Author: Dwayne Butcher

Barack Obama or Mitt Romney? It is that simple. I cannot imagine why anyone would still be undecided. One candidate is going to cut taxes, balance the budget, and create jobs. The other candidate will cut taxes, balance the budget, and create jobs.

Regardless of your political leanings, this is essentially what you can expect from whoever is elected president next week. Not much. People will still be protesting something — jobs, wars, trade treaties, equal rights, whatever. The world will not end, America will not collapse, and things will pretty much continue as they have for decades. The things that affect the majority of people today in 2012 are exactly the same things that affected people in 1980, 1960, 1940, 1920, 1900, etc.

This all sounds way too pessimistic, doesn’t it? I think it does. And I have never really thought about it in this context until I visited the exhibitions “Hot Cold Cool” and “11 Septembers,” both currently on view at the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM).

“Hot Cold Cool” is four separate exhibitions from the museum’s expanding works-on-paper collection and includes work from some of the heaviest hitters of the 20th century: Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, and Mark di Suvero.

AMUM director Leslie Luebbers was associated with the World Print Council from 1978 to 1984 and during that time amassed quite a personal collection of prints and works on paper. She is currently in the process of giving this work to the museum.

“‘Hot Cold Cool’ started as a means of making the time to do the basic collection data work,” Luebbers says. “All the prints in my collection were done during the Cold War, and the World Print Council’s purpose was in some sense a way of linking to artists whose work would otherwise be inaccessible. The political situation was always in the background, even if it was not overt.”

The “Hot” of the exhibition title equals the Vietnam War. “Cold” refers to the Cold War and includes Russian propaganda posters. The “Cool” is formalism ­— art about art and only about art, vis à vis Clement Greenberg or an Andy Warholian Pop coolness. According to Luebbers, “This coolness is related to the repressive anti-Communism of McCarthyism and the pall it exerted on the expressive content in art. The ’50s and ’60s were great times to be specifically nonpolitical. The Vietnam War opened Pandora’s box.”

The reductive work of Ad Reinhardt and the luminescent woodcuts of Carol Summers could never be confused with antiwar art, yet, as is evident with their work in this exhibition, each was compelled to create accusatory images and signs of disapproval in response to the Vietnam War. “That is the lesson of this portfolio: Artists protest,” Luebbers says.

That artists protest is also the contention of Memphis artist Jan Hankins and his exhibition “11 Septembers.”

Umpteenth Amendment was created during the George W. Bush administration and served as the impetus for the rest of the work in the exhibition. It is a ginormous 96″ x 240″ painting of an American bill where the front and back are simultaneously featured on the same side. Prominent members of Bush’s cabinet are humorously represented throughout the piece enjoying their spoils of war.

On the opposite wall are emblems of government agencies and what Hankins claims are their real and intended purpose. Big Coal Advisory Commission, Department of Health and Second Mortgages, and Department of Guns and Fool Recreation are just a few of the pieces.

Hankins’ interest in making political work began during the Reagan administration, particularly with the United States’ involvement in the civil wars of El Salvador and Guatemala.

“[They] perpetuate this myth of the U.S. being the saintly policeman of the world, which is something we never have been,” Hankins says.

This perpetuation continues today, and Hankins’ nuclear anxiety is the subject of his new work, specifically the drone attacks on Pakistan, a country with hundreds of nuclear weapons. “I am afraid the wrong person will get ahold of one of these weapons and attempt to teach us gringos a lesson,” Hankins says.

Hankins, a self-described socialist, says, “Socialism is the historical trajectory of society. We have to work things out. It is in everyone’s interest to work together.”

This is a nice statement. It really is. I also happen to believe it to be true. But, in this political climate and our history of not learning from our past mistakes and protests, who are we really kidding?

“Hot Cold Cool” and “11 Septembers” through November 21st

he first three months for Christina Lanzl as new executive director for the UrbanArt Commission have been busy. Since accepting the position, she has overseen the installation of two new sculptures and the dedication of another, with four additional dedications scheduled this fall.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Germany, Lanzl was taken with Memphis instantly. She’s been impressed with how substantial the public art collection that UrbanArt has been able to amass in just 15 years, and she is delighted that internationally renowned artists Vito Acconci and James Carpenter have permanent installations at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts. She is also impressed with the local representations as well, particularly Greely Myatt’s Quiltsurround at City Hall.

A cultural planner and public-art consultant with more than 20 years experience, Lanzl is interested in place-making, thinking about communities in a holistic fashion.

“You do not simply put a sculpture in a neighborhood because you have a spot there. You need to think of the overall composition of what is surrounding the sculpture,” she says. “I am developing a sense of place with cultural assets in a neighborhood context, in an urban context, and in a city context.”

With this in mind, Lanzl is interested in engaging local communities even more than in the past, bringing in volunteers from these communities to be part of the design and fabrication of the objects. “Public art is for everybody,” she says, “and can be accessed by people for free.”

During her first week on the job, she traveled with the UrbanArt staff and the seven artists who had been selected to create murals in Memphis to Philadelphia, which has a world-renowned mural program. Lanzl led the artists on tours of various murals and organized workshops and studio visits with the artists who completed those projects.

Each of the seven Memphis murals are currently in the fabrication stage and are scheduled to be installed late spring or early summer 2013. Artists selected to create murals are: Jamond Bullock at Bethel LaBelle Community Center; TWIN (Jerry and Terry Lynn) at Halle Stadium; Beth Edwards at Willow Park; Brandon Marshall at Greenlaw Community Center; Sowgand Sheikoleslami at Gooch Park; Chad Irwin and Kyle Taylor at Pine Hill Community Center; and Jason Miller at Gaisman Community Center.

Miller, who for three months documented his participation in activities such as bingo, billiards, Zumba, basketball, and ballroom dancing, got a sense of how important the Gaisman center is for that community. From the thousands of photographs he took during those three months, his mural is made for the very people who use the Gaisman Community Center on a daily basis.

The selection committee for the projects at UrbanArt can move at a glacial pace. The mural artists were notified of their selection in early 2011, with fabrication only beginning in the last two months. Several prominent Memphis artists who have previously created projects told me they have no intention of submitting additional proposals, stating that two years is just too long to commit to a single project. The projects that UrbanArt manages from private sponsors have a tendency to move a lot faster, as they do not require extensive committee-based processes, if any. However, the projects for Memphis’ “Percent for Art” program are a different story. Each stage in the process requires a different committee, selecting, contracting, reviewing, approving, fabricating, and installing. It can be overwhelming and frustrating for the artists.

Another issue that UrbanArt has to deal with is the lack of artists who can actually make public work. There are even fewer artists teaching in Memphis-area colleges and universities who have public art experience and are able to instruct and mentor current and recent students on their proposals.

“You have to have a portfolio and you must show initiative to be selected for a project,” Lanzl says. She is excited that University of Memphis painting professor Beth Edwards is one of the artists selected to create a mural. “Edwards is currently working on her first public art commission. She can now go back to her classes and share her experiences. Growing the talent, so to speak.”

A perceived lack of communication with the community and the artists whom UrbanArt works with has also been a problem the last several years. (UrbanArt, in its defense, had been without an executive director for more than a year.) Lanzl understands the frustrations that artists have had in the past with the organization, and she is working hard to correct that. She began by working to increase the social media presence of the organization and increasing the frequency of email updates and calls for local and national proposals.

Lanzl is working to increase UrbanArt’s presence on a national level as well. She recently enrolled UrbanArt in cultureNOW, a network of organizations working together to create a digital “national gallery” of art and architecture in the public realm. She is interested in not only bringing the rest of the world to Memphis but bringing Memphis to the rest of the world. Lanzl is making a concentrated effort to get Memphis artists to apply and be awarded projects throughout the country. So, growing the talents of artists in Memphis is essential.