Art Museum at the University of Memphis

In the last interview he gave before his death in 1993 at age 90, Carroll Cloar shared a childhood memory with WMC’s Joe Birch. The celebrated painter and longtime professor at the Memphis College of Art talked about a pet chicken that ate out of his hand and perched on his shoulder until one terrible night when it accidentally ended up on the dinner table. Cloar says he was devastated and hid under his family’s house for hours crying and swearing he’d never love anything as much as he loved that bird. That wasn’t true, of course, as he later admitted: “I recovered and loved three women and three cats in my lifetime. Two women left and the three cats died, but the third woman has been here 20 years.” The third woman, his wife Pat Cloar, will visit David Lusk Gallery Saturday, December 6th, to sign copies of a new book produced by the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM) titled Carroll Cloar: In His Studio.

Cloar was a complicated artist from Earle, Arkansas, who employed realism, surrealism, magical realism, expressionism, and something like pointillism, often all at once.

In 2013, to celebrate the artist’s centennial, several regional museums teamed up for a multi-exhibit event called “The Summer of Cloar.” The most personal and surprising of these shows was produced by AMUM, where recordings of the artist’s voice played near the reassembled, newspaper-collaged walls of the artist’s studio. Carroll Cloar: In His Studio juxtaposes the artist’s words with drawings, photographs, and images lifted from the studio, documenting the AMUM show, which also showcased a seldom-seen group of mid-20th-century lithographs.

There’s a great story about Andy Warhol semi-crashing a party where the invited guests were all top-notch abstract expressionists. According to tradition, it was a heavily intellectual scene, and Warhol had arrived as the guest of his friend and colleague Marisol, who had broken into the New York art scene as an abstract expressionist but was moving more and more in the direction of Pop.

The deeply serious abstract artists were suspicious of Warhol and his paintings of soup cans and sculptural Brillo boxes. Painter Mark Rothko was allegedly overheard asking the host what might be done about the intrusion. And what could be done? After all, the profoundly superficial upstart had arrived with Marisol, a rare and extraordinarily gifted female presence in a notorious boys’ club.

In conjunction with Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper,” the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM) is exhibiting a collection of Andy Warhol portrait Polaroids, black-and-white photos, and silkscreen prints. “Andy Warhol Portraits: Art and Irony” looks at the New York scene through the lens of Warhol’s camera and contrasts those shots with portraits of American turmoil and tragedy.

“People always talk about how Warhol commodified things that hadn’t been commodified before,” says AMUM Director Leslie Luebbers. “Today we might say that he monetized these things. He turned them into money. Even a photograph of the Birmingham race riot. And a picture of Jackie Kennedy. He was able to monetize tragedy.”

The U of M’s exhibit was assembled both as an enhancement for Brooks’ show and to resonate with another AMUM show collecting images of the civil rights movement from the archives of the Memphis Press-Scimitar.