The Dixon Gallery & Gardens teases your sweet tooth with its most recent exhibitions: “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings” and “Piece of Cake: Confectious Sculptures by Greely Myatt.”
The former features 100 works by Wayne Thiebaud in honor of his 100th birthday, which he celebrated in November 2020. The exhibition looks at the entirety of the artist’s career, starting with his earliest works right after World War II and ending with his latest series from 2016 to 2020.
Thiebaud’s subjects vary from landscapes to figure paintings, but he is most known for his 1960s paintings of cakes, pies, and other sweet treats. “A lot of times his paintings are inspired by the food displays you might’ve seen at a typical American diner in the middle of the 20th century,” says Julie Pierotti, the Martha R. Robinson curator at the Dixon. “So they have this kind of nostalgia to them for us looking at them today — nostalgia for the diner culture of decades ago.” Critics of the time referred to Thiebaud as the “Walt Whitman of the Delicatessen.”
“You don’t have to have any art history knowledge to come in and look at his work, appreciate it, enjoy it, and learn something,” Pierotti adds. “These are subjects like two ice cream cones that are so a part of our life and our culture that anyone can look at them and smile.
“The humor in them is so deadpan, yet it’s quietly dramatic,” she continues. “They speak to something inside of us that is like a guilty pleasure; you have this bodily reaction to it, in your heart and in your gut.” Thiebaud painted in the same manner a baker would frost a cake, with thick coats of paint that make the viewer want to scrape off a bit with their fingers.
Greely Myatt wanted to capture this kind of bodily reaction in his sculptures for the “Piece of Cake” exhibition, also at the Dixon. Just as Thiebaud applied thick layers of paint, Myatt applied layers of brown caulking as the chocolate icing on top of cakes made of wood. The caulking oozes between the layers and drips down the sides. “It’s really gooey and rich,” he says. “You wanna make it look lush, so people wanna lick it rather than just look at it.”
Myatt made his first cake sculpture with 54 layers to celebrate his 54th birthday in 2006. After that, he began making cakes and other sweet treats as gifts to celebrate his friends’ milestones and birthdays — gifts that friends like gallery-owner David Lusk and Metal Museum executive director Carissa Hussong have loaned to the Dixon for this exhibition. “I never thought I’d put these pieces in a show,” he says. “I made them because it was my birthday or David’s birthday, and I thought it was funny to make these things you couldn’t eat.”
When asked if Thiebaud inspired his confectious sculptures, Myatt says that, as an art professor at University of Memphis for 30 years, he was aware of Thiebaud, but Thiebaud was not why he made these pieces. Rather, the connection between the two occurred serendipitously. “A lot of my work references other art,” he says. “I grew up in Mississippi, where there weren’t a whole lot of art museums or galleries. So my connection with art was not with the high art — modernism — until I went to school. It was sort of a collision between the vernacular art that I grew up with and the art with historical references.”
But for one cake in this exhibition, the connection between the two artists was intentional. In honor of the Thiebaud exhibit and his 100th birthday, Myatt sculpted a 100-layer cake that towers 8 feet and sits right next to Myatt’s 54-layer cake — “Wayne and I,” he titles it.
The two exhibitions are playful and clever. But as Myatt says, “Humor is a serious form of art. It’s a skill.” And it’s a skill that both Wayne Thiebaud and Greely Myatt possess.
“Piece of Cake: Confectious Sculptures by Greely Myatt” is on view at the Dixon until September 26th. “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings” is on view until October 3rd.
