Category: Art Feature

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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. 

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Edge District Has Its First Art Crawl

The art crawl will go to four venues. (Photo: Holtermonster)

Before Covid postponed events or canceled them altogether, Marshall Arts hosted an open studio event each December, welcoming the public into makers’ creative spaces and boosting the artistic community’s spirits. But the gallery hasn’t hosted one since 2019 — a fact that wasn’t lost on Lauren Holtermann, aka Holtermonster, who started renting studio space from Marshall Arts post-pandemic.  

In fact, Holtermann didn’t even know about the previous open studio events until gallery manager Anthony D. Lee mentioned it one day. “I was like, ‘Let’s do that again,’” she says. “And then it turned into a whole thing.” 

By “whole thing,” she means the first-ever Edge District Art Crawl. With Holtermann’s excitement to motivate him, Lee wanted to make the usual open studio event bigger. “Now, it’s not just us, Marshall Arts,” he says. “We extended the invite to all the new guys [Sheet Cake, Ugly Art Co., and Solid Ground Studio]. So it takes it from us, an isolated venue, and now we kind of have a district. I always kind of knew that was coming because I’ve been here for 20 years, and Marshall Arts has been for 32 years.”

The “new guys,” as Lee calls them, have all opened their spots in the past year or so. Sheet Cake, owned by Lauren Kennedy, celebrated its first year with a party on December 14th, and Anderson Goin’s Ugly Art Co. opened this spring. Solid Ground Studio is artists Jodi Brewer, Pam McDonnell, Lisa Williamson, and Paul Behnke’s private studio that’ll be open to the public for the art crawl. These four artists just closed their show, “Something Solid,” on December 14th at Marshall Arts, the gallery’s first show since Covid.

For the art crawl, guests can expect special gallery hours as they take a self-guided tour of the four arts venues. Marshall Arts will have work on display by its artists, plus open studios by Lee, Holtermann, Emma Self, Wiley Bros Music, and others. Sheet Cake’s new exhibitions “Loose Ends” and “Back for Seconds” will be on display with work by Brittney Boyd Bullock, Roger Allan Cleaves, Melissa Dunn, Stephanie Howard, and Clare Torina. Meanwhile, Ugly Art Co. will have an exhibition by Sam Reeves Hill. 

“We want to let people know that the Edge is an active third space,” Lee says of his hopes for the art crawl. “The district’s still in its formation, but it’s a walkable locale with interesting things to do.”

“And it’s cool to show off that we have a blooming arts district popping up with some old heads, like Marshall Arts, and all these new bloods,” adds Holtermann. “It’s really exciting.” 

Edge District Art Crawl, Marshall Arts, 639 Marshall | Sheet Cake, 405 Monroe | Ugly Art Co., 635 Madison | Solid Ground Studio, 669 Monroe, Thursday, December 19, 5-8 p.m., free. 

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Remembering Children of the Holocaust

Sculpture by Israeli artist Rick Wienecke (Credit: Heather Strickland Photography)

Susan Powell and Melissa Wheeler were taken aback when they discovered many of their students at Horn Lake (Mississippi) Middle School didn’t know what the Holocaust was.

Instead of just telling them it was when 6 million Jews were killed during World War II, the teachers wanted to involve the students in a project.

“They felt like if they had a project to go along with what they were taught and learned, they would really understand,” says Diane McNeil, president of the Unknown Child Foundation. “And, oh my, did they.”

The children collected 1.5 million pennies. Each penny represents one child killed in the Holocaust.

To showcase the children’s efforts and to raise money for a memorial that will include the pennies, “A Night to Shine” will be held December 16th at the Landers Center. Priscilla Presley will be the special guest.

“When I was asked to serve as honoree of a gala to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Unknown Child Foundation, I learned the mission of the foundation is to educate the world on the importance of keeping children safe by memorializing the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust,” Presley says. “The Unknown Child Foundation will be the only memorial outside of Israel dedicated to these children. I have no doubt visitors will travel to the Mid-South from far and wide to pay their respects to these children. 

“I have lost my daughter, Lisa Marie, and I have lost my grandson, Ben. I have a heart for all children.”

Priscilla Presley (Credit: Christopher Ameruoso)

McNeil got involved when Powell contacted her about helping them come up with a project for the students. She knew McNeil had been involved with Jewish/Christian relations. When asked, McNeil didn’t hesitate.

“I’d always wanted to know what 1.5 million looked like. And so I said, ’Why don’t we get the students to collect 1.5 million pennies? One for each child that died in the Holocaust. Then we’ll know what 1.5 million looks like.’”

Both teachers loved the idea. “So, the kids started collecting. We thought we would have it done by the end of that school year.”

Instead, she says, “It took three-and-a-half years.”

The pennies “weigh over four tons.”

During one point, they realized they might have a problem, McNeil says. “We’re sitting here with 1.5 million pennies. There’s something wrong with this picture. Why are we going to let people from the Holocaust be represented by the American penny? That makes no sense at all.’”

They then discovered a fascinating fact. “The guy who designed the penny came here as a 19-year-old from Lithuania. And he’s Jewish. Victor David Brenner.”

Also, she adds, “The penny is the most circulated piece of art in the world.”

But there was another question. “What are we going to do with all these pennies?”

“I had no idea. But someone had brought me these pictures of a sculpture of a child in the ovens of Auschwitz.”

She contacted Israeli artist, Rick Wienecke. “I called him and said, ‘We want to melt these pennies and make something out of them.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t. The power in the project is them collecting 1.5 million pennies.’”

He told them not to melt the pennies. He said, ‘I will make this sculpture for you.’ I said, ‘We have no money.’ And he said, ‘I believe in you.’

“He made the sculpture for us. It’s a life-sized sculpture in bronze. And it’s of a child in the oven of Auschwitz. The child is on the grate about to be burned.”

Some of the pennies are beneath the grate.

In addition to the life-sized statue, Wienecke told them he’d make 10 limited editions — some smaller sculptures or maquettes of the statue. He said he’d sign them, number them “and then break the mold. No more.”

As a result of the penny collection/sculpture project, McNeil, the two teachers, and some volunteers formed the Unknown Child Foundation.

The Desoto County Museum in Hernando, Mississippi gave the space for them to do an exhibit on the penny collection. The exhibit, “The Unknown Child Holocaust Exhibit,” which is still on view, includes a more than six-foot tall wall of pennies. These aren’t the pennies from the Horn Lake students, McNeil says. The pennies in the exhibit are less than two percent of 1.5 million.

Also included is a recording of Rabbi Levi Klein from Chabad Lubavitch of Tennessee and a student from the Hebrew Academy reciting names of children who died in the Holocaust.

The goal is for the exhibit to travel, McNeil says. “We can go through the state and tell about this and raise funds for a permanent memorial.”

The timing for the gala was perfect. “Christmas and Hanukkah coincide this year. And this happened to be our 15th year.”

Dabney Coors, a Memphis friend of Presley’s, contacted her about attending the gala.

Presley agreed. And, in addition to appearing in person, Presley will be featured in a video with about 10 of the children who collected pennies. The children will be saying, “It’s so much more than a penny.”

For more information, go to unknownchild.org