Category: Art Feature

Categories
Art Art Feature We Recommend We Recommend

Memphis Art & Fashion Week Begins Friday

Photo: Courtesy Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Kicking off on Friday, May 2nd, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art will host its Memphis Art and Fashion Week, complete with a runway, immersive experiences, and conversations.

“It’s about culture. It’s about art. It’s about music, community, and inclusivity,” says Ramona Sonin, director of Memphis Art and Fashion Week and associate professor at the University of Memphis. “It’s a celebration of art, fashion, and the creatives in Memphis.”

In that vein, interior designers Carmeon Hamilton and Colin Chapman will host a Met Gala Watch Party on Monday, May 5th, and Wednesday’s Culinary Couture event will celebrate chef Karen Carrier as she prepares a menu inspired by the artistry and boldness of high fashion. DJs will take over the runway’s after-party. “Having these wonderful creatives all come together to celebrate art and fashion, it’s just really wonderful,” Sonin says. “I’m so grateful to the Brooks for listening to my ideas.”

Last year was the Brooks’ inaugural Art and Fashion: Runway at the Museum, then a one-night event. “It sold out,” Sonin says. “And then we found ways to make a few more spots again, and then we opened tickets up again and it sold out again in seven minutes. So Memphis has been so supportive of it, and clearly it’s something that they love seeing. Knowing that, we came back this year officially with a Memphis Art and Fashion Week — and not just necessarily the traditional runway but also celebrating art.”

The Friday, May 9th, runway show with nearly 50 designers, local and national, will feature several categories including mini collection, micro collection, wearable art, and more, with headliner Korto Momolu, acclaimed Project Runway designer. “She is an amazing talent I can’t wait for Memphis to see on the runway,” Sonin says. “From watching her on Project Runway, the way she works with fabric and her structure, I’ve always adored that, and her use of fabrics as well.”

At the start of the runway will be works by U of M students in the school’s fashion program. Students will also be backstage helping with models get dressed and undressed and so forth. “It gets super chaotic in a wonderful way,” Sonin says. “It’s something you could never teach in the classroom. You can talk about backstage all day long in the classroom, but until they’re back and they’re experiencing it, they’ll never understand it fully. So I’m so happy that we’re able to do that.”

Almost nine years ago, when Sonin first moved here, opportunities like this didn’t exist for students. U of M’s fashion program didn’t exist. “We already had a fashion merchandising program, which I was hired to come in and revamp. In doing that, I pitched the idea of design, and it was approved. And so the design program has just been growing and growing. 

“There wasn’t anything really here, the love for it was here, but there was not an outlet for celebrating it.”    

Of course, there was the now-closed Arrow Creative’s Memphis Fashion Week, last celebrated in 2023, but as Sonin says, “They had their own mission, and our mission is certainly different.”

Already, the Brooks and Sonin are looking to 2026’s Memphis Art and Fashion Week. “We had so many applications that we are now in the process of considering that the runway may need to be a two-night event,” Sonin says.  

“The Brooks has really embraced the idea of fashion as part of art,” Sonin adds, pointing out the museum’s Couture Collective, whose members can attend exclusive events and have access to opportunities in selecting works of art related to the fashion community. “Fashion is an art, and there’s some very artful things that are done in the creation process of making anything, even for a traditional runway. So I think it’s the celebration of that, and people are starting to realize that as well.”

For more information about Memphis Art and Fashion Week and for tickets, visit brooksmuseum.org/program/fashion. A schedule of events is below. (All events take place at the Brooks unless otherwise noted.)

Memphis Art and Fashion Week Schedule

(Photo: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art)

Blue Suede Vintage After Hours: Shop local, get your unique vintage look, and stand out at Memphis’ week of fashion and fun. | Blue Suede Vintage, 486 North Hollywood Street, Memphis, TN 38112, Friday, May 2nd, 5 p.m., free

Met Gala Watch Party: Kick off Memphis Art & Fashion Week and watch the red carpet arrivals of the Met Gala in style. | Monday, May 5, 6 p.m., free/Couture Collective, $20/museum member, $35/general admission

Culinary Couture: This exclusive dinner features a menu by chef Karen Carrier that celebrates creativity across the senses. | Wednesday, May 7, 6 p.m., $175/Couture Collective, $175/museum member, $195/general admission

Backstage with Korto Momolu: A dynamic conversation with the acclaimed Project Runway designer on creativity and cultural influence. | Thursday, May 8, 6 p.m, free/Couture Collective, $10/museum member, $18/general admission, $7/student

Runway at the Museum + After Party: A showcase of more than 50 visionary designers from across the country followed by a party in the Summer Art Garden. | Friday, May 9, 6 p.m., free/Couture Collective, $35/general admission, $25/U of M student, $110/VIP, $15/after-party only

Cocktails with the Curator: Black Dandyism: An exploration of fashion, identity, and resistance with the assistant curator of photography C. Rose Smith. | Saturday, May 10, 3 p.m., free/museum member, $18/general admission

Categories
Art Art Feature

Maritza Dávila-Irizarry: ‘From the Ashes’

Maritza Davila (Photo: Jon W. Sparks)

In 2024, a small space heater sparked a fire that would set Maritza Dávila-Irizarry’s backyard studio ablaze. Her printing press, her tools, her collection of art books, and several artworks, both her own and those she collected — all amassed over her decades-long career — were damaged or destroyed entirely; the studio itself had to be brought to the foundation. “Between the fire and the fire department, everything was either burned or wet, or both,” she says.

Yet, amid the ruin, the printmaker found salvageable pieces, in drawers and stacks, covered by glassine, a smooth and glossy paper, resistant to the elements, it turned out. Edges were smoked on some pieces; water warped the papers’ surface on others. Neighbors, friends, colleagues, family, all picked through the rubble the next day. They donated to a GoFundMe. They helped Dávila and her husband, Jon Sparks, a Flyer writer, move what they could save into their home and later, when the lingering smoke in their home got too much for her asthma, into a Pod.

Prints hang like clothes set out to dry in Puerto Rico, where Dávila grew up. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

“One of the ladies helping me, a neighbor, told me, ‘I wanna buy a burned print,’” Dávila says of that first day. “I said, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’”

It wasn’t an act of pity for her loss, the artist knew. The woman even rushed to have it framed the next day. “It has become another piece,” Dávila says. “It’s survival, but it has become unique. So I’m willing to take it. It’s perfectly all right for me. It shows experience.”  

And that’s the mindset she’s taken for her show at Crosstown Arts, “From the Ashes,” on display through May 11th. “It’s work that survived the fire and work that was inspired by the fire and the surviving nature in me. I’m a survivor. …

“It’s not the first time that I have been in a very tight spot, and my reactions have been focused: What is your goal? Let’s make it happen. … And being a teacher, that’s the kind of approach I make to the students. When they are feeling low, I say, ‘Okay, let’s look at this. What if we do this and this with this?’ — thinking about what we have in front of us.”

She encourages her students — and viewers — to embrace the inescapable realities, to work with, not against, them. Her work itself explores those inescapable and “inseparable” qualities of ancestry “that through blood and culture and beyond our ability to control help make us who we are. And while we may not be able to consent to the qualities of the past that have shaped us, we do exercise choice in how we regard our essential selves.”

One of these pieces calls back to Dávila’s own ancestry — Don Moncho portfolio, a collection of screen prints, now with smoke markings, made in honor of the artist’s father. “My mother taught me about being a strong woman,” she says, “but my father taught me about discipline, being committed to being a creative person.”

Her father was a teacher, like her, and a musician. The prints contain photographs of him with his guitar, typed-up poems he wrote, a slip of his handwriting, and sheets of music — each element telling a facet of his story. Now, though, the edges of the prints are marked with smoke, his daughter’s own story coming into view. 

These water- and smoke-marks carry throughout the show that inescapable reality Dávila has recognized as “just change” — a new visual element to take in. Some pieces hang on a clothesline in the gallery, a nod to when those pieces hung to dry in the aftermath of the fire. An unused printing plate is on display, burned so badly it never had a chance to print, while a stack of burned books sits in the back to remind viewers of what was lost. “I lost hundreds of books and I was so proud of my library,” she says, noting that she’d lend out art books to whoever asked.

And the studio, she says, was another place for community. “I like to share my space and whatever I have with others. I’m a great believer that people carry their energy into places, and that when you have people in your place, that’s good energy.”

Dávila’s space has since been rebuilt. It’s better than before, with higher ceilings and better ventilation, but she still hasn’t replaced all her tools and supplies. Yet she says, “I’m very blessed by all the support from the community, my friends, my family. … And [‘From the Ashes’ is] almost a thank you for the hundreds of people that showed up at my door.” 

Categories
Art Art Feature

‘Not Only Seen, But Felt’ Closes at UAC

The artists in "Not Only Seen, But Felt" (Photo: Belinda Herrera)

Gabrielle Yasmeen began her photography discipline on disposable cameras, taking pictures of her school friends on the bus. She wouldn’t have called it a discipline then. It was about capturing memories. Her family lived outside of Memphis, and this was her way of feeling like she was a part of something, of her friends’ story, of her story. 

“It took me a while to call myself a photographer, or an artist actually,” she says, even though she would always have her camera on her, asking her friends to pose this way and that. Over time, though, she began working with clients and taking paid gigs for events. “It really changed my perspective around the importance of what I was doing and the work that I was doing — that people really appreciated it,” she says. “That’s when I was like, maybe, it’s okay to call myself a photographer. Maybe, I can really go for this role that I’m pretending to play.”

Some of this hesitation she attributes to anxiety. “I think I was scared to live up to the photographers that I’ve looked up to, like Carrie Mae Weems and people of that stature. ‘Oh, am I on par with that? Could I ever produce work that felt the way that those images make me feel?’”

Carrie Mae Weems is perhaps best known for The Kitchen Table Series, where the photographer takes center stage at the kitchen table in scenes of mundane life, smoking a cigarette or applying lipstick. These domestic images made Yasmeen “feel like my presence is appreciated, … that I could be displayed in a museum.” 

It’s that sense of presence that Yasmeen wants to recapture in the exhibit she’s curated at the Urban Art Commission (UAC): “Not Only Seen, But Felt.” With work by seven Black women photographers, including Yasmeen, the exhibit quilts a narrative of Black life in Memphis, giving rise to each unique voice. “All these pieces, they honor where you’re from, where you’re at, how you show up, and give you a chance to be seen and felt,” Yasmeen says.

Gabrielle Yasmeen (Photo: Belinda Herrera)

“I have not seen in the last five or 10 years a show that was all photography-based and all Black women-based,” she says. “It felt important to me because obviously that’s what I do and that’s who I am in conversation with a lot of times. And us being in Memphis, that’s a majority-Black city, I would think that we’d see more shows kind of dedicated to that. And then just the history of photography here in this city, it’s been something that our ancestors have done, capturing those really historical, sometimes extremely poignant images throughout time, and so I just thought that this might be a space to celebrate some of the higher points.”

The artists featured in this exhibit are A.C. Bullard, Akeara W., Alexus Milons, Ariel J. Cobbert, Jasmine Marie, and MadameFraankie, in addition to Yasmeen. At its core, the show is collaborative. Though Yasmeen is the curator in name and came up with the title, each photographer chose the pieces in their portfolios that they thought best adhered to the theme. “I wanted to do a group show to say that it’s not just about me; it’s about all of us collectively,” she says. “And it feels good to know that you’re not the only one doing this — prioritizing taking images of Black life and celebrating it.”

In all, Yasmeen and her fellow artists have found the exhibit to be inspiring for themselves, even as they strive to inspire others to see and feel for themselves. As Yasmeen says, “To hear their why behind what they do, it has reinvigorated my own search for my why.”

In the gallery, the pieces are arranged in a way so that they are in conversation with one another, rather than grouped by the artist, and the photos range in style, representing each photographer’s individual practice. From a smiling boy flashing cash at a car show to a woman covered in flowers in a studio, these are moments of joy in being seen but also in making one’s presence known, spontaneous and posed. Both are worthy of wall space. 

(Photo: Belinda Herrera)

“In today’s time, anyone can take a picture,” Yasmeen says. “But I do think there’s a difference when you set out to deliberately tell a story with your images. That’s what all of the women in this show do: They tell stories with their work and they’re able to tell a full narrative within one image. … And generally speaking about art, there’s the powers-that-be that set the tone of what is and what isn’t art. In a lot of cases, that has been a white-male dominated space, so it takes us to do something about that and say these things are of value and that they matter.

“I do think that things are changing, but larger narratives show that we are coming up against a front and a battle for that and for the legitimacy of other voices. And so it is very validating to be able to put a show like this together and to have it selected.” As part of a new initiative this year, UAC has offered its Office Exhibition Space for free to local artists, like Yasmeen, who apply to the program. (This does not include any funding, just space, but UAC takes no commission on any sales.) 

“It takes a village to see the value in what’s being displayed,” Yasmeen says. “Photography is universal, and you can see yourself within any image. And I challenge people to do that, to see the value in the work that’s being displayed.”

“Not Only Seen, But Felt” closes today, Thursday, April 17th, with a reception from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Urban Art Commission. 

Categories
Art Art Feature Fashion We Recommend We Recommend

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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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. 

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.” 

Categories
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.