Tag: Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM)

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AMUM’s “Becoming More Myself”

Tattoo by Waites (Photo: Chuck Wilson)

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.

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Art Art Feature

Particle Man: Amir Hadadzadeh’s “Micro-Aesthetic”

Basketweave from “Micro-Aesthetic”

If you were to zoom into a piece of metal — and I mean really zoom in, down to the atom, down to a billionth of a meter — you might get an image similar to those captured by Amir Hadadzadeh, whose microstructure images are now on display in his “Micro-Aesthetic” exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis.

An assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering, Hadadzadeh uses these images in his research on the nano- and micro-features of metals to evaluate the determining properties of the internal structures. “We find a connection between the properties and the features that we see on the very small-scale,” he says, “thinner than the thickness of a hair.”

While working with these images, taken through electron microscopy, Hadadzadeh realized that “whether I’m thinking about it or writing a scientific paper or trying to interpret all of the images, I have the same feeling as being high.” To him, this tiny science contained an unexpected beauty. “They are all scientific images,” he says, “but they have artistic features — colors, lines, patterns, and there’s similarity to what we see in our everyday life.”

Amir Hadadzadeh (Photo: Courtesy U of M)

So with the help of his wife, Sepideh Dashti, who is an artist working in both photography and performance art mediums, he selected a dozen or so images for his exhibition out of the hundreds stored on his computer from his time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Brunswick and CanmetMATERIALS in Canada. “I tried to pick images with some features that can have a connection to our everyday life,” Hadadzadeh says. He even titled the images of the zoomed-in fabricated aluminum or titanium as objects they resemble — “Hot Peppers,” “Hairy Back,” “Horse Head,” “Atomic Heart.”

“My purpose here was to engage the general public with what I have been doing during my research,” Hadadzadeh says. While to the average onlooker the “hairs” on “Hairy Back” might be just that, engineers like Hadadzadeh use the hair-like lines to characterize the strength of the metal. Though the colors on some of the pieces may appear abstract, engineers use them to understand and interpret the image according to a color-coding system.

All of these features are important to Hadadzadeh’s research, but, he says, “I don’t expect the general public to understand the science.” In fact, he encourages visitors just to look around and enjoy what they see. “People can know that scientists are doing something that has scientific value and artistic value,” he says. “I’m trying to combine them here. This is the first step for me, and I’m trying to explore how I can do more and use the adventurous world of art to promote science and engage people and encourage them to learn a little more.”

Before this exhibit, Hadadzadeh had never really experimented with art. “I’m from Iran, and in Iran, usually families really would like their children to go to engineering schools or medical schools,” he says. “Unfortunately, at least for my generation, they didn’t appreciate art or humanities.” Even so, the professor found his passion in material sciences and engineering and can’t imagine doing anything else. “I’m not an artist,” he says. “I’m an engineer.”

But under his wife’s artistic influence, he’s learned to engage with his creative side. “Let’s be honest,” he says. “Engineers and scientists usually do not understand the art in the proper way. … She changed that mindset in me.”

Now that Hadadzadeh has had a taste of his wife’s creative philosophy, he plans to pursue his art further and hopes to have more exhibitions that can simultaneously promote art and science. “It is very helpful to have an artist in your life,” he says, “and I’m very grateful for it.”
“Micro-Aesthetic” is on view at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis until September 30th.

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Passion & Pain

Memphis College of Art’s current exhibition, “Drawing Comment: Illustration and Social Commentary,” includes internationally noted artist Luba Lukova’s stunning portrait of love and loss titled Water. Although the work is semi-abstracted, we can just make out a mother’s expression, still see the pride and concern she feels for the fire-engine-red baby that lies on her chest and cries. The mother is armless. Her body is as cracked and gray as parched earth. Instead of statistics regarding rates of mortality, instead of discussions about drought and its impact on the African continent, Lukova’s in-our-face, one-on-one work of art asks us to feel, really feel, what it’s like to love a child then watch it die.

Through March 27th

A New Yorker for years, now living in Nova Scotia and exhibiting across Europe, Canada, and the U.S., Leya Evelyn paints like she lives — experimentally, with daring, and open to new possibilities.

The nuanced, layered, scumbled, and scraped surfaces of Evelyn’s “Recent Paintings” at Harrington Brown Gallery allow us to see her visions unfold as sunlight moves across a weathered facade in Wilder By Far, no. 2, as almost impenetrable darkness falls across the right panel of the triptych Chance Meetings, and as passions are laid bare on the scraped saturate-red surface of I Knew About It Anyway, no. 5. 

The circles and ovals that often appear in Evelyn’s work are not geometrically exact symbols suggesting eternity or cycles of nature or elliptical orbits of planets that change little over millennia. Somewhere between line and form, between object and abstraction, Evelyn has developed a highly personal language of gesture that feels inflected with emotion and new ideas: frayed rope-like lines hang loosely then knot up in I Knew About It Anyway, no. 1, uncoil and reach up in Tell Me the Reason, no. 2.

Along the edges of many of Evelyn’s paintings tiny pieces of fabric are collaged next to equally small swatches of color. You may find yourself moving into and stepping back from these paintings again and again as you explore works so rich and evocative, each centimeter of their borders is a fully realized work of art.

Through April 5th 

For “Lied, Tied & Dyed,” artist and activist Suzanne Broughel has filled Jones Hall Gallery with incredibly soft materials and colors. As we step in close to enjoy her subtle textures and tones, we’re also drawn into an exploration of what the artist describes as “white skin privilege and economic racism” and “serious inequalities that still exist.”

Broughel’s mix of the conceptual and visceral, her nuances of meaning as well of texture and tone, and her inventive, sometimes unnerving, use of everyday materials — including skin bronzers that simulate bullet wounds in ribbed cotton T-shirts, basketball hoops tied into knots used for lynching, and Martha Stewart bedsheets tie-dyed and titled White Confidant of a Black Panther (Self-Portrait of David Horowitz) — make her explorations of privilege and prejudice particularly powerful. 

Hundreds of rows of beige-toned Band-Aids tilted Forty Acres of Bandaids (Every Shade of Bandaid For Sale Within Forty Acres of the African Burial Ground, NYC) not only address the presumption that flesh tones are beige instead of deep-brown or black, they also evoke the stone blocks out of which slaves in Egypt and in 18th-century New York City built huge edifices that housed and entombed the rich and powerful.

Many of Broughel’s works radiate in all directions in sometimes celebratory, sometimes chaotic, sometimes explosive ways. In our overpopulated and high-tech world, millions of people, no longer needed for backbreaking labor, are jobless and destitute. Their basic needs are unmet, their desire for opportunity is profound, and their energy is coiled and also ready to explode.

Through March 25th

James Inscho’s paintings bring us full circle. Memphis attracts noted artists from around the country and world, and our city sends out prize-winning artists like University of Memphis fine arts major, James Inscho, whose works can now be seen at the U of M’s Communication and Fine Arts Building.

Stand close to Inscho’s large oil-on-canvas The Condition IV, and it nearly overwhelms with undulating fields of burgundy, crimson, and opalescent orange. Stand back several feet, and you’ll see a portrait of humanity that is at once existential, sardonic, and seething.

Near the center of the work, a full set of teeth, tinted blood-red, smiles at us with what looks like a warning and a welcome, a grimace and a grin. Inscho’s shape-shifting pool of roiling blood and emotion in this work confronts us not with a portrait of disease but some truths about the human condition that can’t be cured or overridden or high-teched away.

Through April 15th by appointment

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Top Form

For “A Delicate Balance,” the mixed-media installation in the ArtLab at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Colin Kidder and John Morgan turn toy balloons into fine art. They bend, twist, wrap, and blow rubber balloons into amalgams of vegetable and animal life as they explore what happens when nature’s delicate balance is poisoned, globally warmed, and irradiated almost to extinction.

The only recognizable creatures in their post-apocalyptic jungle are the hummingbirds Kidder and Morgan have sculpted from Polymer clay. While the birds’ tufted bodies and wing feathers are still intact, their beaks are now pointed metal darts sharp enough to pierce the rubbery hides.

And it looks like they’ll be needing them as they hover and dart just beyond the reach of the hundreds of deep-purple, opalescent-orange, and electric-blue tentacles that reach out from the walls or scurry across ArtLab’s floor dragging what look like smooth pink intestines — turned inside out — behind them. Their bellies are stretched to the point of bursting as these phosphorescent, toxic creatures allure and then poison unsuspecting prey.

As edgy as they are instructive, Kidder and Morgan’s original, beautiful, and topical mutants make “A Delicate Affair” a must-see exhibition.

Through February 27th

In Pinkney Herbert’s four large pastel drawings at Playhouse on the Square, energy builds, coalesces into increasingly complex shapes, and culminates in a 100-by-125-inch pastel titled Alpha, one of the most inventive works of Herbert’s career.

A softly glowing, sable shadow, hovering in the background, sucks us in as we are swept across the surface by a spinning serpent. Something more profound is suggested by the serpent’s huge, hinged mouth, its deeply furrowed green forehead crowned with tufts of feathers or leaves, and the threadlike umbilical chord that loosely ties the free-floating shadow (womb? black hole?) to the creature’s belly where large black spermatozoa gestate. Herbert has assembled characters from several creation stories including Mesoamerica’s Quetzalcoatl, the British Isles’ Green Man, and the male and female principles of Shiva, the Hindu god dancing the world into existence.

Mounted in Playhouse on the Square’s impressive new performance and gallery space, Alpha can be read as metaphor for all artists (playwrights, actors, musicians) attempting to shape new ideas and new art forms out of the primordial stew.

Through February 22nd

Christian Brothers University’s current exhibition “Raw Silk” provides viewers with the opportunity to see the collages and silk paintings of two accomplished fabric artists working at the top of their form.

It’s late autumn in Japanese Torii, Contance Grayson’s most evocative collage, in which hundreds of pieces of kimono and Japanese money, stamps, advertising flyers, and vintage postcards are layered and stitched into a deeply textured tapestry of the gardens, sea coast, mountains, and Shinto shrines of Japan. Grayson take us through the gate of a shrine into the courtyard beyond where a tiny figure (the only human presence in the piece) meditates in the garden.

Phyllis Boger’s dyes and resist on silk include crisp, colorful, child-like geometries of Italian hill towns and translucent mosaics. But Boger’s most moving and strikingly beautiful work is Procession.

A weathered copper roof tops a sagging, deep-red facade. Three hooded figures, completely in shadow, stand on mottled royal-blue and teal tiles. One of the figures raises his cloaked arms and gives thanks for the tiny windows of light, umber woods, and rolling fields that border his town. Deep-green and raw-sienna shadows swirling inside the penitent suggest that, instead of merely going through the motions, he deeply feels the ritual he performs.

Through March 11th

Elisha Gold is best known for his metal sculpture, such as the nine-foot sunflower planted at Memphis Botanic Garden whose face is covered with 700 rounds of ammunition instead of seeds.

For Gallery Fifty Six’s current show “Forgive Your Enemies,” Gold has mounted a series of paintings that are as sardonic, socially conscious, and politically astute as his sculpture. 

Replete with Ben-Day dots and comic-book-inspired scenes of military battle and beautiful women, Gold’s slick and crisp-edged enamel paintings are, in part, homage to Roy Lichtenstein. In Gold’s particularly chilling portrait of cynicism and presumed superiority, a socialite raises her glass of champagne and toasts the viewer with the work’s title, It’s True. The Bigger the Lie, the More Believe.