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Tennessee Ballet Theater presents The ICON: Babbie Lovett, Fashion Legend

Tennessee Ballet Theater dancer Dasha Andrienko in Babbie Lovett's orange Connie Fails jumpsuit (Photo: Ziggy Mack)

Babbie Lovett has about 2,000 to 3,000 garments that she’s collected in her 92 years of life as a model, show producer, store owner, and mentor in Memphis’ fashion industry. “You know there’s a fine line between collecting and hoarding,” she jests. “I’ve got a house full and three apartments full of racks.”

But, even as she jokes, she says, “It’s like I have a whole box of paints and crayons that I can use.” For her fashion shows, that is. Just last year, for instance, she put the show together for the University of Memphis: Memphis Fashion Through the Decades. “These last 10 years, all my dreams seem to be coming true,” Lovett says, “because I’ve always wanted my collection to be used for education or for fundraising.”

These days, though, Lovett has to organize her shows by feel and memory, since about two-and-a-half years ago she went blind. “It’s one of the most interesting times of my life. It’s a real journey of learning,” she says, ever the one to take a positive outlook. 

Babbie Lovett (Photo: Courtesy Tennessee Ballet Theater)

Her most recent project has been with the Tennessee Ballet Theater, which will honor the last nine decades of her many-chaptered life with The ICON, Babbie Lovett, Fashion Legend this April. Directed by Erin Walter, TBT’s artistic director, and with works choreographed by Max Robinson and Steven Prince Tate, the ballet will traverse the “peaks and valleys” of Lovett’s life, with four ballerinas representing Lovett. “There are 15 dances, and some are literal depictions of aspects of her life,” Walter says, “and some are abstractions from things that we were inspired by.”

For The ICON, Walter has incorporated pieces from Lovett’s collection in two numbers. “It thrills me because [the pieces in] my collection are really my friends,” Lovett says. “All of my clothes have a story with them. And they’ve never been worn but maybe once or twice, or most of them have been made for shows. And to see them dance just thrills me to death.”

Lovett herself fell in love with dance, long before she fell in love with fashion. “I learned to sing and dance my own way before I could walk,” she says. Even today, she’s still dancing. “I may be as blind as a bat, but in my head I’m just going to keep dancing. … There’s certain music I hear. I get up at night and sometimes I hold on to my walker and dance.”

This production will be the fifth installment of TBT’s 901 Stories, which has brought to life histories of Earnestine & Hazel’s, the Annesdale Mansion, the Medicine Factory, and the Jack Robinson Gallery through dance. “We like to celebrate things about Memphis that maybe people don’t know,” Walter says. “Maybe half of Memphis knows who Babbie is, but the other half doesn’t.” 

Tennessee Ballet Theater dancer Olivia Bran in Babbie Lovett’s Gabriele Knecht coat (Photo: Ziggy Mack)

And to Walter, at least, Lovett is Memphis history. At 92, she began life in the Great Depression, saw the fashion industry boom in Memphis, and took part in it, modeling here and in New York; she built businesses, pioneered “trashion” (taking trash and making it into fashion), and advocated for the arts and causes close to her heart. She was and still is a mentor to many. To try and describe her life in a paragraph is a disservice; to do it in a ballet, however, will put Lovett on the stage, where she’s always belonged, sharing her joy to as many people as possible.

She once wrote, and now recites from memory, no longer able to read or write due to her blindness: “There’s nothing I like better than being a star. Give me your undivided attention. God made the stage. The show is life. Fashion are the costumes we wear on stage, backstage, or in the audience. The play, music, dance, comedy, tragedy. We laugh; we cry. It’s good; it’s bad.  We clap; we boo. We leave. The show goes on. My name is Babbie. Fashion is my passion. The one thing we all have in common is we’re born naked and we cover up.”

Walter says that she always brings a notebook with her for moments like this and many others when Lovett says something that catches her ear. For that reason, Walter has also set up a multisensory exhibit to accompany the show featuring old phones that, when picked up, will answer with recordings of Lovett telling stories from her life, moments not included in the show and moments that, Walter says, “she says in a much better way than I was able to write [for the show’s monologues between the dances].” 

Profits from The ICON will go to TBT’s Frayser Dance Project, which offers free dance classes to students in the Frayser neighborhood. The program is in its fourth year and is sponsored by Nike and Alliance Healthcare. 

Babbie Lovett (Photo: Courtesy Tennessee Ballet Theater)

“That’s why I’m so excited about being a part of all of this because the funds that are raised when you do shows, even if it’s just the beginning, if you can get people interested, then you can get the contributions that you need to preserve the arts or give people an opportunity that they didn’t have before,” Lovett says. 

In the meantime, Lovett looks forward to experiencing the ballet. “My talent has always been able to feel an audience and to be able to see that audience was wonderful. But to be able to feel that audience now is also a gift, so I’m looking forward to feeling and hearing the show.”

Purchase tickets to The ICON: Babbie Lovett, Fashion Legend, sponsored by Alliance Healthcare Services, here. Performances are at the McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College on Friday, April 4th, and Saturday, April 5th, at 7:30 p.m., with a Sunday, April 6th, matinee at 2:30 p.m., and Friday, April 11th, and Saturday, April 12th, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $45 and include a wine reception immediately following the performance, where you will have a chance to meet Lovett, and models and dancers showing Lovett’s collection and Sue Ambrose’s couture designs constructed from bicycle tires.

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Art Art Feature

Floyd Newsum’s Homecoming

Floyd Newsum, Soul of Blue (Photo: Courtesy Dixon/Estate of the Artist)

As Ellen Daughtery, the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ assistant curator, prepared the current exhibition on display — “Floyd Newsum: House of Grace” — Newsum, who was based in Houston, told her the show felt like a homecoming. He grew up here, went to Hamilton Elementary and Hamilton Junior and Senior High Schools, and graduated from the Memphis Academy of Arts (later Memphis College of Art) in 1973. “He thought of Memphis as his foundation, his home, where his family was, one of the most important things for him,” Daughtery says. “He believed in Memphis, even though he hadn’t lived here in a long time.” 

Unfortunately, Newsum died in August 2024, unable to see the first major exhibition of his art in Memphis, yet his joy remains, radiating through his work in “House of Grace.” 

Resembling almost a child’s sketchbook, full of scribbled shapes and drawings etched into spare space, Newsum’s works on paper captivate viewers’ attention, as their eyes travel from one image to the next, taking in each inch of the paper. The viewer is “engulfed,” Daughtery says, noting the works’ large size. 

“It forces you to look up, which for him was important — the idea of ascendance.” Or you can get up close. “It’s really different from different perspectives.”

“They have an overpowering sense to them for sure,” Daughtery adds. “And one of the things that’s fun about them — I think they’re intended to be fun — is that you look at them for a while and you see things emerging out of them.”

This almost seek-and-find style took decades for Newsum to develop, for it wasn’t until the 2000s that he moved away from realism and toward abstraction. He had learned of women in the Sirigu Village in Ghana who paint and repaint abstract patterns on the walls of their homes each year. “That was the spark,” Daughtery says. “He said that was the permission: He had to become abstract.”

He wasn’t imitating the Sirigu women, but he saw them as long-distance teachers he wanted to honor in his practice. He even titled a few paintings after their village. After all, they were the ones who set him free in abstraction.

“And we should take free at its word,” Daughtery says. “He was a civil rights activist. He believed in the idea of freedom in many different contexts, so he thought that abstraction was a freeing thing. It allowed him to get rid of his worries and have a direct emotional response to art.”

And he wanted the same for his viewers — to have a direct emotional response. From simple drawings of animals and houses to cut-out photographs of his grandmother to pasted-on used pastels, Newsum “developed a kind of imagery that he used over and over again,” Daughtery says. “He liked the idea that it was childlike, that he was able to communicate on this level that he thought was universal, like little houses that look like a child’s drawing.”

The houses, a universal symbol of community, also harken to one of Newsum’s projects in Houston, where he spent the majority of his life as a beloved professor at the University of Houston and as co-founder of Project Row Houses, a social art organization that restored shotgun houses into studios in one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. With its arts-focused mission, Project Row Houses supports artists, young mothers, small businesses, and community members. 

Looking back, this passion for community was ingrained in Newsum’s youth. His father was one of the Memphis Fire Department’s first Black firefighters and a civil rights activist. “He took Floyd with him when he was in high school to rallies,” Daughtery says. “Floyd marched in 1968. He found a great inspiration in his father.”

In turn, ladders appear in Floyd’s works, in homage to his father’s job but also as a symbol of hope. Sometimes, his ladders turn and twist on the paper. “Help isn’t always straightforward, but it’s there,” Daughtery says. “It’s coming.”

It’s just another one of Newsum’s positive ways of looking at life. In life, he was known for saying: “You can delay my success, but you cannot determine it.” In terms of his art, “I would say wider success eluded him until later in life,” Daughtery says, but now he has his “House of Grace.” 

“House of Grace” closes April 6th at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens. Admission is free.

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Art Art Feature

‘Away with the Tides’

Calida Rawles, Hallowed Be Her Name, 2024 (Photo: Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London)

Water ripples throughout Memphis history. The flooding waters of the Mississippi River drove those first Memphians to settle atop the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff. Stagnant water from rain cisterns and shallow wells bred mosquitos that brought about the yellow fever epidemic, costing the city its charter in 1878. The epidemic, in turn, led Memphians, searching for a reliable water source in the name of sanitation and health, to discover the Memphis aquifer, the sole source of Memphis’ water today. In this century, residents in South Memphis have to fight to protect our aquifer — against the proposed construction of the Byhalia crude oil pipeline and against the continued threats of contamination from Tennessee Valley Authority’s Allen Fossil Plant. 

With all its complexities, water is now at the forefront of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, “Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides,” on display March 19th through September 7th. Indeed, the California-based artist’s exhibit of 10 paintings and a three-channel video explores water’s dualities, specifically as a space for Black healing, resilience, and joy.  

Water is a central motif in Rawles’ works. Through it, Rawles asks questions about Black people’s relationships with water. She probes the stereotype about Black people not knowing how to swim. “Where’d it come from? Oh, because you couldn’t have pools; there was segregation at the pool. This is a place you don’t see us, and I don’t see myself, and you think we don’t belong.” 

This history and these stereotypes have rippling effects. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning death rates for Black people under 30 are 1.5 times higher than for white people, and 70 percent of Black Americans cannot swim, compared to 31 percent for white Americans, according to a study by USA Swimming and the University of Memphis.

“And so, I thought that could be like an undercurrent to all of the work,” Rawles says. “When you put a Black body in that water, you’re dispelling something — without even talking about a subject. And then if I paint the figures comfortably and with agency, if people think, ‘I could feel comfortable like that,’ ‘I don’t have to be afraid of the water,’ or maybe ‘I should learn to swim,’ I thought I could do that, too.”

In turn, her paintings allow Black bodies to take up space, her canvases large in size, but more importantly they allow them to take up space in water, as historically charged as it is. For this exhibit, Rawles focuses on the bodies of water of Overtown, Miami, a historically Black neighborhood, which Rawles says was once like “a second Harlem.” 

Founded in 1896 for and by African Americans, the neighborhood thrived as an entertainment district during the early- to mid-20th century in the Jim Crow era. “It had a thriving community of 300 businesses, and everyone used to go there, and everyone used to do shows and go to all the stuff,” Rawles says.

But in the late 1950s, with the passage of Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act, the construction of two major freeways displaced thousands of Overtown residents, or “Towners,” through eminent domain. In the aftermath, Rawles says, “They lost their homes, and they lost their businesses, and they had no way to [recover]. The job market just fell.”

The highways essentially decimated the neighborhood, the population dropping and blight taking over what once was a desirable and vibrant community of Black Miami’s professional class in the name of “progress.” Today, though, many say Overtown is experiencing a renaissance, as advocates and community members try to rebuild and reinvigorate what once was, but its scars are not forgotten even as hope endures.

And so, Rawles dedicated her first solo museum exhibit to painting the people of Overtown in her signature way — in bodies of water. She’s taken her subjects, young and old, to Gibson Pool, a product of segregation, and Virginia Key Beach, once designated as a Black beach. In this way, she’s also able to probe the Transatlantic slave trade. Her subjects float, their bodies bending the will of the water, balanced and relaxed in waters haunted by the past. 

“I wanted to make Overtown proud,” she says. “That’s not how I usually work; it’d be a subject or how I feel or a response to news or just what I want to paint. You want to paint from your heart and hope [viewers] get it because you don’t want the viewer to influence what you create.”

Through all her portraits of Overtowners, Rawles adds, “I’m really talking about various communities around. I want to inspire people to learn more about communities and not feel like if you look at them right now you know the whole history.”

While “Away with the Tides” is in Memphis, Rose Smith, the Brooks’ assistant curator of photography, hopes viewers can connect Miami’s Overtown with Memphis’ Orange Mound. “Miami’s Overtown community neighborhood mirrors Memphis’ Orange Mound community,” they say, pointing out how both neighborhoods were founded for and by African Americans in similar time periods. “We want to talk about the ways in which these communities reflect each other, although the Black community in Memphis didn’t experience a highway obstruction. But certainly, there are other things that we can glean and show parallels between these two communities.”

The exhibit will even lead into an interactive gallery wherein the Brooks will highlight Memphis’ own Black swim history, for which Smith dug into the archives, searching through photos and newspaper clippings at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library.

“We want this exhibition to engender joy, rest, meditation and healing within our Memphis community,” Smith says. “We also want to advocate for water accessibility, equity, and safety for our community.”  

“Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides” is on display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through September 7th. For more information, visit brooksmuseum.org/exhibitions/calida-rawles-away-with-the-tides. 

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Art Art Feature

Tops’ ‘In the Hands of a Poet’

A sculpture and a fountain, River Man by the local artist John McIntire stands in the contrapposto pose simultaneously drinking a beer and peeing, the 2022 piece depicting a friend’s party-trick from the 1960s — that of the “human fountain.” The sculpture has been shown in Matt Ducklo’s Tops Gallery, a cheeky little thing, but even he didn’t know the source of McIntire’s inspiration at first. “He didn’t want to say it at the time,” Ducklo says. “But it’s based on [Kenneth Lawrence] Beaudoin.”

Ducklo has been interested in Beaudoin for a decade or so, the poet who’s been called “Forgotten ‘Poet-Laureate of the Mid-South.’” “ I started to think about him more after McIntire made that sculpture,” he says. And, now, as of December 2024, Beaudoin’s work — his poetry combining the visual with the literary — is on display in Tops’ “In the Hands of a Poet,” co-curated with artist Dale McNeil.

Like McIntire, Beaudoin was big in the counterculture scene in Memphis during the mid-20th century. He hosted literary salons out of his own home, created the Gem Stone Awards for poetry, and was one of the founders of the Poetry Society of Tennessee. He knew writers like Tennessee Williams, Jonathan Williams, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Randall Jarrell, and Ezra Pound. By day, Beaudoin was a clerk for the Memphis Police Department for nearly three decades. “My police job kept me close to human beings in tense situations,” he once told The Commercial Appeal. “From a poet’s point of view, it was perhaps the most important job I could have had.”

It was at his clerk’s desk — and his home — that he worked on his “eye poems,” collages of words and images from magazine cut-outs. “He would just sit in the middle of piles of magazines and books, cutting, gluing, and smoking,” McIntire said in a press release.

The result is something, as Ducklo says, “meant for the eye as much as they’re meant for the head.” The poems themselves are succinct, their visual pleasure subverting the capitalist and consumerist trends promoted in these magazines — magazines Beaudoin sliced and rearranged for his own purposes, an act itself another subversion. 

Beaudoin created thousands of these eye poems and frequently gave them to friends and peers. Many of them — and other forms of his poetry — were widely published in small journals in his lifetime. Today, though, his poetry is out of print, including even his most comprehensive work, Selected Poems and Eye Poems 1940-1970. 

This exhibit, in a way, serves as a reintroduction to the largely forgotten poet. After 10 years wanting to show Beaudoin’s work, Ducklo found someone wanting to sell their Beaudoin collection and, with his co-curator Dale McNeil’s Beaudoin poems, had enough for this show. Together, they also created a book that is currently available for purchase at the gallery. (You can also purchase it here.)

Beaudoin stopped creating his eye poems after going blind in the 1980s. He died in 1995. 

“In the Hands of a Poet” is on display through March 1st.

Tops Gallery is located in the basement of 400 South Front St. The entrance is on Huling. The gallery’s hours are noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and by appointment.

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Art Art Feature

Rachel David’s ‘Engorging Eden’ at the Metal Museum

Rachel David, swallowed ice (table lamp), 2024. Steel Stainless, steel, brass, selenite (Photo: Daniel Barlow)

Molded from mud, the golem is brought to life with ritual incantations of the Hebrew alphabet, its purpose to protect, but even with instructions placed on its tongue, the golem inevitably goes amok, twisting those intentions and bringing disaster upon those who called for it. From this Jewish parable, Rachel David gathers, “You can only rely on your community. You can’t offset your responsibilities.”

David, an Asheville-based blacksmith, turned to this story for inspiration in conceptualizing her exhibition, “Engorging Eden,” on display at the Metal Museum. “I started thinking about different parables that could be translated to working with what I’m worried about in this country and in this world,” she said in her artist talk at the opening reception for the show on February 16th. “I think that’s a really pertinent thing to remember as we are experiencing really scary things — that we are each other’s saviors. That’s something that I want to be very explicit about in all of my work.”

David primarily works in furniture, a familiar form that in itself evokes community. “We live with furniture,” David said. “And it’s conversational. … These are forms that tell stories and hold their own narratives but also are part of our narrative.”

For David, her pieces reflect our relationship with the Earth and with one another. The furniture seems to bubble with pustules and pits, a mix of metals melting off the surfaces in slivers. Each bulbous facet David shaped using a different support system. “Really all of this is planned,” David said. “Like, it has to fit; it has to work. But part of my interest is in the distortion that you can achieve in hot forming metal.”

The distortion, David said, reminds her of natural erosion formations. In her Savage Horizon Jewelry Cabinet, she pointed out, “They also look like cobblestones, which also are like city-building blocks, and I think with these really aggressive clawing shapes and then these phallic drippings, this is climate change, and this is what extractive capitalism has done to this world. Where we are in the mountains, there was a hurricane, and everything is insane.”

Indeed, many of the pieces in this show were created in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. “This piece is very much responsive to the hurricane and all of the landslides,” she said of the jewelry cabinet. “There’s 500-plus hours in this piece.”

“When we’re talking about erosion, there are a lot of implications in that word: erosion of trust, erosion of the Earth, erosion of values, and then where does that leave us?”

That’s where David expects viewers to involve themselves — literally — through reflections and refractions of the metals and selenites brought about in their shine. Mirrors, too, offer this reminder. In Family Tree, where representational ancestors and the suns and moons fill a gallery wall with circular shapes, a central mirror piece reminds us that “we are responsible for what we put in[to the world].”

Rachel David, Fluvial Mirror, 2024. Stainless steel, steel, brass (Photo: Daniel Barlow)

Abstract tongues also roll out of these ancestral creatures, and many of David’s other pieces. “The tongue is like the idea of communication [which] has always been a big part of my work [as an activist and artist],” she said. “That’s part of my responsibility as a member of this community: to be responsible to my ancestors and to the future.”

In keeping with this responsibility, as part of her practice, David sources more than 85 percent of her metal from Asheville scrapyards. Further, she, along with Lisa Geertsen and Anne Bujold, co-founded the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths. “We foster having diversity in blacksmithing.”

David’s commitment to community is furthered in swallowed ice (table lamp), which was part of her “Pollination” series — “like a pollination of ideas when we come together and we inspire each other.” The lamp features a light bulb in the center with candles affixed to a suspending bridge-like form. “They’re reflecting each other, and they’re also holding each other … always bringing in the light.” 

The symbolism in the lamp is apparent: “I’m cynical and I’m dark, but I also feel a lot of obligations to my community to be proactive and contributive. I make work sometimes [because] I have to remind myself to get out. Get out!” 

“Engorging Eden” will be on display at the Metal Museum through May 11th. The exhibit is a part of the museum’s Tributaries series.

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Art Art Feature Theater Theater Feature

Young Actors Guild Performs ‘Sunday Morning: Dance to Freedom’

Young thespians conjure up that Sunday morning feeling. (Photo: Juan Self)

Sunday mornings have always held special meaning in the fabric of Black culture. They’re filled with the hustle and bustle of getting ready — women waiting for curling irons to heat to the perfect temperature while men both young and old perfect the knots of their ties.

Congregations then begin to file into church pews as ushers greet them with white gloves. Church mothers fill the front rows dressed as elegantly as the grace they exude. The angelic choir voices sing songs of hope, faith, and praise before a sermon the pastor has mused to echo those sentiments.

“We all know Sunday morning,” Sabrina Norwood, executive director of the Young Actors Guild (YAG), says. “When you think about Sunday morning, that’s you getting up and getting dressed and coming to be rejuvenated. There’s a lot of hand clapping, a lot of foot stomping, and beautiful music that will not only connect you but will reinvigorate you.”

While images of these mornings may be different through the years, themes of hope mixed with the spirit of congregation remain. It’s an important scene to capture, one that YAG is working to encapsulate in their performance, aptly titled Sunday Morning: Dance to Freedom, on February 23rd at the Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, located at 620 Parkrose Road in Memphis, TN.

The performance is timely — the organization celebrates Black History Month and its own 34th anniversary this February — but it also reflects the empowerment needed during this political climate. 

“I think we’re all operating in uncertainty,” Norwood says. “One thing that stays true is the arts, and love for the arts, and everybody can relate to it. We hope it’s both healing and reflective to others.”

Community has been a mainstay for the organization since its inception. Founder and creative director Chrysti Chandler recalls coming back to Memphis in 1991 after seeing there were many children who didn’t participate in after-school activities. She was shocked to find out it was because students couldn’t afford it.

“Many of the young people we serve are from underrepresented populations,” Norwood says. “Those students are able to attend our program for little to no cost because we believe arts should be accessible for all.”

Norwood says through Chandler’s vision, more than 41,000 young people have come through their doors. YAG houses a performing arts academy that operates year-round with students ages 8 to 17. And Norwood says being in the Orange Mound community allows young people a platform they haven’t typically had. They are able to showcase their talent and creativity while also giving a voice to their generation.

Norwood says this age group is known for an outspoken and unconventional approach to social justice, and these themes are interwoven through Sunday Morning intentionally.

“This performance is all about a dance to freedom,” Norwood says. “About them finding ways to create their own avenues to bring justice, equality, accessibility to their community, and to create sustainability. This production will provide an opportunity to not only unify our young people but unify our community.” 

As she reflects on YAG’s students, she says they’re a generation who will move mountains, and art gives them the opportunity to advocate on their behalf while celebrating how far their heritage has come. To amplify this, the production will include a performance from Orange Mound-founded band Black Cream. Gospel artist Deborah Manning Thomas — whom Norwood calls a “vocal powerhouse” — will also join. Rooted Souls, a group that developed from parents of YAG, will perform. And Sharonda Mcfield will come in from North Carolina to join the production, along with Kevin Davidson.

“Gospel music certainly is healing,” Norwood says. “We all know that. Just walking through that Sunday morning of getting there and sometimes feeling so burdened down, but leaving feeling like you can take over the world. That’s the experience we want to be able to create, and hopefully it’ll revive us with the climate we’re in. We really want this to be an amazing presentation of revival.” 

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Art Art Feature

Justin Bowles’ Tops Installation Brings Joy Downtown

Photo: Courtesy Justin Bowles

In a gray Memphis winter, Justin Bowles’ vibrant garden blooms in Tops’ window gallery at Madison Avenue Park. The garden, populated with hot pink plastic yard flamingos and bouquets of artificial dollar-store flowers and springing forth with small blue toy horses, is Bowles’ latest public art installation, this one being titled “Green Fountain.” Its purpose, the artist says, is to bring joy. 

In curating her exhibit, Bowles created three paper collages: Baby Chi, My Backyard, and Wolf Garden. Baby Chi, in particular, is a depiction of her chihuahua she had for many years, a “representation of unconditional love,” she says, but in general these three collages represent her “love of nature, of gardening, of animals. … To me, those are universal things that anyone can access and anyone can experience joy from.”

Justin Bowles’ Baby Chi is one of three collages in her display. (Photo: Courtesy Justin Bowles)

The collages bring forth a world of whimsy, a secret garden for the viewer to step into, with its simple drawings and childlike aesthetic. “I don’t ever put people in my artwork because I want the viewer to be experiencing, instead of the viewer looking at another person in the artwork,” Bowles says.

With that in mind, Bowles’ environment is full of sculptural elements saturated in nostalgia. For instance, those tiny blue horses are toy horses she played with as a child. “I was so excited to find them at my mom’s house,” she says. “I was like, ‘If I paint these and put them in my installation, then I’m still enjoying them and they’re still having a life in this environment.’”

Justin Bowles (Photo: Courtesy Justin Bowles)

In another bid for nostalgia, Bowles also made large fabric strawberries that sit on the floor. “I was inspired by my grandmother and her sister who got in this crafty phrase, I think, in the ’80s, where they were making all these little fabric fruits,” she says. “So it’s like a part of my grandmother is there, too.”

But Bowles doesn’t expect the average viewer to know these small details of her life. After all, that’s the nature of public art, where more often than not, a viewer who encounters the exhibit is not seeking it out but might have just happened upon it. “Anyone can see [this space] 24/7,” Bowles says. “It’s really living a life of its own without me.”

Even so, that sense of nostalgia carries on, without biographical information, as each piece in the curated garden means something to the artist or to someone, known or unknown. Those dollar-store flowers, Bowles says, remind her of “the things people have in their homes to make it beautiful, like a form of self-expression.” A green beaded basket also sits in the garden, something she thrifted. “Somebody made this by hand, who knows how long it took them to make that,” she says. “I had to buy it. It’s a beautiful piece of art. It’s just a never-ending fascination for me as far as all the things that we collect and treasure.” 

Her hope, ultimately, is that at least one of these recognizable elements, if not all, captures a glimpse of nostalgia or joy. Having created murals throughout the city and recently having sculpted a piece for the University of Memphis as a New Public Artist Fellow for the UrbanArt Commission, Bowles sees public art as a unique opportunity to do so. “You do get to interact with people that you wouldn’t normally if you have a gallery or museum show,” she says.

At this, she recalls serving Thanksgiving dinner at a shelter this year when a friend told one of the guests about her installation which had opened a few weeks prior. “She showed him a picture of it,” Bowles says. “And he said, ‘I’ve spent the night right in front of that glass.’ And he proceeded to tell me how inspiring and encouraging it was to him and all the things that he thought about while sleeping there. That was just such a blessing to me to know that somebody who I don’t know, who maybe I never would have met, and didn’t know who I was, had a positive, uplifting experience with the art that had nothing to do with me.”

Bowles goes on to say: “It was a lot of hard work making this. If I’m going to put this much hard work into it, I really want the viewer to have that experience.” 

“Green Fountain” is on view through February 16th at Tops at Madison Avenue Park. 

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Art Art Feature

Ballet Memphis President & CEO to Step Down

Gretchen Wollert McLennon (Photo: Fomoloop)

Ballet Memphis announced that president and CEO Gretchen Wollert McLennon will step down following the conclusion of its 38th season after five years under her leadership. 

McLennon, herself a former student of the school and dancer in the junior company, succeeded founding artistic director Dororthy Gunther Pugh. In her role as president and CEO, she led Ballet Memphis through the challenges brought on by the pandemic, while leading year-over-year growth in main-stage ticket sales, garnering support from the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission, guiding the creation of new productions like Dracula and the company’s newly reimagined Nutcracker, and more. 

A national search, led by the Nashville-based executive search firm ThinkingAhead, is already underway to find Ballet Memphis’ next leader as it prepares for its 39th season. 

Season 38 concludes with its production of Angels in the Architecture to be performed on April 25th to 27th at Germantown Performing Arts Center. Ballet Memphis fans can also look forward to its Winter Mix, February 21st to 23rd, at Playhouse on the Square.

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Q&A with Metal Museum’s Master Metalsmith

Preston Jackson (American, b. 1944), Jolly and the Mississippi Flood, c. 2005. Cast Bronze. Courtesy of the artist.

In October 2024, the Metal Museum named Preston Jackson as its 38th Master Metalsmith. “A Hidden Culture,” the exhibition now on display in honor of Jackson’s achievement, features 16 freestanding sculptures and four paintings by the artist, who describes the show as revealing “history that has been buried, forgotten, or deemed unimportant by society.” The Flyer had a chance to speak with Jackson about the show for our “Winter Arts Guide,” published in December 2024. 

Memphis Flyer: What was your reaction to being named the Metal Museum’s Master Metalsmith?

Preston Jackson: When I got the call to get involved in this, especially being in Memphis, you know, where my ancestors are from, I jumped at that opportunity, and I took it on, even preparing new works for the show. So it was an uplift to do what you’re supposed to. 

Your work goes into history and wants to uncover hidden histories, right?

Yeah, things that people feel uncomfortable talking about. … I find that looking back and re-understanding, rethinking things that were only a hint in your past because you didn’t have the facilities to understand them or express them, it’s almost like admitting it’s good to be human.

Preston Jackson, Madame Fruitvale and Her Dog, c. 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

Did you always know that you wanted to tell stories of other people, or was this something that you developed? 

A lot of these traits that I have today were discovered, as my parents tell the story of my growing up, many years ago, right at the beginning of my little life as a young kid. Growing up in Decatur, Illinois, a product of the great migration that happened, my life is so much a part of that history. My exhibit gave me a chance to express my feelings about that.

And when you’re looking at these stories, are you doing a lot of research? 

Yeah, you don’t want to be wild in your thinking because of how important it is to tell the truth. Just look at our politics today. Truth is sought after, and it’s valuable. If we live a lie or believe in lies, we’re going to sort of destroy the entire civilization.  

Metal Museum, 374 Metal Museum Drive, “A Hidden Culture,” On display through January 26. 

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Scott Carter’s ‘Energy States’

Energy States, 2023 (Photo: Courtesy Scott Carter)

Scott A. Carter has worked in art installation for years. He’s worn the nitrile gloves to handle priceless works, like when he worked as a preparator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Shoboygan, Wisconsin. He’s hung framed photographs not to be touched on the walls of Christian Brothers University’s Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery, which he runs as assistant professor of art. He’s placed pieces in tempered glass display cases at local museums as an occasional art handler. It’s a delicate practice, art installation — a practice that Carter was ready to disrupt. 

It started with the display cases. As a sculptor, Carter says, “I was interested in using the surface to add jacks and cut holes, and treat them as a material, not so much like it’s going to preserve something.”

So, without much of a plan, he took a display case, laser-cut a hole, inverted a corner, added guitar cables, electronic components with exposed wiring, a silk plant, and topped it with a beer bottle. Now, it works as an amplifier of sorts. “You can plug [your instrument] in, and there’s three different modes you can switch between, and it’ll distort [the sound],” Carter says. “I ended up adding a contact mic, too.” Even without an instrument plugged in, the piece will make a loud buzzing sound, disrupting the typically quiet gallery space. 

This piece, titled Energy States and made in 2023, would become the first of many semi-functional sculptures by Carter. For the first time, when he goes in to create a piece, he doesn’t have a plan; he just lets inspiration take over. “It’s a mashup of all the things that I like, furniture-ish design, electronics, engineering,” he says. “For years, I tried to combine my musical interests, interest in electronics with art, but they were always separate things.”

Most of these pieces now make up the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ “Energy States” exhibition, on display through January 19th. Like the first, many of the pieces have sound and interactive components built in, with their mechanics exposed to the viewer, wires and tubing looping through grids made by the artist. Carter evokes mid-century modern or art deco styles with clean lines and simple use of materials, like recycled Modelo beer bottles and hardware the artist 3-D printed himself. He wants viewers to get up close to his works to engage with the elements from all sides layered under plexiglass and in display cases. 

“I do get joy from looking at them and plugging them in a way that I haven’t gotten from other work I’ve made,” Carter says. “I think with this show, I finally got it to the point where I feel like, oh, everything together, I’m happy. Which is weird.”  

“Scott A. Carter: Energy States,” Dixon Gallery & Gardens, 4339 Park, on display through January 19, free.