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.
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.
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.
With its noble trees, winding paths, sprawling views, and magnificent monuments, Elmwood Cemetery is a place of peace, not just for the dead but for the living. For artist Martha Kelly, the historical site has been a source of inspiration, a quiet spot to sketch and paint trees and statues, a “mishmash of visual elements,” as she calls it. Now, after years of drawing and painting and printmaking images of Elmwood, Kelly’s own art is about to become a part of the cemetery’s permanent landscape.
Last year, the cemetery commissioned the artist to create a design for three granite columbaria outside the Chapel, which bear the names Oak, Willow, and Maple. Engraver Brian Griffin of Saltillo, Mississippi, recently finished carving Kelly’s design on-site.
For the commission, the cemetery board had selected the three tree names for the columbaria but otherwise gave Kelly free rein. “Trees are kind of in my wheelhouse,” she says. “I’m traditionally a landscape artist. And I have walked out here and sketched so much. I love the history, and I wanted to honor it in a way that is new, and that is current, and that is appropriate for my work, but also have those echoes coming forward. So they had the tree names. And I said, ‘What if I pair it with a statue [that’s already in Elmwood]?’ And everybody fell in love with that.”
So, Oak is paired with one of the angels who presides over an Elmwood grave. In her statue form, she holds an anchor, a Christian symbol for hope, but on the columbarium, she holds a branch to be more inclusive. Willow, meanwhile, is paired with Margaret Turley, whose memorial statue Kelly sketches regularly. “I felt like [the willow] was a very graceful complement to who she was,” she says.
Lastly, Maple is paired with Emily Sutton’s statue. “She’s my favorite story out here,” Kelly says. Sutton was a madam, who turned her brothel into a hospital during the 1873 yellow fever epidemic and nursed the dying until she herself died. “They put up the statue of her. But the cranky old men who were in charge at the cemetery at the time said, ‘Oh, no, no, we don’t want people to just think she was a hero or anything.’ So they took her madam name, which was Fannie Walker, and they put it in very large letters on stones on three sides around her monument, so people would know that she wasn’t a pristine woman. When I heard that story, I was like, ‘Oh, I think she gets a second round of acclaim.’”
(Photos: Abigail Morici)
Before selecting these three feminine figures, Kelly had experimented with sketches of other statues in the cemetery, including a few statues of men. “But these three emerged for me,” she says. “I thought this is fitting. This is what I want for here, for now. There’s something about women and trees. They feel right together somehow. … And there’s a lot of statues of men out there. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do a male figure if I end up getting to do more of these, but it was important to me to center women in public art because that hasn’t been the tradition. There’s a handful of them out there, but not that many.”
And the same can be said for women who have been credited for their art over the centuries, Kelly points out. “There’s so much work by women that hasn’t been credited,” she says. “[Elmwood] insisted on putting my name on [the columbaria] which I really appreciate. They sent me the mock-up and I’m like, ‘I think [my name] is a little big.’ They said, ‘It’s fine. We like it.’ I’m like, ‘Okay.’ … I’m just so tickled.”
This installation will also be Kelly’s first piece of public art. “There’s an extra bit of responsibility and wonder that goes into making art for something like this,” she says. “It really just meant a lot in so many different ways, because of the place, because of the purpose.
“I grew up here. I’m living in my grandparents’ house. I have a lot of history in the city. It means a lot to get to leave a small mark behind me as a lifelong artist who loves Memphis, loves the trees that we have. … This is where I want to live. So it just really means a lot, to me as someone with my roots very deep in Memphis, to get to have made something out of our history and out of our trees that’s gonna last.”
Elmwood Cemetery will host a free celebration of Martha Kelly’s public art on Sunday, November 19th, 3-5 p.m. Harbert Avenue Porch Orchestra will perform. RSVP at elmwoodcemetery.org.
Kirsten Sandlin’s proposed mural for this year’s Paint Memphis. (Courtesy Paint Memphis)
A hundred artists from Memphis and beyond will be painting away in the Edge District this weekend, thanks to the work of the nonprofit, Paint Memphis. On Saturday, all will be invited to Paint Memphis’ annual festival to support the artists as they paint murals in the neighborhood.
Co-directors David Yancy III and Kirsten Sandlin say the Saturday event will be packed with things to do. Curtis Glover will offer a free mural workshop at noon, and Eli Gold will do some live metal sculpting. To celebrate World Hoop Day, Grind City Flow Arts will stun audiences with hula hooping and fire dancing performances, and they will offer a beginner hoop class for all ages at 3:30 p.m. and an intermediate hoop tricks workshop for ages 16 and up at 5 p.m. Festival-goers can also expect music, an immersive kids area, food trucks, vendors market, artist gallery, and, of course, live mural painting.
For the 100 artists selected, Yancy says it was important to include the community in the decision-making process. “We have business owners involved. We have people in the community involved, and then our board members,” he says. “And we’re just able to narrow it down to 100 this year. And, man, we got a lot of amazing artists and a lot of great local artists that will be involved with Paint Memphis. It’s all about making sure that the community is happy, and we just want to promote a colorful, bright, positive Memphis. That’s the beauty of Paint Memphis — that we transform an area from looking abandoned to bringing it back to life, giving it that pop of color, giving it that creativity to make people want to actually come there and [experience] all the things that murals provide. So it’s gonna be really cool because that whole area will be full of amazing art.”
As artists in their own rights, Yancy and Sandlin will each be contributing murals of their own. Sandlin says of her mural, “I typically paint children interacting with the buildings or the area because I believe that everybody can relate to being a kid.”
“I’m painting my goddaughter,” Yancy says. “The doctors told her when she was first born that she wouldn’t be able to walk or just be a normal human. Now she’s almost 5 years old, man, living a great life. She’s walking; she’s talking; she’s beat the odds. So I’m doing a piece for her to just show how amazing it is if you just don’t give up — life is full of all possibilities and opportunities.”
All the artists are volunteers, most of them traveling from all over the country to make Memphis beautiful. “Keep in mind the artists will be there all day, every day from Thursday until Monday,” she says. “So the artists will be needing support for the whole week.”
With that in mind, and to show a bit of Southern hospitality, Paint Memphis, in partnership with local businesses, has opened a number of events to the public, including an artist meet-up at Craft Axe Throwing on Thursday at 8 p.m., an art show opening at the Ravine on Friday at 5 p.m., a drink-and-draw event also on Friday at 8 p.m. at Brinson’s, an after-party on Saturday at 8 p.m. at Inkwell, and a “women in murals” panel discussion on Sunday at 8 p.m.
Enjoy Arkwings’ free art yard. (Photo: Courtesy
We Are Memphis)
“I didn’t call myself an artist until I was 52 years old,” says Jana Wilson, executive director of Arkwings. She’d always been creative, even sold her assemblage art from time to time, but since that wasn’t her full-time gig, she didn’t feel she fit the title of “artist.” That is, until someone at an art show pointed out that just making art meant she was an artist. “And all of a sudden I was like, ‘Whoa, I could have been doing this my entire life.’ It’s my identity.”
Now that Wilson is executive director of Arkwings, she says, “I don’t want people going through life the way I did, and not identifying as whatever creative type of being they are.” After all, for her and for many like her, creativity through the arts is healing. “Nine times out of 10, when you ask an artist why they make art, it always go back to, ‘It makes me feel good,’ or ‘It makes me feel like a whole person.’ And there’s so many people out here who are craving arts engagement, and that’s really the heart and soul of why the arts became part of [Arkwings’] mission statement, which is ‘mind, body, and spirit wellness through the healing power of arts and nature.’”
For its part, Arkwings offers free access, seven days a week, to its Art Yard where guests of all ages can take part in different outdoor creativity stations, such as painting on a mini mural, building fairy houses, adding to the poetry tree, picking seeds or herbs from the community garden, and making music at the “Rhythms of Nature Circle.” Plus, every Wednesday, from 2-5 p.m., guests can tour all of Arkwings’ galleries during their Open Gallery Day.
Currently, Arkwings boasts the “Boys 2 Men: If You Don’t See Black, You Don’t See Me” exhibition, curated by Lurlynn Franklin. The exhibit features art solely by local Black men, ranging in age and style: Earle Augustus, Toonky Berry, Eric Echols, Clyde Johnson Jr., Montrail Johnson, Devin Kirkland-XXIV(k), Hakim Malik, Lester Merriweather, Carl E. Moore, Frankd Robinson, Najee Strickland, Andrew Travis, Larry Walker, Steven Williams, and Shamek Weddle.
In curating the exhibition, Franklin says she wanted to highlight each artist’s individuality. “My dad was a real kind gentleman, and he was profiled. You know, you can just snuff out a person’s life, and that’s it, because somebody decided to attach a label, a stereotype, to it,” she adds. “So the major requirement I’m having for the African-American men who are going to be in the show is, I want you to demonstrate your style. It doesn’t have to be political. You ain’t gotta speak to what the title implies. I just want people to see your skill level and artistry.”
“Boys 2 Men” will be on display at Arkwings through July 22nd and will travel to University of Memphis’ Fogelman Gallery in September. For more information on Arkwings and all its upcoming events, follow the nonprofit on Facebook.
Open Gallery Day, Arkwings, Wednesday, July 5, 2-5 p.m., Free.
“Boys 2 Men: If You Don’t See Black, You Don’t See Me,” Arkwings, on display through July 22.
Ernest Withers’
photographs illustrating
Memphis in 1968. (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Last month, to honor the 55th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the National Civil Rights Museum unveiled “Waddell, Withers, & Smith: A Requiem for King,” an exhibition highlighting three Memphis-based artists whose work responded to King’s assassination and the Civil Rights Movement: self-taught sculptor James Waddell Jr., photojournalist Ernest Withers, and multimedia artist Dolph Smith.
“It goes to show the levels of Dr. King and how many people he impacted,” NCRM associate curator Ryan Jones says of the exhibit. “He didn’t just impact people who were civil rights leaders and human rights activists; he impacted people who were artists. And so this goes to show what he meant as a man and that people here in this great community of Memphis have channeled and responded to something that has been a dark cloud over the city in the past 55 years. Dr. King impacted the hearts and minds of so many citizens.”
Each of the three artists were born and raised in Memphis, Jones says, and all served in the military, with their respective services being turning points in their artistic careers. Withers, a World War II veteran, learned his craft at the Army School of Photography. He would then go on to photograph some of the most iconic moments of the Civil Rights Movement, including King’s fateful visit to Memphis, the priceless images for which line the exhibition’s walls.
“We can’t tell the story of the modern Civil Rights Movement without the role of photography,” Jones says, and truly, Withers played one of the most significant roles in documenting that history, capturing approximately 1.8 million photographs before his death at 85 years old in 2007.
At the same time Withers was documenting King’s Memphis visit and the aftermath of his assassination, James Waddell (who happened to later be photographed by Withers) was serving in the Vietnam War and didn’t learn what had happened in Memphis until weeks later. For Waddell and his family, King’s death marked a period of pain and grief — “His relatives compared the assassination to a death in the family,” reads the exhibit’s wall text.
“[Sculpture] was his way of reacting to the tragedy that had happened,” Jones says. “He said that living in Memphis and being a native Memphian and not doing the work would be something he would never be able to get over.” So when he returned home, Waddell channeled this grief in the work now on display — an aluminum-cast bust of King and Mountaintop Vision, a bronze statue of King kneeling on a mountaintop with an open Bible. “It shows he’s humbling himself to God,” Waddell said of the sculpture in a 1986 interview in The Commercial Appeal with Anthony Hicks.
James Waddell’s Mountaintop Vision (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Initially, as the 1986 article reveals, Waddell planned to create an eight-foot version of Mountaintop Vision as “the city’s first statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” “The time is right, because Memphis is beginning to voice an opinion that there is a need for a statue,” Waddell told The CommercialAppeal. “This will be a tool for understanding.”
Waddell, who has since passed, said he hoped “to see the finished piece placed at the proposed Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum, Clayborn Temple, or in Martin Luther King Jr. Riverside Park.” Though that eight-foot version never came to fruition, at long last, the smaller version of Waddell’s Mountaintop Vision can be seen not only in a public display for the first time, but also at the National Civil Rights Museum as he once had envisioned.
Dolph Smith’s The Veil of the Temple Was Rent in Two (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Meanwhile, Dolph Smith, who had long since returned home from the Vietnam War, was in Memphis the night of King’s assassination. As Memphis was set ablaze that night, he and his family stood on the roof of their home, watching the smoke rise around them. He vowed to never forget that date — April 4, 1968. In his personal calendar for that day, he wrote, “If this has happened in Memphis, then now I know it can happen anywhere. It is so hard to believe a man’s basic instinct is to be good.”
In response to what he called “an unspeakable tragedy” and the public uprising that arose from it, Smith took to the canvas. For one piece on display at the museum, titled The Veil of the Temple Was Rent in Two, the artist ripped an American flag, placing photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in between its tears, as Jones says, “to show the extreme divisiveness that the assassination caused.”
In all, Jones hopes the exhibit will show the reach of King’s legacy extending beyond April 4, 1968, all the way to the present day. In one of the videos projected on the exhibition’s walls, Smith, now at 89 years old, speaks on the importance of witnessing artwork like the pieces on display. “If you make something and it just sits there, it’s unfinished,” Smith says. To him — a painter, bookmaker, and educator — in order for a work of art to be “finished,” it has to be shared, for the mission of the artist is not simply to create but to spark conversation, to encourage self-reflection, and in cases like that of Withers, Waddell, and Smith, to activate progress.
“Waddell, Withers, & Smith: A Requiem for King” is on display at the National Civil Rights Museum through August 28th.
From Downtown to Whitehaven to Collierville and back, Shelby County’s government wants to make the arts inclusive and accessible to everyone countywide. Recently, the Arts and Culture Nonprofit Subcommittee announced its “Art For All” campaign, a series of free “Neighborhood Art Parties,” with nearly three dozen local arts and culture organizations participating. This Saturday, April 22nd, marks the campaign’s inaugural event, Arkwings’ Caza de Arte (Art Hunt) Latino Art Exhibit and Multi-Cultural Festival.
“Art For All [stems from] the fact that we have a multitude of organizations within Memphis and Shelby County with a variety of wonderful offerings that we want to bring awareness to and uplift,” says Nykesha Cole, whom Mayor Lee Harris appointed as the county’s first-ever arts and culture liaison in 2022. “Prior to me starting in this role and prior to the establishment of the Arts and Culture Subcommittee [fall of 2021], we did not have a collective effort around uplifting organizations within Shelby County’s government.”
By collaborating with organizations like Arkwings, Cole says, “We just hope that [these Neighborhood Art Parties] will grow into truly creating a county where we have access to arts and culture for people regardless of where they are in the county, what neighborhoods they live in, how old they are, what race they are. … Art should be inclusive and accessible.”
For this first Neighborhood Art Party, taking place inside and outside, Arkwings, a nonprofit promoting wellness through arts and nature in Frayser, is seeking to highlight and engage with the Latino community. As such, the festival will feature a Latino art exhibit, artisan vendors, food trucks, art-making stations hosted by local arts organizations, live metal-smithing with the Mobile Memphis Metal Museum, an art hunt with mini masterpieces for attendees to find on the campus and take home, and performances by Cazateatro Bilingual Theatre Group, New Ballet Ensemble, Opera Memphis, and Danza Mexica Atlachinolli. “It’s gonna be for anyone and everyone who wants to come out and experience a little taste of Latin culture,” Jana Wilson, Arkwings’ executive director, says of the festival.
Bilingual volunteers will serve as interpreters and greeters, and high schoolers at Compass Community School have translated artists’ statements for the exhibit and descriptions of the various activities into Spanish and English. The students and numerous Frayser residents have also helped paint the mini pieces of art that will be scattered across Arkwing’s campus for the art hunt. “It’s gotten so popular that every Wednesday [leading up to the festival] has been an open gallery, and we have residents just popping in to paint mini art,” Wilson says. “And so the support we’ve gotten has made it something where we can really see a meaningful impact even leading up to the event.”
Community members of all ages have volunteered to paint the mini art to be featured in the art hunt. (Credit: Arkwings | Facebook)
“Our mission statement is mind, body, and spirit wellness through the healing power of arts and nature,” Wilson adds. “Research and studies show how it’s great to be out in nature and it’s great to create and engage in self-expression — those things are healing for us. And especially what we’ve been through as a society recently, we need that desperately. If we can offer people the opportunity to create and self-express, then we’re giving them an opportunity for healing, so the festival is a way that we can expose that concept to a massive number of people.”
And that sentiment also ties into the work that the Arts and Culture Nonprofit Subcommittee strives to achieve. “We want everybody to have the opportunity to have access to arts and culture ’cause, truly, when you look at it, that is one of the most vibrant things in society,” Cole says. “And we just wanna make sure that it’s getting its proper showcase and people are getting a chance to experience it in all neighborhoods.”
Following this first event in Frayser, Art For All will partner with the Stax Museum of American Soul Music for its Family Day, celebrating the museum’s 20th anniversary on Saturday, May 13th, 1 p.m.-4 p.m. The event will include free admission to the museum, live performances, art-making activities, and more. Then, on June 25th, the Museum of Science & History will host the Art For All Festival, where dozens of arts and culture organizations will come together to showcase performances and artmaking. More events are to come, so stay up to date with Art For All at 901ArtForAll.com.
Caza de Arte (Art Hunt) Cultural Exhibit & Festival, Arkwings, 2034 James Road, Saturday, April 22nd, 11 a.m.-3 p.m., free.
One of Johana Moscoso’s denim-clad sculptures on display. (Photo: Abigail Morici)
Growing up in Colombia, Johana Moscoso resented the fragility of the two porcelain figures her mother treasured, figurines whose fingers and nose would always break. Years later and now living in Memphis, she stands in the gallery housing the Dixon’s collection of decorative porcelain — equally untouchable, fragile, and overwhelmingly European — but in the room over, in the interactive gallery’s “Who Is That Artist?” exhibit, Moscoso holds the hands of her life-size recreations of porcelain figures in the collection. These pieces are structured with recycled cardboard and paper, with their exteriors clad in used denim. “I wanted to create something that people can touch,” she says.
In creating her sculptures, Moscoso took inspiration from the Colombian New Year’s tradition of Año Viejo, where friends and family make an effigy of the past year to burn as a way to welcome the next and say goodbye to the last. Likewise, the artist hopes to burn these sculptures, honoring her roots and looking to the future, but for now, she strives to make accessible what was once inaccessible in the porcelain. For instance, in one piece, where the original depicts a woman assisting a young lady at a vanity, Moscoso doesn’t include the young lady; instead, a stool sits for anyone to take her place and to see themselves as part of the art.
Similarly, Danielle Sierra, another artist in the exhibit, also aims to make visitors a part of her art. In her typical work, Sierra reinterprets Mexican milagros, religious charms used to pray for miracles. Instead of saints, images often found in milagros, Sierra renders faces of those in her life enshrined in rays of gold and surrounded by flowers. “I wanted to focus on the human being the miracle,” she says. “We tend to not see the beauty in ourselves, but we’re so quick to see it in flowers and plants and creation.”
In the exhibit, Sierra has created a photo stand-in for guests to see their own faces as part of one of her milagros. “It’s a matter of you becoming those things that you see as beautiful,” she says.
The third artist in the exhibit is Karla Sanchez, who challenges visitors with a comic-making station to reflect on what plagues their minds — their hopes, fears, worries. As an artist who has struggled to understand her complex identity as a DACA recipient from Mexico, she has found comics to be a therapeutic outlet to express her experiences as an immigrant. She hopes that by sharing her illustrations in the exhibit, she can inspire others to find healing in creativity, whether that’s in drawing or writing or something else entirely.
Altogether, the three Latina artists hope to uplift their respective cultures and welcome others into their work. For more information on the exhibit and the artists, visit dixon.org.
“Who Is that Artist?”, Dixon Gallery & Gardens, on display through April 16th.
Some collect baseball cards; others collect Pokemon cards. For Alex Paulus, a kid in the ’90s, it was Marvel trading cards. “That was my favorite thing when I was a kid,” he says. “They were like these fully rendered oil paintings of Marvel characters.” Little did he know that his childhood hobby would inspire him to start a new kind of trading card in Memphis, almost three decades later.
In 2020, when lockdown rolled around and boredom took over, the artist explains, he had an itch to return to those Marvel cards that had once excited him, so he purchased a box of them. “I found out that in one of the packs in the box, you could get an original hand-drawn piece of art on a trading card,” he says. “And I got one of those cards. I was like, ‘Oh man, this is really cool.’ … So that kind of gave me the idea of what if I could buy a pack and it was just filled with all of these handmade cards and how cool that would be.”
Paulus, as it turns out, wasn’t the first to think of creating trading cards with original art. That honor belongs to a Swiss artist, M. Vänçi Stirnemann, who in 1996 initiated an ongoing and now worldwide performance whereby artists of all backgrounds create, collect, sell, and trade self-made unique works, 2.5-by-3.5 inches in size.
Inspired by this, Paulus became determined to bring the phenomenon to Memphis. In 2021, thanks to a grant from UrbanArt Commission, he created 50 packs of his own artist trading cards, with three little paintings in each, and he sold all of them at his 2021 show at Off the Walls Arts. Some of these packs even had golden tickets — Willy Wonka style — that granted the recipient a full-sized painting hanging at the show. The goal, Paulus explained in his grant application, was to “inspire others to make their own artist trading cards and become part of the performance, too.”
Three of Paulus’ cards that will be for sale this Sunday at Wiseacre. (Photo: Alex Paulus)
For the day, these artists will sell their 2.5-by-3.5 inch works at affordable prices, some as low as $10. Some will sell them individually, and others will sell them in packs. Some cards you’ll be able to see before purchasing, and others will be a surprise. Some packs will even have golden tickets for full-sized artwork if you’re lucky. Of course, you’ll be able to trade cards with other collectors at the event, and you can even bring in your own 2.5-by-3.5 inch works to trade if you so please.
By Mary Jo KarimniaBy Michelle FairBy Nick PenaThe artist trading cards range in their subjects and styles. (Photos: Mary Jo Karimnia, Michelle Fair, Nick Pena)
“There’ll be tiny abstract paintings, really detailed pencil portraits, Ninja Turtle porn, altered baseball cards,” Mary Jo Karimnia, one of the participating artists, explains when asked what type of images collectors should expect. Clearly, there’s a range in subject and even medium. For her cards, Karimnia explores motifs of eyes and rainbows, and some incorporate symbols inspired by old Icelandic magical staves, with spells “to get protection from witches,” “to destroy all weapons,” “to nurture humbleness,” and so on.
Karimnia, who “caught the [tiny-art] bug” after Paulus’ Off the Walls Arts show, says that the small form allows for more experimentation. “It’s a different challenge [than my usual work],” she says, “Plus if I don’t like one, I can throw it in the bin.”
Paulus adds that working on a small canvas has influenced his “normal” work (in addition to giving him carpal tunnel in his wrist). “I’m incorporating some of the style that I’ve been doing [on the cards] back into my larger scale canvas paintings,” he says. “I thought this was just gonna be like a fun little side project, but it’s just altering what I’m doing.”
Overall, the artists hope that the trading cards will connect the arts community with the Memphis community at large. Anyone can attend, and everyone who does will walk away with original art. “It’s making art accessible,” Karimnia says, “and the cards are great to display, frame, or trade.”
The group hopes to host more trading events in the future and add more artists to its roster. Keep up with the group on Instagram (@artisttradingcardsmemphis).
