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Harmonia Rosales’ “Master Narrative” at the Brooks

Oshosi Gets His Crown, 2019 (Photo: Courtesy Harmonia Rosales)

At a young age, Harmonia Rosales fell in love with the Renaissance masters who wove tales from Greco-Roman mythology and Christianity in their paintings. “They tell a full story, corner to corner, like a children’s book where you don’t have to really have the text,” she says. “You can almost look at the image and know this is what happened. When I was younger, though, I never looked at the image and thought, ‘Okay, this is the story of the Great Flood,’ or what have you. I would make up my own stories. It wasn’t until my daughter that I then became more aware of what was missing. When I had my daughter, it was like I was reborn almost, with these really innocent eyes. And when I took her to see these beautiful paintings that I fell in love with, she didn’t fall in love with them. … She was like, ‘They don’t look like me.’ It just hit me that I didn’t want her to feel like her hair wasn’t beautiful, her skin wasn’t beautiful.”

And so Rosales took to the canvas to give her daughter the representation she was missing in the Western Renaissance paintings that have been celebrated for centuries. As an Afro-Cuban American, she turned to the Lucumí religion of her ancestors. “These gods [of Greek and Roman mythology] are very similar to the orishas I grew up with all my life, but took for granted because I grew up with them,” she says. “There’s no real images I can find on the internet, and so I was like, ‘Let me tell a story, where it’s easy for the masses to understand, but also add in our history.’ And then when I say our history it’s from people from the African diaspora, the Atlantic slave trade, our life, and how we survived through the gods and how the gods survived.”

At first, her peers discouraged her from painting these stories centered around African and Black figures in the Renaissance style. Her advisors told her she wouldn’t be able to sell them, but Rosales didn’t care. This work made her happy. “To see us in there, our ancestors, our history in a format where it’s just as time-consuming, looks just like the Renaissance paintings — the priceless paintings, the most beautiful paintings of the world, can’t touch ’em, can’t buy ’em — I wanted to do that in order to empower us and see our history in the same light,” she says. “Inclusion, it’s all about inclusion. Seeing this is what I want for my children.”

Rosales intended these pieces to be public-facing, wanting to reach as broad of an audience as possible just as the Renaissance masters she reimagines and reinvents have achieved. And thanks to the Brooks, she is one step closer to that goal as her first solo museum exhibition, outside of her home state California, opened last week. Titled “Master Narrative,” the exhibition contains over 20 breathtaking paintings completed over the past few years. The exhibit will be on display through June 25th, with museum programming throughout its run. Learn more at brooksmuseum.org.

“Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, on display Through June 25th.

“Creolization in the Work of Harmonia Rosales” Lecture, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Wednesday, March 22, 6 p.m.

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Forms Meet Functions Live Painting Show

LueElla Marshall was driving home from her job at Kroger when she got a call from God. The streets in her neighborhood of Orange Mound were filled with litter — a sight that weighed heavy on Marshall’s heart. “It used to be a beautiful community,” she says, having lived in Orange Mound since 1966. “But for a long time, this community has been going down. Every day I came home, it looked like the city was getting dirtier and dirtier. So I said, ‘Lord, when is the City of Memphis going to come out here and clean this trash up? It’s just been so long since they’ve done that.’ So God said to me while I’m there riding in the car, he said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ 

“And I looked around and wasn’t nobody in the car but me. So I said, ‘Me?’ God said, ‘Yes, it’s you. Why don’t you do it?’ So, all right, I had to think about it. But,” Marshall continues, “when God tells you to do something, you do it all right.”

What came from this calling was Marshall’s 2016 “Art Cans” initiative, through which neighborhood artists and students painted large trash cans to be placed around the neighborhood. Marshall hadn’t really thought much of the arts, she says, until this project. “I got to learn that art is everything. I used to drive past them and think they were beautiful works of art, our receptacles,” Marshall says. “I wanted a place to show them.” And so she opened Orange Mound Gallery (OMG) that year through a grant from ArtUp. Though the gallery has hosted several exhibitions, Marshall had never shown her receptacles in the gallery setting — until now, that is, thanks to the help of artist and arts educator Lurlynn Franklin.

Franklin, Marshall says, brought a new energy to the project that had gone dormant a few years ago. Since the initial trash cans were placed around Orange Mound, many of them have been stolen or destroyed by cars crashing into them. “But I never gave up,” says Marshall, “even when I had to pay people outta my pocket to clean [up] and empty the trash every week. This is a spiritual thing. God told me to do it, but once I started, I still didn’t know what to do ’cause I didn’t get the proper support until Ms. Franklin came to me.” 

“I was just moved to help her,” Franklin says. “She’s never had an exhibition of her cans because once they’re painted, they go out in the community. And I just told her this could be a good way to fundraise and it could be good exposure for artists.”

Earle Augustus, radio program director and personality, begins work on his trash receptacle which he will continue painting upon at the “Forms Meet Functions” live show. (Credit: Abigail Morici)

And so, with Marshall’s blessing, Franklin reached out to artists through word of mouth to paint on the receptacles. The receptacles will be displayed at the University of Memphis’ Fogelman Gallery in September, and later will be sold to fundraise for OMG, with 60 percent of the profits going to the artists. Before then, the artists Franklin has gathered will participate in a live painting art show, entitled “Forms Meet Functions,” this weekend at the gallery

“People can go and watch the project’s process, talk to the artists, look at the work that they’ve created, look at their sketches, and connect the dots,” Franklin says of the evening event. “Something happens for people when they can see that.”

From left to right: Walter “Sir Walt” Andrade, Zelitra “Madamn Z” Peterson-Traylor, Toonky Berry, Lurlynn Franklin, Andrew Travis, and Clyde Johnson Jr. (Credit: Abigail Morici)

The group of more than a dozen artists range in their experience and exposure. Two of them — Michael and Lylah Newman — are still kids in grade school, and they’ll facilitate a collaborative paint-by-numbers trash can for those who attend the show to add to. Also participating are Michael and Lylah’s mom Darlene Newman, Walter “Sir Walt” Andrade, Toonky Berry, Clyde Johnson Jr., Najee Strickland, Andrew Travis, Zelitra “Madamn Z” Peterson-Traylor, Kierston Nicole Williams, Steven Williams, Earle Augustus, and Christie Taylor. 

For the project, Franklin wanted the artists to inject their own style into the cans. “Like form and function,” she says, “the can, it’s all ready to function, but you have to build the art around it. … We’re not going to have empty concepts on these cans. We’re not just slapping anything on them.” These, Franklin says, are meant to be accessible pieces of art that function as trash cans, and indeed, each can is distinct in its style, as evidenced as the artists begin their processes before the show. “It’s about people being able to truly engage with the work, the energy coming off the work.”

Madamn Z paints the basic shapes of her subject, which she will refine at the live painting show on Friday. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

For Madamn Z, the trash receptacle she’s working on harkens back to what she considers her most inspirational piece — a portrait of the model Winnie Harlow. “I use art to heal myself from Crohn’s disease,” she says. “So all of the works that I’ve done, I’ve been able to not only heal myself with, but I hope to inspire other people. … And I think [Harlow] stands out so much because our ideal of beauty has been distorted by mainstream media. And she’s like, ‘You don’t have to be perfect.’

“I remember watching her on Top Model and they called her Panda,” she continues, “and I remember how that hurt her. But she took that and she built a career, and look at what she’s doing now. So it just shows how you can go from thinking you’re on the low end of the spectrum and that you’re not worthy and that you’re trash, you feel like trash, but you’re not. You’re beautiful.”

In addition to painting the cans, Franklin also commissioned the artists to create a piece alluding to the subject of environmentalism for the show. “They were supposed to read these articles I provided and come up with a piece of art that was based on those articles,” she says. “So it’s layered. [As a viewer] it makes you curious, and you wanna dig. Like what the heck is this really about?”

One article, which was the source of a painting by Madamn Z, spoke to Dr. Martin Luther King’s environmentalism. Her piece is divided into two, with one image illustrating police brutality during the I Am a Man strike in Memphis, and the other rendering a child and parent watching that same scene on a television today. “I wanted to focus on how, although King’s dream has been realized somewhat, the reality of it is that our children are still exposed to the same dream he was trying to portray and unify everyone under,” she says. “As a mom raising two young children, that’s not a picture I want my children to be accustomed to watching, but today on the news, that’s all we see.” 

Walter “Sir Walt” Andrade touches up his painting, which will be on display as he works on his trash can at the live show. The receptacle, he says, will feature symbols representing Tyre Nichols, Gangsta Boo, and Young Dolph. (Credit: Abigail Morici)

Put simply, King’s dream is a work in progress — a sentiment Marshall echoes. She says of the 55-gallon cans used for her initiative, “Those are the drums that we used to burn our trash in when the sanitation was stopped. I got taken back to when Dr. King was marching and when T.O. Jones and his followers sent for Dr. King to come to Memphis. … I didn’t know God was going to give me something to do that Dr. King was connected to. I always say this [work], it is the spirit of Dr. King and T.O. Jones. It has been a blessing for me.” 

Marshall now also heads the Orange Mound Neighborhood and Veterans Association Inc., in addition to her work with OMG, which she hopes to grow as a community space and improve through grants and donations. 

Andrew Travis paints his can in his distinct abstract style. Behind the table, as with each table at the show, are samples of the artist’s work. (Credit: Abigail Morici)

“I didn’t know all this was coming,” she says. “See, I’m 75. Faith had to get me here, and I’m still going. People don’t know this gallery here; we don’t have any signs outside — that’s how broke we’ve been. But you see, we still didn’t give up. You can feel the spirit. I can feel it when I’m talking about it and thinking about it. How God just put tears in my eyes. I wouldn’t have known this. I didn’t see it. I didn’t even see it coming. We are onto something that’s really cool.”

Join the Orange Mound Gallery for “Forms Meet Functions: The Trash to Treasure Live Painting Studio Art Show,” Friday, March 10th, 5-7:30 p.m. The gallery is located in the Lamar-Airways Shopping Center next to TONE, 2232 Lamar Ave. 

“Forms Meet Functions: From Trash to Treasure” will be on display at U of M’s Fogelman Gallery, September 1st-October 1st. The opening reception is September 1st, 6-9 p.m.

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Under the Quilt

Photo: Abigail Morici

A wasp nest sits on Sharon Havelka’s studio desk between a box of thread and a strip of red embroidered fabric. She lights a tea candle and hands me a slip of paper.

“Write something you really want or wish for, or something you just want to get rid of,” she tells me. I do as she says, and she rolls up my wish before wrapping it tightly in purple thread and putting a bit of melted candle wax on the end. 

“Where do you want it to be?” she asks, gesturing to the wasp nest. A few of the nest’s holes are already filled with bundles of colorful thread, so I point to an empty pocket, into which she slides the rolled-up paper. All that’s left to the eye is a tiny bubble of purple thread, nestled among wishes of strangers at home in the holes of a wasp nest. 

A similar wasp nest sits in Havelka’s show, “Salmon Skin Fried … and Other Delicacies,” on display at the Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery at Christian Brothers University. That nest used to reside above Havelka’s front door until it fell and all the wasps left it behind as if it were a hostess gift. “It reminded me of how a mailman leaves you a package,” she says. “It was just perfect, and I brought it inside.”

Instead of wasps, Hatch contains notes of Havelka’s friends and family’s greatest dreams and/or fears, bundled in the holes of the wasp nest. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

As an artist, Havelka knew she had to make use of the nest, but she says, “With anything that I find you can’t make it be something that it’s not. You have to listen to it. What does this want to be? It wants to fill up the holes with something. So then, what are your larvae? It’s gotta be something that can grow, something that can fly out and go out into the world.” And that’s where the written wishes came in. “The process has to be meaningful.” 

That approach carries throughout her work, letting the materials dictate her process, even letting the materials come to her. For most of her recent work, Havelka gravitates towards quilting, a passion that blossomed while her three children were young. Before then, the graduate of the Memphis College of Art would draw and paint — “I was really into realism,” she says. That is, before she stumbled into woodworking and fell in love with the patterns she could make by cutting triangles or rearranging strips of wood.

With little kids around, though, woodworking wasn’t ideal, but Havelka needed to make something, anything, just as she always had ever since she herself was little and would get straight to drawing her hands and feet after coming home from school. Luckily, her sister-in-law passed down the family sewing machine to her, and although she hadn’t sewn before, she took to quilting, converting the patterns she loved in woodworking into fabric. Without much disposable income, she pulled from the materials she already had — scraps from the scrap bin, her children’s red velvet pants that they’d outgrown, her husband’s old shirts. Eventually, people started giving her their old clothes or unused fabric. 

Rice incorporates fabric from an old cotton rice bag gifted by the artist’s mother as well as fabric from an old Chinese dress the artist and her sister played dress-up in. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

Around this time, Havelka also enrolled in nursing school, hoping to gain a bit more financial stability. “I had no idea what nursing was like,” she says, “but my midwife was also an artist. And I saw her life, and when you’re young — 27, 28, 30 years old — you just don’t know what you’re doing, and I liked how she was doing her life, how she could nurse and be an artist. So I was like, ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I had no idea what I was getting into, but I really liked going back to school.”

Havelka even found inspiration in her nursing classes, especially anatomy and physiology, as she learned more about the body beyond what a model in a life-drawing class would offer. “It just goes deeper. You get into the fluid electrolytes or the cardiopulmonary system; you’re going in and seeing the process of what creates the muscles — the stuff underneath the painting, I guess.”

Immediately, she started designing quilts with linear patterns inspired by the vertebral system. Then the idea of skin, with its wear and tear, came into play. “Skin is the largest organism of the body,” she says. “It’s your first line of defense, and of course you can get into like the whole underlays of skin and skin color and race.” From there, Havelka started staining her fabrics with coffee, tea, wood shavings, rust, and walnuts. She experiments with the fabric’s stains, wears it down, lets it sit out in the sun or rain. “I’ve tortured it, dumped it in water, but I’m giving it some kind of history rather than just picking it from a store. I like the idea of maybe, there’s some kind of struggle. … Each material has its own experience.”

As Havelka “tortured” her piece Skin with staining, fire, and ironing, the recycled cloth began to tear and show wear like skin that is bruised, sunned, and damaged, so the artist “grafted” and “tattooed” the piece with her signature quilting. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

As she delved into her nursing career, she continued making her art, even when her job took her to Germany for five years. While there, she found inspiration in the landscape. Much unlike the flatness surrounding her in Memphis, in Europe, she says, “Everything is up and down and around. … So I got my first vision of what I wanted to do: a quilt basically rolling off the wall.”

Indeed, Havelka wanted to challenge the idea of what a quilt could be; she wanted to break away from the flatness, giving the quilt a structure that curves and bumps on its own. She doesn’t use metal in these quilt sculptures and instead relies on stuffing and the weight of the folds of the fabric itself to function as the bones and muscles. “They’re not permanent; they can still bend,” she says. “So it’s only as large as they can be before they fall on the gravity of themselves.”

Havelka found inspiration for Salmon Skin Fried, the titular piece that hangs in her show, while frying salmon skin and watching it puff up. “I thought, oh, that’s gotta be a quilt,” she says.

In making these sculptures, Havelka doesn’t intend to abandon the tradition of quilting. “I want to do something new with the quilts,” she says, “but I want to maintain the family connection, the history, And so using the clothes, whether it’s from my family and friends, that just keeps with the tradition.” Of course, the sentimental weight these pieces carry has not been lost on her, as she savors each piece, waiting for just the right moment to repurpose it in her art. “Sometimes it’s really hard to cut up,” she says. “But it makes that cut very valuable.”

Through it all, the artist blends the old with the new, letting each material’s experience and history dictate how and when she incorporates it. Even in her show, Havelka has mixed in her earlier work with her newer pieces. In Understory, for instance, she has rested her quilt sculpture on a table she made in college that has since lost its leg. “It’s bridging my past with the present and so what’s buried underneath the Understory is a little bit of my past.”

Understory (Photo: Abigail Morici)

A quilt, by nature, asks you to think about its layers — what’s on top, what’s in between, and what’s underneath; how each piece of fabric works with another as part of a pattern. “It’s an analogy, I think, to human beings,” Havelka says. 

And though her work is quite personal with materials taken directly from her life and her loved ones, she hopes viewers will find a meaning of their own. “It makes me happy to have people see what I’m making,” Havelka adds. “Sharing part of yourself is starting a conversation. If you’re always just stuck in your studio and no one ever sees, maybe it goes to that saying, ‘If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one hears it’ — you have to get it out there. You have to have people see it, and maybe they’ll see something they wouldn’t normally have seen, which makes them think of something they might not have normally thought about, which art is all about.”

As a whole, you could say that Havelka’s work is about facilitating connection — from her work as an ICU nurse to the sharing of personal notes tucked away in a wasp nest to the sewing of sentimental materials gifted from relatives. She invites the viewer to consider the whole picture, the entire pattern, and to find new purpose and beauty in the vulnerable, overlooked, or discarded. As Havelka’s first solo show comes to a close, she looks forward to sharing her work in more galleries and hopes to continue building these connections. 

To keep up with Halveka visit her website or follow her on social media. “Salmon Skin Fried … and Other Delicacies” closes Sunday, March 5th, at Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery. 

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Katrina Perdue’s “Mending in a State of Abundance”

Katrina Perdue repairs objects with hand-stitching. (Photo: Courtesy Katrina Perdue/Crosstown Arts)

After her father passed away, Katrina Perdue began patching a pair of his old jeans, the last pair he’d worn. Though she had knit and sewn a bit before, this was her first time mending a piece of clothing, but the act of repairing loved and worn clothes was therapeutic in itself. “It’s kinda slowing down and having something that’s calm and meditative to do in a busy world,” she says. “I found that it was a very healing process and it really helped me through that grief.”

So, after that first pair of jeans, Perdue turned to mending as often as she could, wanting to bring new life to the materials around her — from her childhood blankie to her daughter’s stuffed bunny to a chair from her partner’s studio. Before long, Perdue broadened her scope beyond the personal. In her exhibit at Crosstown Arts, Perdue has gathered some of these items that she’s mended — some personal, like her blankie, and some not so personal, like a mended plastic bucket found among curb-side trash.

“Part of it is really studying the way something’s made and thinking about how, even though there are these huge factories and these machines, it still requires a human hand to piece those things together, and we are so removed from it,” Perdue says. “In the last 20 years, fast fashion has become a thing and we are now seeing the result of that in how much waste there is — these literal mountains of waste landfills.”

With this in mind, the act of mending, for Perdue, is more than just extending the life of an object; it’s honoring it, too, by not treating it simply as disposable among our material and consumerist abundance. Perdue even uses bright, colorful stitching to highlight this idea. “It brings attention to the wear instead of trying to hide it,” she says. “That’s a metaphor for life, thinking about sharing our struggles, sharing things that are difficult — you know, our scars that are a part of our story.”

“Mending in a State of Abundance,” Crosstown Arts Galleries, on display through March 5.

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From Ari Rozario, With Love

Ari Rozario (Photo: D’Angelo Connell/DC the Snapper)

Visual artist and native Memphian Ari Rozario believes that art is a feeling thing.

Rozario spent her childhood sketching and doodling. Through the years, she’d sketch the Memphis bridge and certain places and experiences on Beale Street that were significant to her. After spending time away living in Atlanta, which became her second home, Rozario now describes Memphis as more of a feeling. “There’s a different feeling to being home and being around all these people who have seen you through all your stages and transitions,” she says. “It makes me feel like this is the right place to be at this moment.”

The artist will host her first showcase back home in Memphis at Seraphim Gallery, December 16th through 18th.

Gold is a common theme in many of Rozario’s pieces, including “The Golden Hour” and “The Golden Hour PT 2,” which can be viewed on her website and will be on display at Seraphim. In these pieces, gold elegantly blooms from one corner of a matte-colored canvas and onto the center. “Gold has a very royal feel to me. It makes the piece captivating,” she says. The gold in Rozario’s art turns the work into what feels like a statement piece — one that belongs in the entryway of a grand home or a sophisticated space.

Though Rozario often has a vision of what her next pieces will look like, ideas are just the start of an ever-changing final product. “The original idea is kind of like the foundational idea. So it can change in the process. That’s pretty normal for me,” she says. Acrylic paint is her primary medium, and one of her favorite colors to use is Montana Black. On the other hand, she also chooses color palettes in the moment and even experiments with different textures.

For Rozario, art has no rules. A typical creative process includes putting her headphones on and getting lost in music as she works. She will listen to music that reflects her current mood or feelings, and those feelings then inspire the finished product. “While I’m creating, nothing else exists,” she says.

When asked what type of audience she hopes to capture through her art, Rozario says it’s all about deeper thinking. “I think oftentimes, people who see art in person kind of just go into a space and say, ‘Let me tell you what I can see.’ It’s unique because it’s different for everybody.”

There can be many perspectives, and Rozario captures this idea in one of her favorite pieces, “One Shot.” As a mixed media piece utilizing monochrome colors and outlines of what can be interpreted as a basketball and basketball net, it has a deeper background message. Captured in its title, “One Shot” is about taking chances and following your dreams. “Whatever it is that you’re going through in life, you got one life to do it. You got one shot to do it,” Rozario says. “One Shot” will be on display at the showcase.

Looking ahead, Rozario has plans for future creations and experiences in the works, like more public opportunities, releases, and speaking engagements. Currently, she is working on releasing merchandise, including T-shirts that say, “From Ari, with love.” Rozario chose this phrase because, she says, “We all just need a little bit of love out there.” She wanted to do something different, to spread love through something more personal. “Whenever I sell a piece, that’s how I feel about it. This piece is from me to you — with love. It’s like a personal little note. It’s like … my little doodle as a child.”

Ari Rozario’s showcase at Seraphim Gallery (437 N. Cleveland) runs December 16th to 18th. “The Path of an Artist” black-tie event will be held the 16th from 6 to 9 p.m. Formal attire is encouraged but not required. From the 17th to the 18th, hours will be from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with no dress code. Find Ari Rozario at arirozario.com, on Instagram and Twitter @AriRozario, and on TikTok @1AriRozario.

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Art Art Feature

“CHOICE” Gallery Show

Artist Loveday Funck writes, "We are fighting a dystopian power struggle in which the powers that be would rather women die in agony than be able to possess any control or agency over their own bodies." (Credit: Courtesy the Artist)

According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37 percent think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

Local artist Stephanie Albion falls in this 61 percent. Once the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked in May, she knew she had to do something to express her anger, frustration, and sadness, so she turned to collage, her mode of communication. She also turned to Danielle Sumler in hopes of reviving the Nasty Women of Memphis.

In 2017, Sumler, along with Chelle Ellis, founded the Nasty Women of Memphis, joining a movement of other Nasty Women chapters throughout the country who were putting on pop-up exhibitions in response to the 2016 election. “The whole thing is, one, giving artists a chance to just express themselves and have a conversation,” Sumler explains, “but also, making it a fundraiser, too. The artist, when they submit their work, price it themselves, but each piece needs to donate at least 50 percent to Planned Parenthood, with the rest going directly to the artist. Some choose to donate more.”

For that first exhibition, Ellis and Sumler had met only a month before opening. “It was very fast,” Sumler says. “I think I was kind of shocked by how well received it was under that timeline. We were packed that opening night. It was really exciting — all the positive responses, not only from the artists who submitted but also all the people who came.”

Nasty Women of Memphis’ opening reception in 2017. (Photo: Nasty Women of Memphis)

That year, Nasty Women art exhibitions spread globally, raising money on behalf of women’s rights, individual rights, and abortion rights, but now most of the chapters are seemingly defunct, including the original New York City chapter. Yet in Memphis, the Nasty Women have put on three exhibitions since that inaugural year. 

The next exhibition opened in 2018 and addressed the Me Too Movement and Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation. The third opened virtually in 2020, responding to all that was 2020.

“We actually closed on the day the election results came in, so that was pretty cool,” Sumler adds. After that, Ellis and Sumler had agreed that the 2020 exhibit would be their last exhibit, feeling that they had said all they needed to say. “We were kind of like, ‘We’ve done this enough, we’ve had our time with it.’” 

But then Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Stephanie Albion reached out to Sumler. “We were like, ‘Well, that’s a perfect reason to wanna do something.’” So on June 25th, the day after the Roe v. Wade reversal, they announced that another exhibition would happen — “another chance to express our rage through art and another chance to support Planned Parenthood.” The show would be titled “CHOICE.”

Angi Cooper’s Objectification Board (Photo: Courtesy the Artist)

The call for artists went out to women, people with uteruses, and all those who support reproductive rights. “It’s really important for us to make it an inclusive conversation because not only does this affect someone who identifies as female, but it affects everyone really.” From there, Sumler, Ellis, Albion, and artist Savana Raught worked together on a volunteer basis to select the more than 80 artists of various media and styles. In the end, the pieces, when put together, touch on a range of emotions coming out of the reversal of Roe v. Wade: frustration, sadness, fear, anger. 

Cheryl Hazelton, who is featured in the show, writes in her artist statement, “I’m terrified of what the future might bring. I need to do something … anything … to support the fight against this obvious aggression.” Meanwhile, Emma Self Treadwell writes, “If it were up to me, I’d line the walls of Congress with uteruses as a reminder that we are here, and we are all around you … so choose wisely what you do with our rights.” 

Mary Jo Karimnia’s The Fall 3 (Photo: Courtesy the Artist)

Overall, each piece points to the consensus that, as artist Jenee Fortier writes, “Access to safe abortion services is a human right. None of us are safe until all of us are safe.”

You can schedule a tour of the show here or by emailing nastywomenmemphis@gmail.com. The group will host a closing reception Friday, October 21st, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. You can also view and purchase work from the show online. Prices start at $10, and proceeds will benefit Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi. 

“CHOICE,” Marshall Arts, 639 Marshall Ave., on display through Friday, October 21st.

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“Revealed”: Jay Etkin’s Exhibition of Czech Artist’s Works

CREDIT: Courtesy of Jay Etkin Gallery

If you saw some guy pointing a cardboard toilet paper tube at you, you’d probably laugh, ham it up, and go along on your way. That’s what most of Czech outsider artist Miroslav Tichý’s subjects did.

Jay Etkin of the Jay Etkin Gallery has an exhibition of drawings and photographs on loan from the Cavin-Morris Gallery. The New York gallery is known for exhibiting artists from around the world, specializing in self-taught artists who make art independently of the art world.

“I feel very honored to have these drawings and photographs,” says Etkin. “Though I tried to get a homemade camera on loan, the Cavin-Morris Gallery turned me down. I don’t blame them.”

Courtesy of Jay Etkin Gallery

Miroslav Tichý’s camera

Once he discovered the works, Etkin wanted Memphis to know this voyeur photographer who took thousands of pictures of women in his hometown in the Czech Republic. His cameras were constructed using cardboard tubes, tin cans, and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware that they were being photographed, striking poses when they sighted Tichý, not realizing that the camera he carried was real.

The brilliance of the photographs is that they are skewed, spotted, and badly printed. His primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes were meant to add poetic imperfections.

Tichý has said, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”

Stop by Etkin’s gallery to bid the works farewell and revel in the perfectness of imperfection.

Closing reception for “Revealed,” Jay Etkin Gallery, 942 Cooper, Saturday, Jan. 2, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., free.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Artist Christina Huntington’s “Recent Still Lifes” at Eclectic Eye

CREDIT: Courtesy Christina Huntington

When Memphis artist Christina Huntington began a weekly series of small, alla prima (wet-on-wet, in one sitting) oil paintings of still life arrangements, she did so as a way to reawaken her dormant art skills. On her website, christinahuntingtonart.com, Huntington states that most of the paintings for this first “real show” were produced in one sitting. The idea, inspired by Carol Marine’s book Daily Painting, is to practice a lot and enjoy it by not getting too invested in getting it right.

But she did get it right and has already sold nearly two dozen pieces framed in black resin or wood frames with glass, cropped to show the raw edges of under-painting, and floated on an off-white mat.

Courtesy Christina Huntington

Christina Huntington’s Seven Radishes

By day, Huntington is a senior information architect at Archer Malmo. She graduated from Rhodes College with degrees in studio art and creative writing but gained her appreciation for art-making from her father who maintained a lifelong art practice. Her mother is a Philippines-born Spaniard and her father is from Mississippi.

“My father is my biggest and first artistic influence,” Huntington says of her late father, who passed away eight years ago. “My mother struggled with English. I often helped her understand during a time when Memphis wasn’t as diverse. This plays into my work as an observer — taking in information and translating.”

Her brushwork in this series depicting fruits and vegetables, flowers, and nostalgic objects balances the illusion of depth and volume while honoring the medium of painting.

“Recent Still Lifes,” Eclectic Eye, 242 S. Cooper, viewable by appointment through the first week of January.

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Cover Feature News

Beside Still Waters: The Life and Art of Jeanne Seagle

CREDIT: Fletcher Golden

Jeanne Seagle’s favorite Bible verse begins, “He leadeth me beside still waters and he restoreth my soul.”

“I’m not religious; don’t get me wrong,” Seagle says. “But I had to learn my Bible verses as a kid. And I remember them. I really like that one.”

Her own still waters are found at Dacus Lake, the subject of “Beside Still Waters,” Seagle’s first one-person art show at L Ross Gallery.

Fletcher Golden

‘Jeanne In Fog’

“My subject matter is the land inside the levee right across the Mississippi River from Downtown. Dacus Lake,” she says. “I have a great affinity for that land. I’ve always loved to go across the river, from the time when I first moved to Memphis. It was so much fun to go ride around in the fields and go down to the sandbars. I go over there a lot. It’s just a great getaway from Midtown Memphis. I can drive over the bridge and be over in the wilderness in 20 minutes.”

Seagle’s show includes 11 large black-and-white drawings and 11 watercolors of the Dacus Lake area. She takes photographs, which she uses for her drawings. “They’re very precise. Very photo-realistic drawings. It takes me about a month to do each one.”

Jeanne Seagle

of Humor,’ News of the Weird illustration for the ‘Memphis Flyer’

During her art career, Seagle, 72, has worked as an illustrator for ad agencies and publications, including the Memphis Flyer, where her cartoons illustrated News of the Weird for many years. Her public art can be seen at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and Methodist University Hospital. Books that feature her illustrations include Mickey and the Golem by Steve Stern and Mommy Without Hair by Selene Benitone.

But Dacus Lake has flowed through her artwork for decades.

In the mid-1990s, before they were married, Seagle and Fletcher Golden spent a lot of time at Dacus Lake, where Golden lived for a while in a mobile home. “I’d just go over every Friday night and ride through the bean fields. I really got to know the land over there. I house-sat for him, and I would just go down to the river and paint and draw.”

The area was a new world for Seagle, who was born in Pueblo, Colorado. “All of my art was about going out to Colorado to visit my family,” she says. “I just did brightly colored paintings of mountains and canyons and mesas and that kind of thing. I’d go out there every year and ride around and paint.”

When her elderly relatives died and she stopped making the trip to Colorado, Seagle was at a loss for subject matter. “I was not all that crazy about the flat Delta land. But little by little I started seeing all the subtle beauty and the surprises you find when you get up close in the swampland and the waterways. And I started making pictures of this Delta land.”

It never stays the same, she says. “It floods every year. It’s inside the levee, and that makes the landscape change. The waters rise and recede. It’s a great place for all kinds of water birds and animals to live. And because it floods every year, it’s not developed. It keeps the humans away. Because of that, there are animals that just roam up and down the Mississippi for hundreds and hundreds of miles. 

“If you go early in the morning, you see these animals. I saw a panther one time when I got up early and was sitting quietly doing some watercolor painting.”

And then there are the trees. “Because it floods, the roads are elevated so that trees grow up around them, but the trees take on very strange shapes, too, because of the Delta tornadoes that come through and tear off the limbs of the trees. They’re all raggedy-looking trees that are so unusual.”

Jeanne Seagle

charcoal pencil on paper

The area does attract some eccentric people, Seagle says. “When Fletcher lived there and I was visiting on a regular basis, there was a bait shop on stilts. It was kind of a community gathering place.”

And, she says, “There were other people living over there at the fish camp — people who don’t like living in civilization. They were people who are close to the land, people who hunt for beaver tails. Just very earthy, country people who have known all about the country, and the last thing they want to do is live in civilization. We got to know them, and that was really interesting.”

Seagle’s love of nature began when she was a child. Her family moved from Colorado to Mississippi when she was very young, then they moved to the woods of Arkansas when she was five. “My father worked for the department of forestry, and he got a job as a forest ranger in Western Arkansas in the Ouachita Mountains. As a little child, I was living in this forest. An only child.”

Seagle spent time drawing and walking through the woods by herself. “Being all alone with no brothers and sisters out in the country was probably a big influence,” she says. “If I’d been living in town and had lots of people to play with, I might not have become an artist.”

She was known for her art ability in school. “I remember in the first grade I would draw tattoos on little boys and I’d draw paper dolls for the little girls. I charged a dime. I kept on doing that all through school. I was the class artist.”

In high school, Seagle took an art class trip to Memphis Academy of Art, which later became Memphis College of Art. “I saw these kids in there that were beatniks. I loved that. I really wanted to be a beatnik. So when I got old enough to go to college, I came up here.”

She moved to Memphis in 1967. “By this time, the Art Academy had all the great people: Ted Rust, Bill Womack, John Mcintire, Burton Callicott, Ted Faiers, Veda Reed, Bill Roberson. Murray Riss started teaching when I was there. It was just wonderful to be around these people, and I got to take classes from all of them.”

Seagle majored in illustration. “When I was a little girl, I loved looking at my mother’s magazines. I really was not exposed to art galleries. We lived in the forest ranger station in Western Arkansas, so the art that I saw was in my mother’s magazines. And I wanted to be a magazine illustrator, a children’s book illustrator.”

Her schooling was interrupted after she married her first husband, a medical student. “My first marriage was very brief — to somebody that I met here in Memphis, and we moved to Los Angeles.” That was “a different lifetime,” Seagle says. “He was gone most of the time, being an intern at the hospital.”

Jeanne Seagle

Jeanne Seagle and Pomegrante Studio

After her divorce, Seagle returned to Memphis, where she completed her degree at the Art Academy.

She took a job as assistant executive designer with Dobbs Houses. “I dressed like the young executives. I wanted to be a young executive. I worked at Dobbs Houses in the interior design department and went to work in a high-rise building and dressed up with hose and skirts.”

Then, she says, “The director of my department was found to be embezzling from the company and the whole department was fired. That’s when I changed. I was fired from the executive track and so I just kind of totally changed then and relaxed and became more of a Bohemian, I guess.”

In 1973, Seagle got a job working with a couple of her classmates, Ellis Chappell and Jim Williams, at The Grafe, the in-house graphics agency for Stax Records. They created and produced Stax album covers.

When The Grafe downsized, Seagle became a founder of Chappell, Williams and Seagle, an illustration studio in the Timpani Building, an old cotton warehouse. The Malmo & Associates ad agency was their biggest client. After five years, they sold the building.

“We made a bunch of money,” Seagle says. “So I just went to Europe, traveled around, went to all the art museums. I came back and I started doing fine art.”

When her money ran out, she went to work for Malmo & Associates.

In 1993, Seagle became a freelancer. A major client was Contemporary Media, Inc., where she became a regular illustrator for the Memphis Flyer. She illustrated the Flyer‘s News of the Weird column for 20 years. “That was great training for what I’m doing now,” she says, “which is obsessive black-and-white drawings.”

Her Flyer illustrations were composed of “little tiny dots,” she says. “You had to be obsessive-compulsive to do it. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now in my landscape drawings. I’m just doing these tiny little marks that take forever to do. Everybody looks at them and says, ‘Oh, my God. You just have such patience to do that.'”

Seagle also began doing public art, landing UrbanArt Commission grants to create mosaic murals on two trolley stops on Madison.

In 2012, she created the 16-foot sculpture, I Can Fly, at Le Bonheur: “It’s a giant obelisk with mosaics on all four sides depicting the seasons with children playing, climbing trees. On top is a giant bluebird about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with a little kid riding on top of it.”

The next year, she created the 16-foot-tall Genome Kids sculpture at St. Jude. She describes it as “a giant DNA helix with whimsical-looking little children climbing it.”

She then did a series of 6-foot square paintings, including “giant painted quilts,” at Methodist.

“I made a lot of money,” she says, “and I was able to, pretty much, retire from commercial art work and turn to fine art.”

She began booking shows, beginning with a one-person show at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena. Then, she says, “Linda Ross called me up and asked me to be in one of her shows. That was really a great turning point in my fine art career, to be able to be in a well-respected gallery. I’ve been in shows with her for five or six years.”

Ross, now retired from the gallery, says, “What has always attracted me to an artist is the movement, the feeling, of the line work in their art. So it’s no wonder that I found Jeanne’s body of work so compelling. She has such a deft hand, whether it’s the broader brush strokes in her quietly moving watercolors or the delicate-layered markings in her stunning penciled landscapes. Simply masterful.”

Jeanne Seagle

‘Flooded Shoreline,’ charcoal pencil on paper

Seagle’s current show at L Ross Gallery was supposed to open in the spring but was pushed back because of the pandemic. Originally, Seagle thought the “the fog, the water, and these stark winter trees” would be “too depressing” for a spring show. “Then, as it turned out, with the pandemic, I don’t think pretty pastel-colored pictures of things would be very appropriate for our world right now. These mysterious, dark pictures are very appropriate.”

“The level of detail and technical skill in these pieces speak for themselves,” says L Ross Gallery owner Laurie Brown. “But, to my mind, what really sets Jeanne’s work apart is her ability to capture the quiet, ephemeral moments of life so exquisitely. You can almost hear the breeze whispering through the branches or feel the cool dampness of the fog.”

As for future plans, Seagle says, “I want to make bigger pictures, and I really want to start being in museums.”

Seagle and Golden, who have been married almost 20 years, live on an acre of land in Cooper-Young. “It’s made the pandemic much more bearable to have all this land, all these trees in our backyard. It really looks like we are living out in the country.”

Seagle still makes the trip to Dacus Lake. “I’m still totally fascinated with this landscape. It’s always changing. The water conditions are always changing. The floods and the water rising, morning and night, and the light — it’s just full of ever-changing subject matter that thrills me.”

“Beside Still Waters” is on view through September 5th at L Ross Gallery.

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Art Art Feature

In the Paint: Robert Fairchild’s Art

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Robert Fairchild’s artwork has evolved from the drawings he made at 5 years old.

“I did crayon drawings,” says Fairchild, 21. “Star Wars characters with lightsabers.”

He continued to draw as he got a little older, but, he says, “I was a big nerd, so I drew a lot of dragons and Halo aliens. Like just really the nerdiest subjects I could draw in my sketchbook.”

Michael Donahue

Robert Fairchild

Now his work is “more about the scene and what the figures are doing in that space and occupying that space.”

Fairchild’s work, which is in private collections, has been shown at Crosstown Concourse and other spaces.

His work began changing when he got to high school. “I guess when I started realizing being a nerd wasn’t too cool,” he elaborates. “So, my subjects definitely changed. As I grew up, I started to value things differently. I valued people around me rather than fantasies. I valued reality more than my imagination.”

Fairchild took steps to become a technical artist. “Just by observation and learning skills such as perspective drawing and how to render a subject,” he says. “I wanted to push my limits to that. I’m still trying to do that. It’s an ongoing process.”

He credits his Houston High School art teachers Amanda Schulter and Bobby Spillman with helping him take his art to another level. “They showed me art could be a career and you could turn it into something pretty incredible.”

He made pencil and gouache drawings of family and friends. “I didn’t have a really sophisticated idea,” he says. “I just loved these people, and I wanted to do a drawing of them.”

But making art wasn’t easy, Fairchild says. “It was very difficult. It’s been a long, hard process to get where I am now. This kind of work took a long time. And art never came easy for me. I always had to work at it pretty diligently.”

He knew he was going to major in art when he entered college. “I was fortunate enough to get a full ride to the University of Memphis with their scholastic scholarship. That was an absolute miracle. That’s why I went to college. They have a great program, and I’ve been studying under Beth Edwards and Jed Jackson. And it’s just been great.”

His teachers helped him create art that makes a statement. “There’s nothing wrong with doing a dog portrait, but figuring out why I’m doing a dog portrait. Having some reason and concept behind it.

“I love Edward Hopper. His work is about telling a story with figures and having a meaningful subject. I kind of take from his aesthetic choices and try to put them into my work. Right now, my pieces are about public interaction and private interaction between people. So, it’s about comfort in a social setting.”

Describing his painting Millennial Moment, Fairchild says, “I worked from a photograph from a New Year’s party two years ago. It took me about three months to make, but that was when I started to see how many figures I could have in a scene and how much movement I could get, as well as show this isolation within a very packed environment.”

It wasn’t a strict depiction of the party, he says. “I’ll alter the scene. I’ll change the color palette and paint certain people abstractedly rather than try to render them. The main figure is a girl on her phone. And there are two larger female figures in the forefront of the painting. And you have some wild movement in the background.

“Every figure in the painting is in black or dark, [except] the main girl in front wearing a big pink puffy coat. And she’s on the phone ignoring everyone.

“I knew I wanted to do a party painting and I wanted a lot of figures and [to demonstrate] the fact that [the party] was in my home,” Fairchild says. “And I wanted to show how nasty it was. It was kind of smoky and gritty and dirty. But it was also a really fun time. It was a memorable party.”

His work now is “less about the figure and more about the environment. Now I’m trying to challenge myself with different materials.”

Fairchild still wants to show isolation in his paintings, but his focus has become less about realistically depicting subjects and has shifted to show a subject with “a gestural depiction of a figure. And that they’re alone.”