“Have I told the story about how I ended up in art school?” Dolph Smith asks, excited at a chance to tell a story he’s clearly told many times before, but this time to a new audience. “I was a G.I. for three years and stationed in Germany, and ended up in Berlin.”
His sergeant had offered two tickets to the Berlin symphony, and Smith jumped at the opportunity. “We’d never done anything like that,” he says. Once the show started, “I burst into not just tears, but I was sobbing out loud. I was just crying my eyes out.”
As soon as Smith left the symphony, he says, he called his mother and woke her up. “I said, ‘Mother, find me an art school.’ And she didn’t even ask questions. She found what was the Memphis Academy of Art, and I got back out of the Army just in time to get down there and started two weeks later.”
At this point in time, Smith had never drawn or painted before and showed little interest in art as a child growing up in Ripley, Tennessee, but as luck would have it, he had the talent, his classes would soon reveal. “You got to believe in faith. You got to believe in something,” he says. “It gave me a life. It was the beginning of my life.”
And, indeed, it was. Smith would go on to be a prolific artist and beloved teacher at the Memphis College of Art (MCA). At 91, he still hasn’t stopped creating.
Since 2023, his former daughter-in-law, Colleen Couch, a papermaker and former MCA alum and teacher herself, has been archiving his work. Twice a week, she’s traveled to Ripley, where Smith now lives, to document his work. She’s found pieces hidden under the stairs, gone through hundreds of slides of his work and his collection of other artists’ work, taken photographs, and asked him questions, so many questions.
In this process, Couch has seen the true span of Smith’s career, the way it transitioned from watercolors to papermaking and bookmaking to sculpture. She has seen how his wife Jessie inspired him, how the motifs in his works shifted and matured. Couch has seen herself inspired by him and by his work, and she saw the same urge to create burgeoning in Smith.
“It’s a good way to look back and realize that the things we make are always honest,” Dolph says. “It’s always ‘hands take over from our hearts,’ and it’s all honest.”
And so a joint show at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, “Walk in the Light,” came about — a chance to showcase the arc of Smith’s oeuvre; new works by Couch inspired by Smith’s pieces, uncovered in the archival process; and two new collaborations by Couch and Smith. The show, both say, is an opportunity to see the way two artists share their stories — the ways they diverge and the ways they come together.
“We think of art as being about skill and what have you, but really the good art is about storytelling,” Smith says.
“Colleen Couch and Dolph Smith: Walk in the Light,” Dixon Gallery & Gardens, through June 29, free.
