-to-ceiling installations.

Marcus Kenney explores the American psyche with collages of memorabilia, brand-name labels, vintage wallpaper, and children’s book illustrations that often resemble the Dick/Jane/Sally characters from mid-century elementary school primers. Weaned on the prosperity of the ’50s and the psychedelia of the ’60s, Kenney’s cutouts float over devastated landscapes, taunt physically disabled youngsters, and smoke cigarettes — unaware of the harm they cause — still plump, still beautiful, still 7 years old.

At David Lusk Gallery, through June 28th

Memphis painter Meikle Gardner moved to Manhattan two years ago. This month, he fills his “New York/New Work” exhibition at Perry Nicole with 30 saturate, sensual, and original works of art. Gone are the slathered-on heads and complex gridwork. Gardner’s gestures have become a satisfying blend of calligraphy, geometry, and fertility icon. Spermatozoan shapes spread out into luminous color fields in Morphogenesis. Languid brushstrokes weave in and out of blue-black folds softly lit with silver-white wisps of paint in Ancient Fold. A silver-blue background overlaid with opalescent green sinew in Prattle-Head is punctuated with yellow and topped off with blue calligraphy outlined in red. This tremendously complex, crisp, never overworked painting reads like synapses of a supercharged mind in a supercharged city where possibility is endless.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art, through June 30th

One of the most psychologically revealing paintings in “Larry Edwards: Cautionary Tales” at Jay Etkin Gallery, A Dream of Innocence depicts a young girl on a sky-blue sofa wearing what looks like Little Red Riding Hood’s cape. But in this postmodern version of the Brothers Grimm, the heroine isn’t attacked by a wild creature — from the shoulders down she is the wolf.

Atypical of Edwards’ oeuvre, this powerful exhibition contains fewer images of hellfire and damnation and more pointed insights regarding the ways humankind thwarts what is natural, anesthetizes itself to the pain of others, and threatens to destroy its world.

The show’s most searingly topical image, Fourth of July Holiday Tree, is covered with ornaments, exploding fireworks, and red-white-and-blue ribbons. Near the top of the tree, two tiny flags waft patriotically. At the zenith, an eagle burns — the essence of freedom going up in flames as an overzealous nationalism preemptively strikes other countries, other points of view.

Dangerous Country for Exotic Birds is a lush menagerie of parrots … and scissors with colorful handles. Each bird’s crest, the tufted feathers and distinct coloration, is carefully, beautifully observed. The painting’s title, its pitch-black background, and its scissor blades poised to cut through burgundy branches and parrots’ bodies tell us all is not well in paradise. This work is most unsettling not because it broaches the cutting of the rain forest. Dangerous Country suggests that the loss of exotic species registers for many of us with as little impact as scissoring paper cutouts.

Edwards’ sardonic humor has mellowed. Several of his “cautionary tales” are playfully ironic, even hopeful. An unbridled profusion of roses and lilies grows out of the top of Corset Flower Vase. Each petal, bud, pistil, and stamen is back-dropped by black top soil spewing from a 19th-century corset, the restrictive Victorian undergarment that damaged women’s bodies by squeezing them into hourglass figures.

In one of the most celebratory works of Edwards’ career, Christmas Holiday Tree, the angel at the top has “gone green” and sounds the clarion call for something this satiric soothsayer holds truly sacred: the good, faithful, gentle stewardship of the earth and its creatures, including ourselves.

Larry Edwards’ A Dream of Innocence at Jay Etkin

At Jay Etkin Gallery through April 22nd

A sun blazes behind an American flag. A puppy plays. The face of Barack Obama comes slowly into view. A small Mississippi grocery store, where 14-year-old Emmett Till whistled at the proprietor’s wife, stands empty and in shambles.

In “Sitting Still: Contemplation and Creation,” the current exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, New York conceptual artist, Anne Beffel, weaves these and other video images into a cogent meditation regarding our power to shape our world.

Beffel wants us to slow down, to be more aware, less quick to jump to judgment. Toward that end, she asked University of Memphis students to learn the basics of meditation, to build the stools on which they meditated, to videotape a slice of their lives, to respond to their videos with brief descriptive phrases that read like stanzas of poetry, and then to mail these materials to Syracuse University students who repeated the process of relaxing, recording, and responding.

At AMUM, viewers are also invited to relax on the stools the students made, to watch their videos. In our consumer society and electronic age, where we ingest everything but nothing deeply, Beffel’s art is powerful. It reminds us that we are the directors/writers/lead actors of our lives. We can determine what we’ll focus on and with whom we will share our discoveries, in what tempo and tone.

The residual power of Beffel’s art extends beyond museum walls. When you leave AMUM, you may find yourself slowing down, concentrating on some aspect of experience like this viewer, who, en route home, stopped her car, watched a steel-blue sky go black, and wrote a poem.

At AMUM through April 12th

Bronze mountains, figures, and worlds explode in Perry Nicole’s “Roy Tamboli: Madrugada,” an exhibition that pays homage to sexual, mental, mythic, and cosmic energies.

What could be the body of a dragon arcs and twists, Art Nouveau-like, through space near the top of Fuerzas (Sprung). The dragon’s gnarled face spews flames that ripple into angel wings. In the midst of these baroque flourishes, Tamboli adds sex and satire to the mythic and the sublime. Tiny patchworks of bronze that look like Adam and Eve just created engage in gymnastic sex on the back of a motorcycle.

Tamboli’s bronzes range from iconic to meditative to chaotic in this body of work. Several gracefully abstracted pelvises stand side-by-side, tilted forward slightly, in Hejira. This is Tamboli’s powerful evocation of a family whose members bolster one another while still being able to move fluidly, en masse, as they celebrate, work together, or seek a better life, as they do here in an artwork whose title means “migration” in Arabic.

A stylized figure with almond eyes and triangular torso stands on his head in Sirasana. A couple makes love. A man shovels earth and buries a tiny body. These episodes from Tamboli’s life, played out on a high narrow ledge, precariously tilted, evoke the tenuous quality of memory and existence.

There are no discreet categories, no moral judgments in this wildly imaginative work in which sex flows into a kicking bull, cannon fire, the molecular makeup of carbon, windblown trees, a hurricane, and human figures hoisted up by angels. Mind, myth, and material world roil into one seething cosmos that Tamboli describes in interviews and artist statements as “madrugada”: “King energy — the power of nature manifested in all things constantly changing.”

Through March 29th

L Ross Gallery’s current exhibition, “Greetings from Spillmanville,” finds another artist/storyteller working at the top of his form. With techniques learned from Looney Tunes, tattoo artists, and 19th-century Japanese printmakers, Bobby Spillman transforms coffee grinds, ink, and dollops of gouache into powerful, poignant works of art that are softly nuanced as well as rich with detail.

A whiskered catfish as big as Moby Dick threatens to swallow a ship in The Rise and Fall of the Dark Pegasus. The subject of Sourdly Lion attempts to devour a lemon tree. A baby duck is swept along by a stream of water through a forest in Carry One and past telephone poles in Field Trip. Its eyes are wide with wonder, reminding us that every life is a grand adventure.

Spillman combines Greek myth with Aesop’s Fables to create stories that transform tragedy into exercises of the imagination. A giant squid in We’re Going To Need a Bigger Boat pulls free from a rope tied to an anchor moored on a hillock at the bottom of the ocean. Its tentacles threaten to capsize a ship on the surface. Instead of drowning at sea like Sinbad’s comrades or being doomed by a fatal character flaw in Greek drama, the work’s title suggests a sequel in which protagonists learn from their experiences and build a boat big enough to encompass their new ideas.

Bobby Spillman’s We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat

Fearless depicts life lived with wisdom as well as courage. Two adventurers, who know their strengths and their limitations, fly at the edge but still within sight of their flock. Golden-brown sun warms the birds’ bodies. Their wings’ soft and flexible feathers, spread out at different angles, are buoyed by air currents over the tops of tall pines swaying in the wind.

This visionary, bittersweet, deeply felt art is inspired perhaps in part by the 485 students, ages 5 to 12, Spillman teaches at Bruce Elementary School. Many of the students, like their mentor, tote a handmade sketchbook everywhere they go. Some of them spend the last hour of their school day with Spillman doing “art time” as they explore feelings, hopes, and frustrations in their sketchbooks.

“Spillmanville” isn’t a place, an exhibition, or a fantasy. It’s a state of mind and Spillman’s reminder to the child in each of us to jump back into life with eyes, heart, mind, and imagination wide-open.

Through March 31st

For the Memphis College of Art’s exhibition “The Matter at Hand,” artists used simple tools and everyday materials to handcraft complex, extraordinary wood carvings, quilts, crochet, and ceramics. Somewhere between high and low art, these works take postmodern narrative to new heights of satire, social commentary, and shtick.

Jeana Eve Klein’s mixed-media quilt The Rise and Fall of Old Mold House is Southern gothic with a sense of humor. Smack dab in the middle of the large quilt, Klein has sewn a bas-relief rag doll and stuffed her with fabric. With auburn hair and long mascaraed eyelashes, she looks up at the viewer like a kiddie Scarlett O’Hara. Accustomed to a life of leisure, her arm hangs limp at her side. She lolls back on a long sloping lawn in front of a Southern mansion where large oak trees drip with moss. We can just make out the white columns at the end of a lawn. Everything in her world is fading fast except her sense of entitlement — one of the reasons “Old Mold House” (and civilization) might fall.

Membranes glisten inside the small opening at one end of Jason Briggs’ ceramic sculpture, Lover. Bound up like a papoose, studded with what could be warts or ritual decorations, and carefully laid out on a wad of cotton like a prize possession, Lover is both grotesque and beautiful. This wickedly funny, hand-sized work of art is arguably the centerpiece of the show.

Tracy Krumm’s Cone (Sleeve)

In a work of metal alchemy, Cone (Sleeve), Tracy Krumm crochets copper and brass into an Arthurian damsel’s dress sleeve so delicate and gauzy it begs to be touched. The cone that cups the end of the sleeve ties the loose threads into a metal sieve so tightly woven it could be the damsel’s chastity belt or the metal jacket of the knight who protects her.

Race Among the Ruins is Aaron Spangler’s wood relief of a small town. Painted in charcoal gray and rubbed with graphite, the town looks charred. Some catastrophe has not only singed but felled trees and buildings with enough raw force to bend a car nearly in two. There are touches of the surreal and sinister. Far right, an upside-down cross that looks like the hilt and blade of a sword is carved above a rose window, like those found in Gothic churches. Another sword is thrust between the branches of a tree that reaches across the top half of the work.

Churches are scorched and towns and ideologies toppled in an enigmatic elegy that could have been titled Twilight of the Gods or Civilization in Ruin. Spangler’s masterfully complex carving goes way beyond handicraft. Last year, Race Among the Ruins sold at auction at Christie’s for more than $50,000.

Through March 21st

“Cling to Me,” Joey Fauerso’s exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College, is one of the most sensual shows you will ever see. This is sensuality with a capital “S” — as in senses, not sexual titillation.

In Fauerso’s video Get Naked, we fly over cold, barren landscapes, watch human figures huddle at the side of a highway, and glimpse a woman, covered in muslin, touching her head to the ground. This black-and-white footage could be the opening scenes in a film noir in which some dark drama is about to unfold. Not here. In between these snippets from the past, a young man undresses, lies down, throws back his head, and opens his mouth. Sunlit waters wash over his body.

Watch the video several times. Superficial personae, linear time, and memory slip away. What begins as a disorienting, ever-shifting kaleidoscope of water-color washes becomes a compellingly effective meditation that, instead of blocking out the natural world or stilling the mind, reminds us how to go with the flow.

That Joey Fauerso is a female tapping into the male aspects of her psyche to create Get Naked makes this an even more interesting, boundary-blurring work of art.

Through March 26th

For Tom Lee’s exhibition “Into the Fire,” there is a perfect pairing of art and venue. Inside Power House’s small, sooty gallery, the Fuel Room, Lee has drawn, whittled, and painted a savagely wry 21st-century version of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Instead of surrounding God with cherubim, Lee depicts the Almighty flanked by a circular saw with an image of George W. Bush imprinted on each tooth of the blade.

In Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel masterwork, God reaches out, almost touching Adam. The Fuel Room Jehovah points to a replica of Elmer Fudd’s shotgun (circa 1950s), which sprays pellets into a tiny Bugs Bunny hanging from the wall. To God’s right, a body as beautiful as Adam’s lies in a casket, naked except for the footgear and helmet of a soldier.

Lee fills the world, post-Eden, with barbed wire, shotgun blasts, carvings of human skulls on wooden stakes, and Katrina floodwaters painted on the wall. A huge white bunny, face half-blown off by Fudd’s shotgun blast, floats in the middle of the deluge and is still nibbling on a carrot. Lee’s work suggests that maybe instead of eating more of the carrots dangled in front of our weary wounded faces, we should rethink some of the Looney Tunes political logic and the convenient lies told in the name of God and country.

Born and raised in Memphis, Grier Edmundson now lives in Scotland. This May, Edmundson is scheduled to paint a mural on the side of a building in Iceland. The piece will be titled “Was the World Made for Men?” — a question posed in the 19th century by another wry explorer of the human heart: Mark Twain.

In his retrospective “North/South” at Power House, Edmundson explores gender, race, modern technology, and the will-to-power with paintings as varied as Nathan Bedford Forrest on horseback, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, three white crosses alongside Interstate 40, and a young girl learning to use a calculator.

View of Tom Lee’s ‘Into the Fire’

Edmundson’s impastoed and energetic brushwork transforms photographs into paintings often explosively different from the original images. In his 2006 portrait of Robert Oppenheimer, beige-pink paint explodes from the top of the physicist’s head like a mushroom cloud.

There’s more spewing in the 2004 work Thoughts on the Definition of Culture Part I, in which hunters dressed in camouflage sit on a front porch sharing adventures, off-color jokes, and small-town vitriol. One of the hunters throws back his head, laughs, and emits a splash of beige-pink impasto the viscosity and color of vomit.

In another work, a Civil War patriot waves his right arm in front of the Confederate flag. His face has been wiped out — white-washed, perhaps, by political rhetoric, blinded by ideology, obscured by cannon smoke, and obliterated on a battlefield.

While his earlier artwork explores some of the South’s disconcertingly mixed messages regarding chivalry, religion, race, and gender, nothing is obscured in Edmundson’s untitled 2007 black-and-white painting in which a hare darts across a field of snow. In the corner of the work are a few lines of poetry about forest animals and the course of nature. Those lines, this painting remind us that power struggles have existed since the dawn of time.

“Into the Fire” and “North/South” at Power House through March 9th