When the news broke Sunday of the death of Charles McVean, he was being widely remembered as someone who was a great achiever – not only as an entrepreneur but as a devoted philanthropist.
McVean, who was 78, had been ailing for some time. But he continued his active interest in his community work, which, among other things, included the Peer Power student-to-student tutoring program, and the creation of the Big River Crossing, the country’s longest active rail/bicycle/pedestrian bridge.
He was a member of the Society of Entrepreneurs, selected for his success in running McVean Trading & Investments, LLC, and last year was honored with the Master Entrepreneur designation by the society.
In a story in Memphis magazine announcing the award, he was described as being observant of opportunities, whether in business or community, and going after them with a passion.
The story said: “Early in his commodities work, he noticed something about the cattle futures market: ‘I said, we just got a bunch of gunslingers and cowboys trading these cattle. I think I can apply some of the more advanced statistical techniques learned [from] the grain trade and beat these guys.’ And he did.”
He received an Innovation Award from Inside Memphis Business magazine twice, first in 2013 for Peer Power, and again in 2017 with Charlie Newman for the Big River Crossing.
Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen issued a statement that said, “Charlie McVean had a brilliant, creative, and innovative mind. He used it for Memphis in the areas of public education and amenities. … We need more Charlie McVeans who give back to make us better. His was a unique, valuable, important life.”
Emily Ballew Neff has resigned as executive director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Mark Resnick, the museum’s deputy director and COO, is taking the title of acting executive director, effective immediately.
Emily Ballew Neff (photo by Brandon Dill)
No reason was given for Neff’s departure. “On behalf of the Brooks Museum’s Board and many supporters, I want to express my appreciation to Emily for her service to the Brooks and the greater Memphis arts community,” said museum board president Carl Person. “I know that Mark will use his broad experience in the arts and management acumen to further our mission today and help us realize our vision for a 21st century museum on the Mississippi river.”
Neff was quoted in the press release saying, “The future of the arts in Memphis could not be more exciting, and as I move on, I wish this great city every good fortune in its recovery from the pandemic and continued momentum.”
Neff joined the Brooks in 2015, replacing Cameron Kitchin, and was responsible for numerous achievements, including the museum’s “Brooks Outside” series, its centennial campaign and celebration in 2017, launching the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellowship in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora, several permanent collection evaluations and reinstallations, and planning for a proposed new museum campus on the Memphis riverfront. Design concepts of the new facility are expected to be unveiled in the fall of 2021.
Mark Resnick. (photo courtesy Memphis Brooks Museum of Art)
“Memphis is one of the most culturally rich cities in America and I’m fortunate to get to work with our great staff and Board of Directors on the Brooks Museum’s exciting next steps,” says Resnick.
The Brooks’ next special exhibition, “Persevere & Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett,” opens June 5th. For more information, go here.
PHOTO BY JON W. SPARKS.
Nelson Gutierrez’s art explores human identity, experience, and history.
Artist Nelson Gutierrez was born in Colombia and worked in various places around the world and in the United States before coming to Memphis six years ago. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone as devoted to local artists and art.
Gutierrez has an exhibition opening this weekend at 2021 Projects, a gallery at 55 South Main Street. That space is not the usual art venue, however, and that’s due to the artist working with the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC) and numerous other artists in town to make it an attraction on several levels.
That otherwise vacant space is part of the Open on Main retail initiative, a project that goes to the heart of the DMC’s mission to boost the economic presence of Downtown. There are, as any who stroll along Main Street will attest, plenty of empty storefronts. Open on Main makes it possible for entrepreneurs, artists, and small business owners to take a low-risk chance on testing their concepts Downtown in some of these storefronts.
The Walk, ink and pencil on paper, 54 x 8 inches, 2021
Open on Main
Brett Roler, vice president of planning for the DMC, says, “Blight and vacancy drag down property values, curtail a vibrant street life, and make it harder for our existing businesses to thrive.” It is clearly better to have open doors and engaged pedestrians. The program has helped more than 30 store operators test the retail market Downtown, with more than 80 percent participation by minority/women-owned business enterprises.
Open on Main typically provides rent-free opportunities for tenants to have their pop-up businesses on Main Street. The arrangement is usually for a month, but Gutierrez was able to secure a six-month plan since he was having rotating exhibitions of about a month each. His stewardship began in January and has gone well enough that the DMC has agreed to let him continue using the space through December.
“What they’re doing is letting entrepreneurs use the empty spaces temporarily in order to test businesses,” Gutierrez says. “It’s not specifically for art, but as that’s my field, I said that that would be a good thing to do.”
He was talking with the DMC last October when so much was still closed to public activity, but they realized it was the time to start looking at ways to reactivate the art scene. “I knew there were going to be a lot of obstacles and limitations due to the pandemic, but we had the tools to do a lot of things virtually. It wasn’t just the exhibitions or the physical space, but also the social media that we would promote, and the interviews we’d do, and promoting the website.”
Gutierrez got together with artist Carl Moore and discussed who could be part of 2021 Projects. “We wanted to help the artists that are not represented by a commercial gallery, so that was our main criterion,” Gutierrez said. “Carl has been here for a very long time, so he knows more people than I do after only six years that I’ve been in the city. We made a list of people that would be able to participate. Another criterion was the quality of the work, so those people had more need to find spaces to execute their work or to reach the public.”
Artists who have exhibited so far are Andrea Morales and Khara Woods (February-March), Maritza Dávila and Carl Moore (March-April), and Johana Moscoso and Scott Carter (May). Gutierrez’s retrospective show runs from Friday, June 4th, through Friday, June 25th.
Norma Constanza Esguerra, plexiglass and MDF, 25 inches diameter, 2019
Portrait of the Artist
Gutierrez’s work is very much grounded in his experiences in Colombia, which have been, he says, in a type of civil asymmetrical war among the Colombian government, left-wing communist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, and the drug cartels.
“It’s a really complex conflict,” Gutierrez says. “And I grew up in the middle of that. The government was fighting to provide order and stability. The guerrillas claimed to be fighting to provide social justice. The paramilitary groups were reacting to threats by guerrilla movements and to protect private interests. The drug cartels were fighting to protect their own businesses. And basically the people that most suffered were the civilians at large.”
He says most fighting was happening in remote rural areas in mountains and jungles. “There were several cases of terrorist attacks in big cities, which increased in the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. I was affected directly by that violence. Everybody in Colombia knows someone that at some point was kidnapped. Everybody in Colombia knows someone that at some point was badly hurt or killed by these types of situations. So that was our reality.”
In the late 1990s, Gutierrez left his homeland and went to England to study for his master’s degree. It was transformative. “When I started seeing the whole thing from outside, everything changed because when I was living in Colombia, I was used to it,” he says. “That was what we were seeing every single day in the news. We didn’t even have a sense of shock anymore. That’s not normal.”
He started to do some work on the subject of kidnapping. “There were about 1,500 people kidnapped,” he says, “so the work is about that and the spaces where people are kidnapped and how families suffer — all the psychological impacts of these particular crimes in a society.”
And there were the land mines. Gutierrez says more than 11,000 people were killed or wounded by land mines in Colombia. While in England, he did an installation for UNICEF and the Colombian Embassy regarding that. Despite a 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, the United States, along with China, India, Pakistan, and Russia, have not signed the treaty. Colombia, however, did sign it.
Youth, acrylic on paper, 25 x 25 inches, 2021
The Road to Memphis
After his master’s degree, Gutierrez went back to Colombia to teach for a couple of years, and he met his wife. They moved to Miami where he worked for an educational foundation. After four years there, he went to Washington, D.C., for eight years, continuing to do his art and to teach. His wife worked with nonprofits, including United Way International, until she received an offer from the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), the fundraising organization for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
And that’s how they came to Memphis.
He got an offer to work with ArtsMemphis as an artist advisory council member in 2016. “I was helping to understand better the situation of diversity in the city and in the county and how we could impact, in a more balanced way, the artists in the city based on that,” he says. In those years, he met artists and did work with the UrbanArt Commission. One of those artists he met was Carl Moore, who told Gutierrez about the program.
Being able to secure 2021 Projects for an additional six months was a definite win for Gutierrez. “When we first made the list of artists, the list was really extensive,” he says. “It’s not just the people that we’re showing now — there are a lot more people that we would like to support and show their work.”
Sorting Through His Passions
As for his own work, he continues to address the issues in his home country. “Having lived that conflict from inside and then seeing it from outside and seeing it now after 20 years, how do I feel about that?” he wonders. “I don’t feel like I’m a hundred percent Colombian anymore — it’s not that I’m not Colombian, but I don’t feel as I used to feel before. Things have changed, and I have changed. I’m trying to understand that and understand the history of the country and understand that as an outsider-insider. I don’t know — is that like a weird situation of non-place?”
These are the musings of an artist sorting through his passions. But it is what artists do, and Gutierrez is not idling. “Some of the work that I’m doing now, some of the drawings that I’ve been working on are based on photographs from the 1940s and 1950s,” he says.
Some of those photographs were taken on April 9, 1948. A political assassination that day sparked violent riots that came to be known as “El Bogotazo.” It changed history.
“That started the violence that we’re living in now,” Gutierrez says. “So that’s what I am working on now. And how am I seeing that from the outside 75 years later? Even after 75 years, you see repercussions of those acts.”
Whatever questions he still has, Gutierrez knows this about his art: “The intention of the work is to point to this reality and to engage people in a critical debate around it changing in the public their habitual way of looking and thinking, in an effort to create empathy again.”
Maria Cristina
Another view comes from Marina Pacini, who was chief curator at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art from 2001 to 2019. Speaking of a recent series, she says, “Like his earlier works, the images are a graphic exploration of human interconnections, and they emphatically demand close attention from viewers, who are rewarded for their effort. With a simplicity of means, Gutierrez packs both a literal and a metaphorical punch.”
University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) Chancellor Steve Schwab will retire and the UT System will begin a search for his replacement. Schwab will continue to serve as chancellor until June 30, 2022, or until a successor is on board.
Schwab has been with the UT Health Science Center for 15 years, serving chancellor since 2010. Prior to that, he served as executive dean for the UT Health Science Center’s College of Medicine.
Schwab is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Medicine and completed his internship/residency in internal medicine at the University of Kansas Hospitals and Clinics, followed by a fellowship in nephrology with Washington University at the Barnes Hospital. He spent 18 years on the faculty at Duke University, where he rose to become professor and vice chair of the Department of Medicine. In 2003, he was named Regents Professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia, and was later named chief clinical officer.
Under Schwab’s leadership, UTHSC:
Expanded clinical partnerships across the state, creating an integrated statewide UTHSC organization of four campuses (Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville) with shared educational, clinical and research activities.
Transformed the Memphis campus. Driven by the Campus Master Plan, led by Ken Brown, the executive vice chancellor, UTHSC has accomplished more than $300 million in construction. Among major additions to the campus are the Translational Science Research Building, the Center for Health Care Improvement and Patient Simulation, the renovated Historic Quadrangle at the heart of the campus, the ongoing construction on the Delta Dental Building, the Pharmacy Building and the Cancer Research Building.
Moved the university toward top-quartile performance in academics, growing the education enterprise to more than 3,300 students and 1,400 residents and fellows, at the same time achieving graduation rates at approximately 95 percent and overall first-attempt board pass rates at 95 percent or higher.
Raised the research enterprise. UTHSC has doubled its grant awards, with a projected total for awards of more than $120 million this academic year. At the same time, UTHSC has more than doubled sponsored program revenue (non-clinical, all-source grants and contracts) to more the $300 million annually.
More than tripled its clinical enterprise with the development of faculty practice plans throughout the state, generating more than $300 million in clinical revenue.
Stood as a health care leader in the state during the global pandemic.
Schwab was named a 2021 CEO of the Year by Memphis magazine and Inside Memphis Business magazine, one of seven distinguished leaders of health based institutions in Memphis. In an interview earlier this year, he said, “Education was hit hard by the pandemic. More than half of our training is usually clinical and done in clinics and hospitals. We maintained our clinical enterprise using PPE and had to adapt our educational programs to go full-speed in our partner hospitals.”
The Center also educates residents and fellows before they go into practice. “Those physicians and dentists stayed working full-time and they were on the front lines,” Schwab says. “We adapted to decrease our density, maintain everything we could do online, and do our laboratories, simulation, and clinical care face-to-face. We had a near-hospital-like experience, but with an educational flavor, and I think we’ve successfully adapted.”
Last year’s changes meant UTHSC needed a new set of guidelines on how to do research in a pandemic. Schwab said, “We had one of the 11 regional biocontainment labs in the United States and that lab literally went into 24-hour operation. We almost doubled our staff doing COVID-related research, usually collaborative projects with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and major pharmaceutical manufacturers on either aspects of vaccine development or therapeutic interventions.”
The last year provided more than the usual learning experience for students. First- and second-year students, Schwab said, had “an opportunity to participate both in terms of diagnostic testing and in terms of administering vaccines. They’ve risen to the occasion in a major way — nursing students, doctoral nursing students, pharmacy students, and the dental and medical students.”
He says he was impressed by the way faculty, staff, and students stepped up and did what had to be done. Students had to learn additional things in a more difficult environment, the staff was tasked with sterilizing rooms every day, and the faculty worked longer hours teaching the same number of students, but in smaller groups to keep distance.
Schwab is particularly proud of one achievement in particular: “We graduated everyone on time last year, and we’re on track to graduate everyone on time this year.”
The UT System has hired Witt Keiffer to conduct a search for the next chancellor of UTHSC. The firm’s team will work in coordination with UT’s in-house executive recruiter and search committee representing faculty, staff, students and alumni.
For some 45 years, the Pink Palace was known to locals as that singular museum of nature, science, and history. It picked up other similar missions in the region and evolved into the Pink Palace Family of Museums.
Now, it’s MoSH. That stands for Memphis Museum of Science & History, a name change and rebranding that has been percolating for 16 months.
Kevin Thompson, executive director of MoSH, announced the change today, saying that although many locals were familiar with the attraction, it was still having something of an identity crisis.
“For too long, visitors to Memphis have not known what the Pink Palace is or associated our properties together. Even many Memphians do not realize the Pink Palace, Lichterman Nature Center, Mallory-Neely House, Magevney House, and Coon Creek Science Center are all managed by one entity,” he said in a statement.
The “umbrella brand will enable us to unite our holdings and expand throughout our region,” he said.
If you’d been watching closely, you might have seen the change coming. The rebranding began in November, 2019, taking it slow and easy. “We were very sensitive to how the public would perceive changing the name, so we took a transitional approach to rebranding using the interim name Museum of Science & History — Pink Palace which has been in place since February 2020,” said Bill Walsh, marketing manager for MoSH.
If you want to insist on using the Pink Palace moniker, they’re OK with that. “There’s nothing wrong with calling us the Pink Palace,” Thompson said. “We plan to keep the name as a locator to direct you to the right place.”
An Amazon fulfillment center, photo courtesy Amazon.
Amazon is upping its presence in the Mid-South with two new facilities: a delivery station in North Memphis and a fulfillment center in Byhalia, Mississippi.
The company expects to employ hundreds at each facility and will pay a starting wage of $15 per hour plus benefits.
The delivery station on Hawkins Mill Road is expected to launch next year. It is part of Amazon’s last-mile delivery efforts to speed up deliveries for customers in the region. Packages are transported to delivery stations from fulfillment and sorting centers, and then loaded into vehicles for delivery to customers.
Amazon has more than 250 delivery stations in the U.S., four of which are in Tennessee.
“Amazon has confidence in our city and our workforce,” said Ted Townsend, chief economic development officer for the Greater Memphis Chamber. “With the addition of hundreds of new jobs at their North Memphis facility, Amazon will now employ over 5,000 Memphians. Working together to bring those jobs to Memphis include our partners at the State of Tennessee, City of Memphis, Shelby County, MLGW, TVA, EDGE and Workforce Midsouth.”
The company says it has invested more than $8.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure and compensation, which has contributed an additional $8.7 billion to the Tennessee economy and has helped create more than 12,700 indirect jobs on top of Amazon’s direct hires.
The Byhalia fulfillment center, expected to open later this year, will use new technologies to pick, pack, and ship larger customer items such as mattresses, kayaks, grills, and exercise equipment.
Amazon says it has created more than 2,000 full- and part-time jobs in Mississippi since 2010. The company says it has invested more than $120 million across the state, including infrastructure and compensation. These investments have contributed an additional $100 million to the state’s economy and have helped create more than 1,000 indirect jobs above Amazon’s direct hires.
Ballet Memphis’ first in-person program in a little over a year is “Paquita in the Park,” a program of three diverse works that will be done on the stage of the Levitt Shell this weekend.
“The dancers are so excited to perform in front of a live audience,” said Steven McMahon, artistic director of Ballet Memphis. “‘Paquita in the Park’ is outdoors, and the audience will be socially distanced, so it is not quite a return to ‘normal,’ but it feels like we are working our way towards it.”
The program will include:
Water of the Flowery Mill, choreographed by Matthew Neenan. The ballet was inspired by the Arshile Gorky painting of the same name, and is set to music by Tchaikovsky.
Being Here With Other People, choreographed by McMahon, is set to music by Beethoven.
Paquita, the ballet classic, is being staged by Julie Marie Niekrasz and McMahon after the choreography of Marius Petipa.
“We are optimistic about the future and hope that we will be able to present a regular season later this year,” McMahon said. “Until then, we are thrilled to be able to share our work in this capacity.”
The performance is an hour and a half and will include two short intermissions.
Attendees can bring lawn chairs, blankets, and picnic baskets, or get food from food trucks that will sell only prepackaged food.
There is a reduced capacity of 400 tickets per show per Health Department guidelines, and masks are required.
Students practice coding in a CodeCrew class. (Photo courtesy of CodeCrew)
The NBA Foundation has announced a total of more than $3 million in grants aimed at creating employment opportunities, furthering career advancement, and driving greater economic empowerment in Black communities.
CodeCrew, founded by Nnaemeka Egwuekwe in 2015, educates and mentors Black students and professionals who are underrepresented in tech to become tech innovators and leaders through practical hands-on computer science training.
Egwuekwe said the grant would be used to provide support to a program for young adults training to be entry-level software developers. In the nine-month comprehensive course, students work in a small classroom and use real-world technologies to learn the fundamentals of coding and system development. The students, who receive a stipend, also get leadership training.
The Collective Blueprint, which partners with CodeCrew, has similar programs for young adults such as assisting with credential attainment in in-demand career fields including IT, healthcare, and the skilled trades. The nonprofit initiative was started in 2016.
The arts administrators participating in the Black Theatre Managers Fellowship at Hattiloo: (clockwise from upper left) Kai EL' Zabar, Christie M. Howard, Ayana Williams, and Rhonda Wilson.
Hattiloo Theatre is putting a focus on arts management with its inaugural session of the Black Theatre Managers Fellowship.
This July, four arts managers from four cities will participate in the program that provides practical training in arts administration. The class will be in residence in Memphis for a three-week intensive session led by Hattiloo Theatre executives, consultants, and experts from the field. The fellowship, a three-year program, will see the group of fellows return for additional three-week sessions in 2022 and 2023.
The four are Kai El Zabar, executive director of ETA Creative Arts Organization in Chicago; Ayanna Williams, managing director of Blues City Cultural Center in Memphis; Christie Howard, managing director of Jubilee Theatre in Fort Worth, Texas; and Rhonda Wilson, founder and executive director of Star Center Theatre in Gainesville, Florida.
The program will provide academic training in nonprofit arts management, finance, planning, fundraising, board management, and marketing. Networking and mentoring will continue between sessions. The fellows will develop strategies to address the most pressing challenges facing their theaters.
The Black Theatre Managers Fellowship is funded by the Black Seed — a national strategic plan to create impact and thriveability for Black theater institutions.
Jay Martin, CEO of Juice Plus+, on a My City Rides scooter. Photo courtesy Juice Plus+.
The Society of Entrepreneurs (SOE) has named Jay Martin the recipient of the 2021 Master Entrepreneur Award.
The award from SOE, in partnership with Junior Achievement of Memphis, will be presented to Martin, CEO of Juice Plus+, on Saturday, May 1, 2021, at the Virtual 29th Awards Celebration to be aired at 7 p.m. on WKNO-TV. The celebration will also recognize this year’s inductees: Tyrone Burroughs of First Choice, and Michael Hudman and Andy Ticer of Enjoy AM Restaurant Group.
Martin was inducted into the SOE in 2008. A celebrated storyteller, he’s written two books and is sought after as a speaker.
He graduated from the University of Georgia in 1968 and moved to Memphis in 1969. Martin founded National Safety Associates (Juice Plus Co.) with $500 and has served as president and CEO since its inception.
Juice Plus+ is a direct marketing company with 75,000 independent distributors in all 50 states and 25 foreign countries. The company has systemwide sales of $425 million annually, and has sales since inception of $12 billion. There are 450 employees, primarily housed at corporate headquarters in Collierville, and a shipping facility in Memphis. Juice Plus Co. hosts two conventions a year with an average attendance of 5,000.
Martin has long been involved in working to improve the city. He initiated one of the most innovative programs in Memphis when he established My City Rides. “It provides affordable scooters through a lease-to-own plan,” he says. “We’re close to 300 people with the scooters and they get 75 to 80 miles a gallon. They really like it.” He and his My City Rides team were awarded an Innovation Award from Inside Memphis Business magazine in 2019.
Martin has served on the Board of Directors of Church Health Center, St. George’s Episcopal School, the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis, Memphis Athletic Ministries, and the US Direct Selling Association, and is a supporter of the Boys and Girls Club, Church Health Center, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (the company sponsors the St. Jude Marathon), Volunteers of America, United Way of the Mid-South, and the Albert and Jessie Martin Scholarship. He also established the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Memphis’ Job Seeker program with a $5 million grant that helps train, motivate, and place high school graduates from the Boys and Girls Club in meaningful jobs. The program serves 50 to 75 kids annually.
The designation of Master Entrepreneur is given to a member of the Society who best exemplifies the full range of characteristics – self-direction, determination, creativity, leadership, and integrity – that are necessary for membership in the Society. Martin joins a group that includes Jack A. Belz, Michael Bruns, J.R. ‘Pitt’ Hyde, Patrick Lawler, Scott Morris, and Henry Turley.
