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).
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.
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)
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.”
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Courtesy of Jay Etkin Gallery 
Courtesy Christina Huntington