Guitar, 18” x 24” acrylic (Photos courtesy Ron Jewell)
It’s hard out there for an impresario.
For years, Ron Jewell has been all in on the performing arts. In the 1980s and 1990s he was director of marketing for the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and after that he joined the city of Bartlett to put together and run the Bartlett Performing Arts & Conference Center. As director of the facility, he booked the programming and turned it into a venue that drew healthy attendance. After 21 years there, he went over to the Orpheum Theatre Group where he was director of operations for the Halloran Centre for eight years.
But he wasn’t just behind the scenes in the performing arena — he’s had a yearslong run with his one-man show “Mark Twain At-Large” that he’s performed all over the country. He could run a show on either side of the curtain.
As happens with people of a certain age, however, he sensed change was afoot. “I began to prepare myself for retirement,” he said. “The whole concept of leaving a long career in the performing arts seemed like giving in somehow.”
Combustion, 11” x 14” acrylic
He had the finances to retire, but he just wasn’t sure what he’d do. “I just didn’t have any direction for what to look forward to. I wasn’t ready.”
And yet, something was already bubbling up. “About 10 years ago, I asked my daughter, on a lark, to get me a starter painting kit,” he said. “I began to push paint around a canvas without any instruction, playing all over the palette with great folly, while watching a variety of video demonstrations and tutorials on techniques and style.”
Wetland, 18” x 24” acrylic
He finally found his direction. And he’s well aware of how an artist’s initial explorations can go off in any number of ways. “As I discovered new paths for expression, the exhibit may seem, at times, a little tangential,” he said. “But the randomness in styles reflects the search for my own voice. I’ve found a new sense of purpose and rely on my creative energies to navigate what I call the ‘Second Winds.’”
Jewell’s explorations go far and wide, and that suits him just fine.
“I paint for myself, but I’m ready to include my circle of friends. You will excuse my amateurish attempts, but I hope you will also celebrate the never-ending power of an inspired imagination.”
Ron Jewell’s exhibition “Second Winds” is at Gallery Ten Ninety-One at WKNO, 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova. The show runs from June 3rd to June 29th, with an opening reception Monday, June 3rd, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Flying Tigers by John Lee (Photo: Courtesy John Lee)
When SunAh Laybourn founded Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month Memphis in 2023, she knew an art show would always be a part of the annual activities. After all, the 2022 removal, and eventual reinstallation, of photographer Tommy Kha’s Elvis-inspired portrait in the Memphis International Airport was just one of the events that got the University of Memphis professor thinking about Asian-American representation, and, sadly, anti-Asian hate, in Memphis.
For that first AAPI Heritage Month art show, Laybourn chose the title “Asian American in the South.” “That approach for me last year,” she says, “was really just making the statement that Asian Americans are in the shadows, but we’re part of the South, and so I love to be able to see all of the creativity from all the artists. It was really a lot about identity-making.”
This year’s show — “Between Heaven and Earth, We Build Our Home” — is an expansion of that. “The theme of the exhibition is about family and home and ancestry, kind of like how we communicate and pass down knowledge and wisdom and lessons from generation to generation,” says Neena Wang, the show’s curator. “The theme really just came out of the pieces that I [was sent]. Everybody was sending in work about family, about their relatives, about ancestry.”
Participating are Thandi Cai, Sai Clayton, Sharon Havelka, Vivian Havelka, John Lee, Christine Yerie Lee, Huifu Ma, Susan Mah, Lili Nacht, Yangbin Park, Neena Wang, and Yidan Zeng. All are AAPI individuals from Memphis or living in the South, whose art showcases a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, textile, photography, video, and performance.
Wang and Laybourn also point out that “Between Heaven and Earth” marks UrbanArt Commission’s first show by an outside organization. “I think what’s great about having this partnership with UrbanArt is that the show will be on view for a few weeks [through June 19th],” Laybourn says. “Last year was just one night only.”
“Between Heaven and Earth” opens on Saturday, May 25th, with a reception featuring a special performance by the MengCheng Collective (Cai, Nacht, Wang, and Zeng). Nacht and Zeng will also lead a free Raise Your Flag workshop on Sunday, May 26th, 2 to 5 p.m. “They’re going to do a cyanotype flag-making workshop,” Wang says. “The idea is making a flag as a representation of place because the theme of the show is very much about building your own place as an immigrant or as an outsider.” Participants can register in advance at bit.ly/mcraiseflag.
Brantley Ellzey and Alicja Trout (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Alicja Trout’s explored the rock-and-roll scene. She’s taken the risks that come with that, toured, worked the merch tables, designed her album covers and band T-shirts — and she’s not done with music, that much needs to be said — but Trout has found a new passion, or rather reignited an old one: visual art. And, this Sunday, she’ll introduce her new artform to Memphis in her solo art show, “Understory,” at Brantley Ellzey’s Summer Studio.
Ellzey, who helped curate the show, says he didn’t know Trout painted until this year, and he expects most Memphians also know Trout solely for her music. Even so, when he first saw her paintings, he knew he wanted to show them in his studio. “I had a show for Lee Chase for his photography, and then I had a show for Moth Moth Moth,” Ellzey says. “So I’m kind of focusing on artists that are multidisciplinary but maybe people don’t necessarily know that they are visual artists, and they might be familiar to people in Memphis in other ways.”
For Trout, who’s been known as Alicja-Pop around Memphis for the better part of her life, art has taken a backseat to her music after earning her master’s in fine arts from the Memphis College of Art. “One of the main reasons I chose to do music is I do enjoy being alone a lot, and I found that I would just not ever socialize [if I were a visual artist, working alone in a studio],” she says. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to live my twenties and my thirties alone,’ so I chose music as a thing to do with people.”
As the years went by, she would make things here and there — dresses for her daughters, a small painting for a room. “Maintenance art,” her friend called it. “I love art,” Trout says. “And every time I go to a museum, I just love it. And I just got inspired by that again, and music started to weigh on me as, ‘Oh, it’s work. I have to record and sit in my dark space in front of a screen or computer and play over and over again to get it right.’ I just felt like I needed a break.”
That break would come in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. She started small with simple graphic linework on a small canvas, but eventually she graduated to large landscapes. She experimented with styles and forwent realism.
(Photo: Abigail Morici)
“Because I came from doing music for so long and then went back into painting, I think a lot of it, I had fun doing it because I was experimenting again,” Trout says. “When I left art school and I went into music, I would do more like posters and flyers and record covers and things that were done with a purpose with words on them and stuff. It was kind of like graphic design, rock-and-roll posters.”
But this return to painting allowed her to “get more simple.” “I also took on this nature and interest in trees,” she adds, “because I think it’s part of getting older as a person, especially when you come from rock music and rock-and-roll and you’re used to the aesthetic of nighttime clubs and all that stuff. But then I have children and I just got a lot more into taking peace outside and animals and nature and creatures in my yard and growing things. So it’s just like a natural progression of time.”
Music, it turns out, had allowed her to work out “a lot of issues in my brain and anger and frustration, just angst and all that stuff. And I think I’ve processed that at this point.”
So, her paintings lean into the fantastical, portraying a sense of peace in storybook landscapes. “As with a diorama in a natural history museum, the viewer is transported into a scene both natural and artificial,” reads Trout’s artist statement. “Sheltering tree limbs comfort and calm like a protective parent.”
(Photo: Abigail Morici)
Often in Trout’s landscapes viewers can find a lone creature, at ease in its environment varied in color, often not found in nature. A winding path or river, or sometimes a single light source, will bring the eye to the a focal point on the canvas, offering a familiar image though it represents the unknown.
“For some reason, it’s cozy and comfortable [in the fantastical],” Trout says. “ I am kind of a loner, and that stuff, like Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and fairy tales, has always been a cozy space for me, and maybe having daughters, I went through that again with them and watched a lot of Disney and I read at a lot of beautiful illustration books with them. It was such a cozy space.”
But even in this coziness, Trout hopes to challenge the viewer to reflect on the environment and their place in it. “This body of work displays my love and fascination for the natural world and my fear that we will lose it to inharmonious human development,” she writes in her statement.
In all, though, the works are a personal triumph for the artist. “I was super happy to come back to painting,” she says. “It’s normally in my house and shut in closets and to see it all up, I just want people to come and be part of the experience.”
Join Alicja Trout for the opening reception of “Understory” at Brantley Ellzey’s Summer Studio (3086 Summer Avenue) on Sunday, May 19th, 2 to 6 p.m. The show will be on display through June 2nd.
“The blue color, which dominates my art collection,” the artist says, “is a symbol of the oceanic beauty and serenity, but it also has secrets, which like our oceans, are never completely revealed and discovered.” (Photo: Courtesy Iwona Rhodes)
In literature and art, water holds many symbolic meanings — rejuvenation, renewal, sorrow, purification, to name a few. But for artist Iwona Rhodes water represents home — her seaside home in Gdynia, Poland, and the home “where we come from and eventually we all will return to one day.”
The ocean, Rhodes writes in her artist statement for her upcoming “Seaside and Beyond” show at ANF Architects, is “a place of creation.” It’s “like a God-Father figure who serves us, forms us, and through his beautiful nature is also comforting us.”
It’s only natural for Rhodes to see water this way. She grew up close to the beach. She worked on a cruise line. She now lives in a river city. Water, despite its versatility, has been the most constant theme in her life.
“I’ve always been obsessed,” she says of the organic form that inspired the more than a dozen paintings in “Seaside and Beyond.” “My paintings are a reflection of the majestic nature of oceans with their endless forms and capabilities.”
“When I was creating this collection, I felt like it was coming to me, so this is something I’m just enjoying,” Rhodes says. “I had a sudden desire to paint blue abstraction and experiment with media.”
Part of that desire stemmed from her dad’s passing three year’s ago. “I was just missing him, and the ocean always. Why I’m so far from the ocean? When I came back home [from Poland to Memphis], I felt this coldness.”
Photos: Courtesy Iwona Rhodes
So she painted her own oceans — 14 times over on canvas using acrylic and mixed media, opting for impressionist and expressionist styles over realism. “I’m good at realistic painting, but this is more honest,” she says, adding that the paintings tap into her own emotions — her nostalgia for the shores that raised her, her longing for the depths of the oceans and the mysteries they contain.
Though she initially agreed to 20 new paintings for this ANF exhibit, Rhodes was satisfied with her 14. “I said, ‘I’m done.’ This is pure.”
But then she started her new job teaching art at Compass Community School to students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Since she immigrated to America, she’s worked in the corporate world, and teaching, as one can imagine, has been a completely different experience.
“I love this job,” she says. “Literally when I’m leaving school, I’m physically exhausted, but I’m so happy. I’m coming back home and I cannot stop talking about my schooling, showing artwork to my husband. And it’s just amazing. It’s also very inspiring for me. … Teaching only for 10 months inspired me so much, I’m doing an extra six [pieces] inspired by my students. Now I have an idea for another collection.”
In February, Rhodes explains, she taught her students about Alma Thomas, an African-American artist who taught in Washington, D.C. in the 20th century. “She was so successful. Like, every second kid in Washington, D.C., could say that there was a point in his life she was teaching him art. But for me, she’s an inspiration because she was so well educated and she wanted to give back to society by educating tons and tons of kids, and at the end of her life she was rewarded by becoming a true artist. And I love her art. It’s very inspiring.”
For her classes, Rhodes asked her students to create sunrises and sunsets by using pieces of construction paper. “I was in shock when I saw [the results,” she says. As Rhodes scrolls through photos of her students of her work, she praises each one genuinely: “Mind-blowing,” “The creation of this, how she came with this? I have never seen anything like that,” “This is mesmerizing. I love this,” “Okay, this is my inspiration.”
These works inspired by Rhodes’ students will be revealed at the ANF show. “There’s a lot of things altogether, but it’s very honest,” she says, adding that she’ll also display a few line drawings, some of which have been published in her book Heart Traces.
These graphics are linear profiles, witty, ambiguous, and self-reflective in nature. It’s a kind of visual poetry, in a way, which is fitting for Rhodes as she grew up loving to write. “My Polish language and literature professor hated me when she discovered I was going to study fine arts, not literature,” she laughs.
Always the creative, Rhodes says these linear graphics came during a drought of creativity while working in advertising. “I was craving ‘true art,’” she says. “Advertising is like compilation; you use somebody else’s ideas. I was so depressed. I was really unhappy with myself. I wasn’t painting. I knew so much about art, and I wasn’t using it.”
So she turned to a divine intervention of sorts and waited for inspiration to come to her in a dream, and it did — at least, the vision for her Angelic did, a simple line drawing of an otherworldly profile with angel wings capping off the ends of the lines at the neck.
While her other drawings didn’t come from a dream, Rhodes says, they are “a treat for the intellect.” They’ll make you think; some may make you laugh.
In all, for “Seaside and Beyond,” Rhodes hopes viewers will feel a range of emotions. The ocean-inspired paintings might offer profound feelings of serenity or a bit of wonder. The Alma Thomas-inspired works might provide a bit of light or inspiration, and the line drawings may extend a sense of reprieve as they once did for the artist herself.
Join Iwona Rhodes for the opening of “Seaside and Beyond” on Friday, May 10th, from 5 to 7 p.m., at ANF Architects, 1500 Union. Admission is free, and refreshments will be provided. “Seaside and Beyond” will be on display through June 5th, Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Almost a third of U.S. adults have at least one tattoo, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey. That’s up by about 10 percent from 2012 and 17 percent from 2006. And while the popularity of tattoos certainly seems to be on the rise, their stigma declining, it’s more than a trend. It’s a visual art form, it’s a medium for storytelling, it’s an innately human activity, say the curators of the exhibit “Becoming More Myself: Reclamation Through Tattoo Art,” on display at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM).
Vanessa Waites, a local tattoo artist who earned her master’s in applied anthropology in 2023 from U of M, and current anthropology graduate student Caroline Warner collaborated on this exhibition with the hope to give the practice of tattooing “some institutional respect by putting it in an art museum,” Warner says, but more importantly to connect with the community, those tattooed and not.
For the show, 18 volunteer, mostly local participants shared their tattoo stories with the curators — their stories often exploring themes of gender, body image, and trauma; their tattoos offering a sense of bodily autonomy, a sense of “physical, psychological, and social transformation and self-acceptance.” “Tattoos,” says one participant, “are a reclamation of how I choose to show up in the world unapologetically.”
In a way, Waites says, “tattoos straddle this really interesting place between being intensely personal, but also for public consumption.” It can be a reminder for the individual of what they’ve overcome — like tattoos covering self-harm scars — or a visual act of resistance — like one participant whose thigh tattoos have given her the confidence to wear shorts after years of insecurity. “My thighs are beautiful,” she says. “Tattoos are beautiful. Look at it or don’t look at it. I don’t care anymore because I want to see it.”
And, in “Becoming More Myself,” that’s what all these participants want — to be seen — for their tattoos to be seen and for their stories to be seen, the two intrinsically linked. The gallery space, in turn, becomes a space for vulnerability, bodies and personal truths laid bare. “As we had people come through the exhibition,” Warner says, “afterwards, I heard a lot of feedback of like, ‘Yeah, I got it. I connected with that person, this has changed my perspective, I understand, I’m glad I saw that.’”
That was the point all along, Warner says. “These are your lawyers and your bartenders and your library clerks. These are the people directly in your community as you’re walking through here. We’re hoping that people would be feeling more connected and feeling more aware of what it means to be Memphis.”
AMUM is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.
“Becoming More Myself: Reclamation Through Tattoo Art,” The Art Museum of the University of Memphis, 3750 Norriswood, on display through June 29.
Anderson Goin has made some ugly art. It’s okay, though. He knows this to be true himself. For Goin, “ugly” isn’t some big, off-putting word. If it were, the contemporary abstract painter wouldn’t have named his gallery, opening this Saturday, the Ugly Art Company.
And, hey, “ugly” is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? That’s what Goin discovered for himself at one of his first shows. “My friend and her mother — I was standing behind them and they did not know that — the mom looked to my friend and she goes, ‘His work is just so ugly,’” he says of what he now describes as a funny moment. “I heard that obviously, and thankfully that piece ended up selling. Naturally, it hurt my feelings a little bit, but … that’s kind of how I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the word ‘ugly’ and how people use it. I just decided to embrace it and make it something beautiful.”
If anything, Goin reflects now, sometimes artists need to first create something “ugly” to unearth artistic beauty. It’s part of the artistic process. “Looking back on a lot of my younger, my older stuff, there’s a special place that I keep for some of my older work, but,” he says, “a lot of times like, oh gosh, that was not great. And those critiques are the ones that hopefully have helped me along the way. But, yeah, that probably was a little ugly, but hey, we love that.”
“If you’re not getting good feedback,” Goin adds, “you’re gonna keep making the same mistakes.”
That innate need for feedback, it turns out, drove Goin to start Ugly in 2021, not as a gallery space but as a collective. He’d recently graduated from the Memphis College of Art, and without the structure of critiques built into his classes, he was lost. “My ultimate goal was to create a group of like-minded artists so that we could share our work, have critiques together, and then also I would share their work through our social media channels,” Goin says. “At the time, I was trying to build a website for us, so people could just have another way to promote their work and to sell their work. And it kind of just grew from there.”
The collective, which now consists of some 14 artists of many disciplines, has worked without a physical hub for the past few years, exhibiting in shows at places like the Medicine Factory, having virtual critiques with the very issues you’d expect from any virtual meeting. But this new gallery space, designed by cnct. design, will allow for consistent shows and critiques, much more conducive to the group’s needs. “We can do everything that we had wanted to.”
(Photo: Courtesy Ugly Art Company)
Ugly has taken over the old Spectrum night club downstairs space in the Edge District, and Goin aims to make it “refined and sophisticated.” But, he adds, “one of our whole tenets is that we want people to have fun, and we want our space to be welcoming to everybody, whether you have an MFA and you’ve studied art your whole life or if you’ve really never looked at a piece of art critically ever. We want people to have fun.”
Goin and his fellow Ugly artists want to break down any anxieties people may have about coming into a gallery space. Part of that will be through education — “talking to them about our art and the artists in our group,” Goin says. “The people in Ugly are super approachable, super friendly. And that was a big deal for us: We wanted to create a group of people that are hungry to not only get better themselves, but to help people along the way.
“That’s kind of our common ground — that we care deeply about the arts. We care deeply about Memphis and so that’s kind of what has threaded us together — that love of art and of community.”
The collective also plans to “open the doors up to as many possibilities as we can get to as many different kids of people as we can get in the doors.” Movie nights, ballet performances, open critiques, and workshops are just some of the ideas that have been floated.
“We want to cultivate a space that encourages all art forms, whether it be dance or music or cooking,” Goin adds. “We hope to incorporate all of that into meaningful experiences that people can walk away from feeling really good about whenever they leave our space. We want to give love and have people feeling full when they leave our space.
Etowah Hunt Club hosted a dinner at the gallery in February. (Photo: Courtesy Ugly Art Company)
“We’re really hopeful that this is going to be super beneficial not only for the patrons and the Edge District and everyone that comes to see the space and enjoy it, but for us to grow together and to help each other, get to the next stages of our careers.”
For Goin, he never could’ve imagined opening a space like this before he founded Ugly. “I think most artists will probably tell you, it’s harder to sell your own work sometimes, but I really enjoy talking about the artists in Ugly. I enjoy talking about their work. And because I believe in them, and I believe in how talented they are, it kind of came naturally and fell into place.”
As such, Goin says, Ugly as a gallery will always be artist-friendly and artist-first. “We have really cut our commission down really low,” he says. “We don’t have any kind of exclusivity things going on. We want to create opportunities and not take away opportunities. And so, hopefully the more ugly grows, this gives people opportunities to meet other people, meet other collectors — if somebody can take a big step, then we feel like we’ve done our job.”
For the gallery’s Saturday opening, all of Ugly’s artists will be on display. Amy LaVere will be playing, and Ballet Memphis will pay homage to all art forms with a short dance performance.
The members of the Ugly Art Company are Anderson Goin, Genevieve Farr, Zack Orsborn, Hank Smith, Jojo Brame, Heather Howle, Ivy-Jade Edwards, Will Ferguson, Olivia Malone, Sarah Schulman, Sam Reeves Hill, Plastik Olives (Paige Ellens), Rodney Ellis, and Logan Daws.
Follow the Ugly Art Company on Instagram (@theuglyartco). Visit their website here.
Ugly Art Company Grand Opening, 635 Madison Avenue, April 27, 6 p.m.
The clothing on display showcases Siriano’s evolution in design. (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Taylor Swift, Celine Dion, Oprah, Michelle Obama, Janelle Monáe, Billy Porter, Leslie Jones — these are just a few of the well-known figures who have donned the clothing now housed temporarily in the Memphis Brooks Museum of Arts’ latest exhibition, “People Are People.” On display are dresses and suits worn to award shows, galas, and speeches, milestone moments in their wearers’ lives — moments when everyone wants to feel their best, their most confident, and, yes, their most beautiful. It’s a kind of transformation, says Christian Siriano, the designer of these 36 pieces.
“My sister and I, we were ballet dancers when I was little, and I really loved the idea of transformation,” he says. “Like when you see a ballet dancer in her warm-ups but then they transform into a Sugar Plum Fairy, I always thought that was really special.
“I guess that’s what drew me to [fashion]. I love seeing people transform when they put on a certain thing — heels or a dress or a jacket — you hold yourself a different way.”
When Siriano first broke into public consciousness at 21 after winning Project Runway in 2007, the fashion scene really only catered to one body: thin, very thin, and young. Even today, one could argue the same, but Siriano, from the get-go, embraced all bodies, genders, and ages. “It’s important to celebrate beauty and whatever that is for the person,” Siriano says.
If anything, “People Are People” demonstrates just that. Siriano says, “It’s really cool to see all these shapes and sizes of women or men or whoever they are on mannequins in clothes next to one another. It’s kind of never been done actually, probably ever, in a museum, because for so long fashion retrospectives didn’t have different-sized mannequins.”
Photo: Abigail Morici
“Just being able to see different body shapes, sizes, heights even, it’s really a different experience for people experiencing fashion,” says Patricia Daigle, the Brooks’ curator of modern and contemporary art. “… This message of inclusivity is something that really [will] resonate with our community here. This is something that we really also want to champion as an institution as well.”
“People Are People,” Siriano’s first-ever solo exhibit, debuted at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Museum of Art in 2021, before its run at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film shortly after. This is the first time the exhibit has traveled outside of SCAD, and it’s the first time the exhibit will be shown at an institution whose primary focus isn’t fashion but art in general, Daigle points out.
“I love that art museums are really starting to embrace fashion in this way and kind of pull down some of those barriers which are, at this point, quite antiquated of thinking about fashion as something else,” Daigle says. “I think we all love to see beautiful things; whether it’s a painting or a dress, these are all works of art.”
But a barrier Siriano and the Brooks are more concerned in breaking is that of access — and not just in the name of body inclusivity. “We want people that don’t always get to see things like this to get access to it,” Siriano says of the show’s choice to travel to Memphis. “That’s kind of the whole point. That’s why it’s kind of special and unique. There’s a million shows in New York every day. They don’t need another one.”
For the show’s stay in Memphis, Siriano insisted on adding one of his most recent pieces worn by Lily Gladstone at the Critics’ Choice Awards this year. (Gladstone received a slew of awards and nominations for her role in Killers of the Flower Moons, even becoming the first Native-American woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.)
“I took her dress back literally a week ago,” Siriano says. “I was like, ‘No, I need it back. I want to put it in this exhibition.’”
Ever involved in the making of the show, Siriano himself helped with the finishing touches before the Brooks’ opening, positioning mannequins’ precise poses, draping the fabrics exactly right, and wrapping the tulle that covers the models’ faces. The effect of that tulle, Siriano says, blurs their identities, distancing the dress from the celebrity wearer and creating an anonymity that any viewer can assume. “In a way they kind of actually feel more, I think, dreamlike,” Siriano says. “They all mean different things in a way. They all have different voices in a way, you know.”
“People Are People” is on display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through August 4th. Visit brooksmuseum.org for a schedule of complementary programming like workshops and gallery talks.
Michael “Birdcap” Roy, Dove Hunt: The First Shot, acrylic on panel (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Homer’s Iliad begins with a promise of anger, of Achilles’ wrath that would bring about the ruin of Troy. “Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,” goes the epic. “Many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures.”
It’s a story driven by men’s pride, cloaked as heroism, yet leading only to bloodshed and tragedy. Or, as artist Michael “Birdcap” Roy puts it, “All these men were doing all these sort of idiotic things under the guise to be heroic.”
But Birdcap doesn’t say this to belittle these characters, but instead to remark on their humanity that might go unnoticed under the prestige of classical literature. “I just found something very like comforting or familiar in these men,” he says. “It reminded me of just growing up in the deep South and what it means to be a man in Mississippi and how sometimes cleverness and wit are almost looked down upon. Like, your ability to be stoic within pain is more exceptional than your ability to avoid pain. So you stay during a hurricane or you work a hard job. … Those characters reminded me of my family and me.”
Fame Over Everything: Bust of Achilles, mixed media
Birdcap’s current show at Crosstown Arts plays with this idea. Titled “Iliumpta,” the exhibition is a retelling of Homer’s poem, set in the southernmost bayous of Mississippi in the fictitious county of Iliumpta. “It’s based on the word Ilium, which is the Latinized version of Troy, and umpta is sort of like a false noise to make it sound like a Mississippi county,” Birdcap says. “I thought it was a good way to have an introspective show that talked about myself but using this sort of universal reference.”
He writes in his artist statement, “The men in these works shout from a nihilistic void, and in their attempts to be heroic, they, like the ancients before them, choose death over happiness, a closed ear before sound advice, and doom before an apology.”
This is Birdcap’s first solo show in Memphis. While he is known for his large-scale murals seen throughout the city and around the world, Birdcap says, “This is my first chance to have like a big sort of homecoming show.”
It’s also been an opportunity for the painter to experiment with different media like mosaic, sculpture, and silk screen. “I think you have to keep you have to keep the learning process in your routine or you get bored.”
Michael “Birdcap” Roy, Father’s Legacy (Relic), stone on panel
Last year, he attended a mural festival in Pompeii, where he was fascinated by the ancient city’s mosaics. “I was blown away by just how anti-ephemeral the work is, how long it lasts.” Plus, it doesn’t hurt that mosaics have a built-in aesthetic of antiquity to go along with the Greco-Roman mythology at the core of the show. Yet, in true Birdcap style, his mosaics are “ridiculously cartoony” — as are the other pieces in the show.
“I like cartoons because when I was young, I would try to make dramatic work about my feelings or politics or whatever, but I would visualize it in this dramatic way,” he says. “And I think it had the opposite effect where people didn’t really want to pay attention to it. But I think cartoons are very safe and we all have this child-like relationship with it, and so it allows you to put these complicated or harder messages in but still be listened to. Like, it’s not baroque. It really is subtle.”
Too Much to Bear: The Suicide of Ajax, mixed media
His piece, Too Much to Bear: The Suicide of Ajax, he points out, deals with male fragility quite darkly, yet because it is presented with saturated colors and is an inflatable, reminiscent of holiday decorations or childhood birthday parties, it takes on a sort of softness. But Birdcap says, “My character is Ajax, who basically got drunk with rage and really embarrassed himself, and the next day, unable to deal with this shame, he committed suicide. And so that piece could be a fairly heavy piece. Suicide, it’s not fun.”
On a similar note, Birdcap later adds, “I’ve been pretty transparent about my own mental health over the last few years, and this work is an extension of that. The paintings are about the South and the Southern man, but in no way am I trying to divide myself from the Southern man. I am imperatively a Southern man. So all the faults displayed in the paintings, I see in myself.”
But he says, “I think there’s magic here, and I think there’s like room for mythology and folktales in a way that maybe other regions don’t have. I think we have a unique relationship to the power of myth, and so it’s not a big jump for me to think these make sense together. … I’m 36 now; I’m old enough to know I can’t be from anywhere else. I think there was a time when I was young, where I was like, if I try, I can be from somewhere else. And it’s like, no, your memories are there and they’re a part of you, they’re a part of your myth.”
Birdcap’s “Iliumpta” is on display at Crosstown Arts through April 28th.
The title of James Inscho’s show — “three left, one right” — doesn’t refer to dancing.
“The works are abstract, but deal with the ideas of revisiting, reliving, and reconstructing fragments of observed moments and felt experiences,” says Inscho, 40. “So, the title means a few different things to me.
“Three left turns is one right, and that’s the long path we take to arrive at a simple decision. The other interpretation is three lefts plus one right is a 180-degree turn, and that’s a return to where you came from.
“Rather than thinking of it as directions left to right, you can think of it as three options remaining and one is correct.”
“Left” can mean a direction, but it also can refer to what’s left when something is taken away. “And ‘right’ can be a right turn or it can mean ‘right’ as in what’s correct.”
Inscho includes 30 acrylic gouache paintings in the show. “The works are kind of defined by a shifting of space and context. Brushstrokes become shadows. They become forms. They become space. The paintings are in a state of flux.”
The show, “in a sense, speaks to the beauty and uncertainty and the simultaneity of our access to all these different perspectives at a moment’s notice of every event, everything that happens. Seeing experience through a lot of eyes at one time.”
As the press release states, “We might see flat brown brushstrokes criss-cross a flame-red field. Matte black marks become shadows, and now the brown strokes are transformed into sticks, a pile of logs, a mound. It takes so little for the mind to write a story. Look again and it’s only brushstrokes.”
Painting abstract works was not what Inscho originally wanted to do growing up in Dothan, Alabama. “I really wanted to be a Disney cartoonist.”
He remembered watching Disney artists in the animation studio on trips with his parents to Orlando, Florida. “I just remember people working on The Lion King when I was a kid.”
Inscho, who played basketball and golf as a kid, also held an interest in music. “I learned guitar playing on my dad’s classical guitar when I was 8 or 9. Just kind of self-taught.
“I bounced around schools and I pursued a lot of different interests. I was interested in architecture at one point.”
Inscho first moved to Memphis in 2004 because he “just wanted a change of pace.”
While at University of Memphis studying graphic design, Inscho took a painting class with Chuck Johnson “and really took to the medium and the language and the history.”
Inscho, who got his BFA in 2011, had never lived in a big city like Memphis, which he felt “was a bit more cosmopolitan. I had a lot more to learn about life, and art provided a vessel for figuring some stuff out.”
Inscho then went straight to grad school at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lived for 11 years. “I had some shows and some interest and kind of rode that little bit.
“I had several years after grad school where I ran off the fumes of what I accomplished at grad school. And that summer following graduation I kept making work, but things kind of petered out after a few years and I hit a cross-point with my work. It felt like the way I was working wasn’t right for me anymore. I was just feeling a different way about life. Things needed to change to line up more with how I was experiencing things. So, I started from the ground up again.
“I withdrew from the art community in Philadelphia and hunkered down in my studio and tried to figure stuff out. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall for three or four years.”
He turned from making larger, more geometric paintings to smaller ones, which were “more improvisational. More gestural. More evidence of the hand.”
In 2022, Inscho returned to Memphis, where his wife, Whitney Hubbard, is from. “Moving back provided an opportunity to reprioritize and revisit what I wanted my life to be like post-Covid. I wanted to be an artist that’s more engaged with my community.”
He found Memphis to be “such a wonderful” city, where “people have time for you” and “energy as a creator here is really good.”
Inscho reached out to Tops Gallery owner Matt Ducklo, who he met when he first lived in Memphis. “I think Matt just has a really great eye. And it’s a very contemporary space. It’s quirky. It’s a basement space.”
The gallery also “gets national attention. I know he brings in artists from New York and other areas to show in Memphis.”
Inscho has found Memphis to be a “very prolific” time for him since he moved back. “I started making these small paintings six years ago. They’re starting to enter a more mature vision than when I started. I think I’m starting to hit a stride with these pieces.
“When I first started, I didn’t know what a good brushstroke looked like.” But things changed back in Memphis. “I was learning to trust my hand as a painter for the first time.”
Inscho and Memphis are a good fit. “I am a rabid Grizzlies fan. I really enjoy cooking. And I have started to play golf again since I was a kid because there’s so many affordable courses in the city.”
Most importantly, “Memphis is an artistic community. While I was living in Philadelphia, Crosstown happened. TONE started. Tops Gallery started. And now Sheet Cake [Gallery] just opened. It feels like a good time to be an artist in the city. I’m happy to be back.”
“three left, one right” is on view through March 9th at Tops Gallery at 400 South Front.
Whether you realize it or not, you’ve seen Calvin Farrar’s artwork. It’s practically everywhere, his window paintings a part of the city’s landscape as they fill up the fronts of businesses from Midtown to Orange Mound to Downtown. The cartoon illustrations he paints create delightful scenes for passersby and patrons to enjoy; smiling snowmen, waving scarecrows, and dunking Grizzlies offer a moment of whimsy in a city of grit and grind. Today, as I speak with him, he paints the windows of Babalu in Overton Square, outlining cheery elves and Santa first in white paint and pencil, before intuitively adding in colors for the Christmas scene he’s created. His own smiles spread across his face as he steps back to look at his painting, his love of the work obvious.
For the past 25 years or so, Farrar has steadily grown his window painting business, from his first solo job at the old Ed’s Camera Store, then to The Bar-B-Q Shop and a Huey’s location, then to all Huey’s locations, and from there it blossomed to a year-round job all around town that allows him to pursue what he’s always wanted to: art.
“That’s the only thing I know how to do, is paint,” Farrar says. He took to it naturally as a child, his high school teacher, especially, encouraging his talents. Later, when he was an adult, his neighbor, Artiek Smith, also an artist, introduced Farrar to window painting, inviting him along to job sites before Farrar embarked on his own.
Calvin Farrar at work (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Today, as he works, he paints with ease, his strokes confident and smooth. He mastered his signature style a long time ago. When I ask him if he’s proud of his window art — that he can go just about anywhere from Brookhaven Pub & Grill in East Memphis to Superlo in Orange Mound and catch a glimpse of his work — he simply nods, beaming.
Yet window murals — no matter how much of a Memphis staple they’ve become — are temporary, meant to last only a season at a time. “A lot of people don’t want to take it down,” Farrar says. But, alas, they must.
For an artist, like Farrar, these window paintings are only a taste of a legacy that art can offer, so in his free time, he paints in oils, a medium much more permanent. Entrenched in nostalgia for the Delta and the blues, these folk-inspired paintings are rich in color and smooth strokes that suggest the artist’s assured process. When he paints, he says, “I just paint. If it’s a good subject matter, I work on it. … I just get a feel for it.”
“A lot of people didn’t know I painted oil paintings,” Farrar adds. In fact, it wasn’t until this past October that he had one of his first gallery shows “since a long time ago.” The First Presbyterian Church on Poplar hosted the duo exhibition, titled “When the Spirit Moves,” with Rosa Jordan. “I thought it was pretty cool,” Farrar says.
Already, his next show is on display at Buckman Arts Center at St. Mary’s Episcopal School. This exhibit, titled “It’s a Memphis Thang” and done in conjunction with Anna Kelly, features works from across his years as an artist, as well as Kelly’s mixed media works of Mid-South icons. “Calvin has spent so many years charming Memphians with his art,” says Cindi Younker, director of Buckman Arts Center. “Buckman is delighted to offer him a proper show to celebrate this living legend and his work.”
“It’s a Memphis Thang” will be on display through March 7th. The opening reception will take place on Friday, February 9th, 5 to 6 p.m. at Buckman Arts Center at St. Mary’s, 60 Perkins Extended.
