Tag: art

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: Kaywin Feldman

Kaywin Feldman was the youngest director ever hired to run the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Beginning January 2nd, Feldman will become the first female director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, one of the 10 largest museums in the country.

Though she’s not an artist herself, Feldman’s always been passionate about art. That led to studying art history and museum management at the University of London, where she received her master’s degree.

As director of the Brooks, Feldman was responsible for bringing in exhibits that would resonate with Memphis’ culturally diverse demographic. She also managed the museum’s staff, dealt with the business side of running the museum, and acquired pieces for the Brooks’ permanent collection. She’ll have similar duties at the Minneapolis Institute, but considering that the Brooks is much smaller than the Minneapolis museum, she’ll have her work cut out for her. — Bianca Phillips

Flyer: What do you anticipate your biggest challenges will be at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts (MIA)?

Feldman: I’ll be running a much larger institution. Our staff at the Brooks is about 50, and the staff at MIA is 300. Our budget’s $5 million. Their budget’s $25 million. We have a 90,000-square-foot building. They have a 400,000-square-foot building. Their collection is 10 times our size.

Any challenges with being the first female director?

I think everyone’s pretty excited to have a female director, so I don’t think there’ll be any problems there.

As the Brooks’ youngest director, did you ever face any age discrimination?

I certainly wouldn’t call it discrimination, but there was definitely a period of skepticism. There’s always a period of that with any new director, but I think it was a little stronger given my age.

How did you decide which exhibits to bring to Memphis?

Because the Brooks shows a little bit of everything, we try to balance out an old masters exhibition with a contemporary art exhibition. We’re very committed to being an inclusive art museum by representing work by other cultures and African-American artists. We have to make sure every exhibition here balances those things.

What was your favorite exhibition at the Brooks?

The exhibition we brought in last fall, which was “Masterpieces from the Fitzwilliam Collection.” It was an English private collection that started in the 17th century, so it included Anthony van Dyck, George Stubbs, and Joshua Reynolds.

Do your preferences affect what exhibits you show?

No, they really don’t. We have to think so much about what will bring people into the museum, and that’s not always necessarily what I like.

Before you began at the brooks, the museum was often criticized for attracting a mostly white audience. Do you feel like you got a more culturally diverse group into the museum?

It’s certainly been a priority for our organization since the day I arrived. I do think we’ve made a difference. We’ve brought in exhibitions that reflect the community. We’ve brought significant numbers of works of art by African Americans to the collection. We’ve increased our African-American programming. We’ve seen results in attendance, as well as membership of the museum.

Which acquisitions for the Brooks’ permanent collection are you most proud of?

We bought a Dutch still-life painting from the 17th century by an artist named Roelof Koets. That’s a very fine Dutch picture. I’m very proud of the Nam June Paik sculpture in the rotunda. In general, I’m pleased with the way we’ve added to the collection of work by African-American artists and the photography collection.

Who will head up the Brooks in the interim?

Al Lyons. He’s on the board of trustees. It usually takes a year from the time the director announces they’re leaving before a new person arrives.

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News

In the Galleries in Memphis This Week …

In her exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery, “The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body,” Jillian Conrad leaps from high to low art and from the utilitarian to the metaphysical as she messes with the meaning of art and asks, “What is real?”

In the first moments of viewing Conrad’s Flat Earth Projections, we see every nuance of color, every chasm, every mineral vein of what could be a stone, a mountain face, or a meteor hurling through space before it burns itself out in the atmosphere. As we adjust to the darkness in the small room in which Flat Earth Projections are placed, we realize the crispest, most detailed artworks in the show have no substance. Conrad has magnified pieces of road rubble and projected their images on the wall …

Read the rest of Flyer art critic Carol Knowles art review here.

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Book Features Books

Grievous Angel

“He was a good Southern boy,” Chris Ethridge said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons. “Loved to rock and roll, sad all the time.”

“With certain people,” Chris Hillman said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons, “you figure there is nothing you can do.”

Ethridge and Hillman were right. Gram Parsons had the wealthy makings of a good Southern boy, and he loved to rock when he wasn’t crooning according to the sounds laid down in Nashville and Bakersfield. At heart, he was a sad guy too, and what could anyone do? Nothing, apparently, but watch as drug usage and drinking landed Parsons — former member of the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers and later solo artist or in partnership with Emmylou Harris — in an early grave.

Parsons died in 1973 at 26. But before he could reach that grave, there was one thing ex-con artist Philip Kaufman could do: honor Parsons’ wish to be cremated and scatter his ashes at a site where Parsons, in life, found peace: Joshua Tree, California.

So, following Parsons’ death, Kaufman and Parsons’ friend Michael Martin stole the coffin containing Parsons’ body in Los Angeles, drove it to Joshua Tree (where Parsons had died of an overdose), poured gasoline on the body, and set fire to it. Then Kaufman and Martin drunkenly hit the road back to L.A. But Parsons’ remains didn’t stay in Joshua Tree for long. Parsons’ stepfather had them flown to New Orleans and buried.

And yet, today, when it comes to Gram Parsons, things still don’t go right. As David N. Meyer reports in the 500-plus pages of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (Villard), the singer-songwriter’s date of birth on his grave is off by two days. But that figures, given the facts of Parsons’ emotionally charged household chronicled in the opening chapters of Meyer’s thoroughly researched and highly readable biography:

Those facts include (but are hardly limited to) the suicidal gunshot death of Parsons’ biological father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, when Parsons was 12 years old and the alcoholically fueled death of Parsons’ mother, “Big” Avis, after she entered into a tumultuous marriage to Robert Parsons, himself a towering alcoholic. And what of “Little” Avis, the sister Parsons adored. In 1991, she and her daughter were drowned in a freak boating accident. And what of Polly, Parsons’ daughter? She’s seeing to her father’s musical legacy in the form of tribute albums, which comes as a surprise, since Parsons hardly saw to Polly’s welfare growing up.

More on his mind was music in all its popular forms, be it rock, country, pop, gospel, folk, R&B, or rockabilly — the more “authentic” and unpolished the better. It was that way when Parsons was a teenager attending prep school in Florida and already playing in bands. And it was that way when Parsons entered Harvard. (“Attended” isn’t the right word; he split after one semester.)

But if Parsons’ sights were on making music, recording that music was another matter. So too, rehearsing. So too, performing, all of which Meyer covers in often depressing detail. Only his late work with a team of seasoned musicians (including members of Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas band) and his duet work with Emmylou Harris gave Parsons the discipline and professionalism he needed — and then only when he put his mind to it. Parsons’ fabled friendship with Keith Richards, no stranger to excess? As Meyer explains, even the Rolling Stones knew when to get down to business and nail the details.

“Gram fled those details, refusing to confront them, thus avoiding the rigor of making good work great and great work immortal,” Meyer writes.

And that’s not all. Meyer condemns the romanticized circumstances behind Parsons’ death and calls the man himself, by turns, “a pathological liar, an unreliable friend, a narcissistic husband and careless father.” Parsons’ sizable talent? “He threw it all away.” In the same breath, though, Meyer will add that Parsons’ “songwriting showcases the bravery with which he described the self he could not bear.”

That’s beautifully put by David Meyer. And though Gram Parsons didn’t write it, that’s just what you hear from Parsons on a song called “Sleepless Nights.”

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Art Art Feature

Plant, Animal, Mineral

In her exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery, “The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body,” Jillian Conrad leaps from high to low art and from the utilitarian to the metaphysical as she messes with the meaning of art and asks, “What is real?”

In the first moments of viewing Conrad’s Flat Earth Projections, we see every nuance of color, every chasm, every mineral vein of what could be a stone, a mountain face, or a meteor hurling through space before it burns itself out in the atmosphere. As we adjust to the darkness in the small room in which Flat Earth Projections are placed, we realize the crispest, most detailed artworks in the show have no substance. Conrad has magnified pieces of road rubble and projected their images on the wall.

For Horizon Line, Conrad placed a stone on a plywood shelf and then outlined the stone’s shape on the gallery wall. The jagged and soaring lines of Conrad’s elegant drawing remind us that the forms of abstraction, as well as landscape, as well as figuration, derive from nature.

Conrad then takes us inside Oz, three gleaming mountain-shaped panels propped up with wooden scaffolding and stones. With this work, she evokes abstract art’s holiest of holies — flat luminous fields of color — then knocks down the facade by revealing the nuts and bolts of mounting a show.

This is an artist who finds art not in discrete objects or esoteric aesthetics but in the way ideas and objects bounce off one another. So what is art; what is real? Conrad’s elegant, iconoclastic exercises in seeing suggest the answer is simple and unknowable all at once.

“Jillian Conrad: The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through December 5th

“Plants: Interior & Exterior,” Montyshane Gallery’s current exhibition, is not your garden-variety plant show.

Nancy White’s ceramic figure Owed To could be a metaphor for Mother Earth or for the Eve-in-us-all, still in the garden, still intimately connected to life. Eve’s slender green body looks freshly hewn from swamp moss and clay. She sits on the earth looking down; small animals rest on her shoulders; flowers sprout from her womb and limbs.

Melanie Spillman, an artist known for her delicate, sensual watercolors of troubled celebrities, chose flowers as her subject for the show. She paints darkness and grit as well as bright petals as she simulates umber weeds and earth with pigmented Mississippi mud.

Owned To by Nancy White, a work in ‘Plants: Interior & Exterior’ at Montyshane Gallery

With the adeptness of a basket weaver, Marian McKinney works the teals/taupes/turquoises of patinaed copper into complex mosaics. Her five-foot-tall copper Birdfeeders stand at the center of the gallery. Their large sunflower faces bend toward one another like human figures in conversation.

Unlike the proverbial young woman who fades into the woodwork and never gets asked to dance, Bryan Blankenship’s white-on-white Wall Flowers are anything but shy. In many flowering plants, female as well as male reproductive organs are phallic shapes. The pistils and stamens of Blankenship’s white flowers come in all shapes and sizes. They reach out from the center of open-mouthed petals producing sexual energy that is palpable.

Bluebells & Blueboys is Blankenship’s large, mixed-media work of painted and sculpted flowers climbing to the top of a ceramic trellis. The title’s allusions — to Gainsborough’s portrait of an 18th-century youth, an underground magazine, a gay night club, and the beautiful bell-shaped flower — remind us of the wide variety of sexual expression in humans as well as plants.

“Plants: Interior & Exterior” at Montyshane Gallery through December 15th

“Anton Weiss: Pursuit,” the current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, includes some of the most evocative abstractions of Weiss’ career.

The works are on large sheets of aluminum. The pigments, instead of soaking into cotton canvas, stay on the surface of the aluminum, accentuating the mutable, free-floating quality of paint and suggesting the constant flux and the nervous energy of our times. Small saturate patches of thalo blue, cadmium yellow, and scarlet are scattered across muted color fields.

Weiss also scatters scratched and gouged scraps of metal across the picture plane. Unpainted patches of aluminum reflect light. This is not the sunlight of the Impressionists or the luminous color fields of Abstract Expressionism but something more brooding and complex.

When Weiss was a child in Europe during WWII, he made a promise to himself “to create rather than destroy, to give back.” What Weiss gives back now — as the world is once again at war — are portraits of life as compelling as any literal or figurative depiction could be. Here are glimpses into truth, the moments of intense pleasure and pain, the forgetting and the letting go.

“Anton Weiss: Pursuit” at L Ross Gallery through November 30th.

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: Carissa Hussong

Who better to replace a founding director than another founding director?

In January, UrbanArt Commission head Carissa Hussong will replace Jim Wallace at the National Ornamental Metal Museum. Wallace, who led the Metal Museum for more than 25 years, will retire December 31st. Hussong has been with UrbanArt since its inception 10 years ago.

Wallace’s spot may be filled, but UrbanArt is still seeking someone to replace Hussong. Applications will be accepted through November 30th. — Mary Cashiola

Flyer: What was the best part of working with UrbanArt?

Hussong: When people don’t know that I have anything to do with UrbanArt and they tell me about a project that we did and how much they love it, then I feel I’ve accomplished something.

Is there a project that has been especially meaningful?

They have different meanings and there are different memories associated with each of them, so it’s hard to pick one.

The Cooper-Young trestle was early on. When I went into it, I felt certain I could find an example of another trestle somewhere.

I called all over the country and everyone said, “That’s a great idea. I can’t wait to see what happens.” There was nothing that showed this had been done anyplace else. I was thinking, I can’t believe I got myself into this. But it ended up being something the community really loved.

What are you eager to do at the metal museum?

I’m looking forward to getting back into the museum world — that’s where I started out — and focusing on the artistic side. So much of what I have been doing has been facilitating.

W>hat will be a challenge for you?

It’s hard to follow in a founding director’s footsteps. I’m not a blacksmith; I’m not an artist. I have to find a way to replace those skill sets.

People have a fear that the museum will change. Yes, we’re moving into the 21st century, but it has to be a balance between growing and preserving what the museum is. I don’t see myself going in there and drastically changing the museum.

W>hat is UrbanArt looking for in your replacement?

Everybody’s initial thought is we have to replace the director. The Metal Museum said we need to find somebody who is a blacksmith and an executive director. That’s a hard thing to find. I think I’m a little easier to replace.

They need somebody with an arts background. Being able to work with our various constituents is really important: the City Council, Memphis City Schools, community representatives. Whoever comes in has to be able to work with those various groups and really engage them in the process.

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Art Art Feature

One for All

It’s all uphill for the peasant who carries a large load of sticks on his back and walks up a plowed field in the early-morning light. We can almost hear the crunch of the man’s feet crossing the frozen furrows and feel the biting cold penetrating his simple cotton jacket and britches in Camille Pissarro’s painting Hoarfrost at Ennery, which now hangs with 39 other groundbreaking works in Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape.”

“There’s no focus; the subject’s inconsequential; and the painting’s dingy and vile,” railed the critics when Hoarfrost at Ennery appeared in the “First Impressionist Exhibition” in Paris in 1874, but novelist and social reformer Emile Zola found Pissarro’s art powerful because of its “extreme concern for the truth.”

It is a fitting footnote to history that 70-plus years after the French Revolution, a self-taught outsider and social anarchist like Pissarro jumpstarted a revolution in art that successfully challenged the social, cultural, and aesthetic attitudes of the day. Curator Katherine Rothkopf’s beautifully nuanced show thoroughly acquaints us with this lesser-known painter whose innovative brushwork, iconoclastic subject matter, and mastery of atmosphere and light rival those of the more famous impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne.

Disenchanted with social and religious as well as artistic hierarchies, Pissarro painted peasants as large as gentry and smokestacks as large as church steeples and found all people, all employment, all weather, all terrain worthy of his art.

Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise

In the evocative, ephemeral Banks of the Oise, Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône, a river flowing past smokestacks in the Paris suburbs reflects the fumes billowing up, blending with clouds in the sky. Homes and landscape are obscured by heavy snowfall in Effect of Snow at L’Hermitage, Pontoise. At the center of View of the Village of Louveciennes, the viewer’s attention is captured and held by thousands of dabs of color that look like brown summer grasses quivering with light.

While all the show’s paintings were created from 1864 to 1874 — the decade leading up to the Impressionists’ first exhibition — the video accompanying the artwork explores Pissarro’s childhood on the Caribbean Island of St. Thomas, Pissarro’s search for the new and unorthodox until his death in 1903 at the age of 73, the impact the Impressionists had on each other’s work, and how these upstart painters dramatically changed the way we look at art and life.

One stunning example of Pissarro’s command of the picture plane is his masterwork Côte des Jalais, Pontoise, with its descending/ascending perspectives. Point of view is plunged into a Paris suburb lining the floor of a valley far below. With a dramatic play of billowing gray clouds backlit by bright white light, the artist draws attention back up to the top of the canvas. An umber, then ochre, then deep-green field of crops covers the slopes of the valley. At the bend in an unpaved road, two strollers come into view. The road’s loose patchwork of dirt and grass fans out at the bottom of the painting, encompassing viewers and reminding us that we, too, are part of these ever-changing patterns of earth, atmosphere, color, and light.

“Pissarro: Creating the Impressionist Landscape” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through January 6th

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News

U of M To Receive Warhol Photos

CREDIT: image: britanica.com

The University of Memphis is one of 183 universities selected to receive original Polaroid photographs and gelatin silver prints by the late Pop artist Andy Warhol.

The photos and prints are being donated by the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program in recognition of its 20th anniversary. More than 28,000 of these works, valued at $28 million, will go to university and college galleries. Each gallery will receive approximately 150 photos.

The photos are expected to arrive at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis in January.

The foundation’s goal for the donation to provide greater access to Warhol’s work.

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Art Art Feature

Just Desserts

To fully experience Delta Axis @ Marshall Art’s current exhibition “Activation,” you had to be there opening night eating cake and looking at brutal images of war.

Creatures flayed beyond recognition were strewn across a butcher block in Rob Canfield’s savage, beautiful oil Slaughterhouse, and the figure that screamed in Canfield’s Thin Red Line looked like the old woman undone by treachery in Bronzino’s 16th-century masterwork Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time.

Jonathan Yablonski’s sleek, 21st-century image of war hung on the opposite wall. Slender lines soared skyward and narrowed at the top of a black skyscraper backdropped by a blood red sky. A human skeleton as large as the high-rise brought to mind the hordes of humanity whose toil and blood build economic and military empires.

In her mixed-media collage, Native, Leila Hamdan painted what it feels like to be hidden away, shamed, and treated like disposable property. A woman totally covered by a black burka, except for eyes that smoldered with rage and regret, shapeshifted into the thick neck, squat torso and stubby legs of a work-horse.

Conceptual artist Sanjit Sethi baked three large cakes for viewers, including one titled “Axis of Evil,” which was decorated with silhouettes of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. We ate the cake from paper plates that were imprinted with the American flag.

Colored pencils and John Morris’ sardonic color-it-yourself print Coloring Colonialism lay on a table against the far back wall. Some viewers added a line or a touch of color to bear witness to the horror depicted. Some viewers turned away. Others, intoxicated by this show’s heady mix of celebration, patriotism, and brutality, colored the scene in ways that further debased the men and women being burned alive by Spanish Conquistadors.

The cakes have been eaten, but the provocative, brutally honest paintings and prints are still on view.

At Delta Axis @ Marhall Arts through November 3rd

Rob Canfield’s Thin Red Line at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts

Emotional battles are fought in Memphis College of Arts’ exhibition, “Threads 11×1, Eleven Artists A Single Vision.”

We see the inner turmoil in Gwyneth Scally’s sienna-red painting Raven, in which a woman howls, tears at her flesh, and tries to crawl out of her skin as her left foot morphs into a bird of prey. We see foreboding in the stern, sad face of a little girl whose left arm is tied to a billowing black cloud in Emily Kalwaitis’ pencil and acrylic wash titled Held. Kristin Martincic’s ceramic sculptures are filled with unresolved longing. Two white legs in Waiting materialize out of an equally white wall, bend at the knees, and strain to touch the plot of real grass just beyond reach on the floor below.

Conceptual artist and writer Buzz Spector tops off these hauntingly noir works with Black Waterfall, a mixed-media sculpture in which tattered threads unravel and cascade down seven feet of black denim, bringing to mind torn curtains and pierced veils. Instead of white light, Spector and the other artists in this exhibition explore the shadows, the unresolved angers and fears, the dark clouds that gather inside and above us all.

At MCA through November 8th

Running in conjunction with this weekend’s RiverArtsFest in South Main is the “RiverArtsFest Invitational Exhibition” at Jay Etkin Gallery. Roger Cleaves’ robotic, cartoon-like characters skulk, stalk, strangle, and stab each other across every square inch of his paintings. In sharp contrast to Cleaves’ sly satire, Cynthia Thompson sculpts delicate understated paper works that tell us about the quiet, gentle wisdom of the body, and Ian Lemmonds’ images of plastic toys combined with evocative light create a tableau of possibility and joy. At Jay Etkin Gallery, October 26th-October 28th

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We Recommend We Recommend

A Fest First

While the RiverArtsFest is having its debut this weekend, it’s not really new. The visual and performing arts festival, hosted by the South Main Arts District, has its roots in Arts in the Park, the much-beloved annual event that was held in various locations, including Overton Park and the Memphis Botanic Garden.

Some of the early Arts in the Park organizers have come together again to work on RiverArtsFest, according to Jay Etkin, owner of Jay Etkin Gallery. Etkin, whose gallery was chosen to host the invitational exhibit for the festival, is in a unique position. A veteran of Arts in the Park as well as an established gallery owner on South Main Street, Etkin values both the artistic and the commercial sides of the festival. “The festival can share an audience with the Main Street stores and restaurants,” Etkin says. “Everyone can benefit from it. It’s syncretistic.”

For former Arts in the Park devotees who may be skeptical of the more urban atmosphere of the new RiverArtsFest, Etkin has only assurances.

“It’s very much like Arts in the Park,” says Etkin, with a grin, “only with much less grass.”

RiverArtsFest, Friday-Sunday, October 26th-October 28th, South Main Arts District. Admission is free. For more information, go to riverartsfest.org. (At Right: Painting by Roger Cleaves at jay Etkin Gallery.)

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News The Fly-By

Painting the Town

On the north wall of 300 South Main, in a downtown neighborhood known as the arts district, the future of a mural is in jeopardy.

For more than 20 years, the wall has been home to “Taking Care of Business,” a mural created by a group of students under the supervision of celebrated local artist George Hunt. It was one in a series of murals created around the city during 1983, and one of only two murals remaining.

However, a local businessman’s plans to renovate the building have cast doubt on how long the mural will exist.

Divine Mafa, who recently leased the building from the Church of God In Christ, arranged to have the building — and the mural — repainted a dark teal. Mafa has several businesses downtown and plans to open a clothing boutique on the property in early November.

“I didn’t even know it was a painting,” Mafa says. “I thought it was graffiti. … The brick is bad, and the people [who originally created the mural] never primed it and never repaired the brick.”

Mafa’s plans for the mural were thwarted, for the time being, by a concerned South Main resident.

Hank Cole, one of the founders of the South Main Association, has passed the mural every day since it was created. When he discovered it was in jeopardy, he immediately contacted the Memphis Landmarks Commission and even went so far as to park his truck on the sidewalk to prevent painting crews from destroying the artwork. An injunction from the Landmarks Commission temporarily halted the project.

‘Taking Care of Business’ in its infancy

“The whole thing came up so suddenly,” Cole says. “I just noticed it and tried to do something about it.”

According Cole, Mafa had not obtained the necessary permit to change the wall. “We’re a preservation district,” Cole says. “All projects that change the face on a building must be approved by the Landmarks Commission.”

Mafa says he obtained the necessary permit October 19th.

But Cole, Mafa, and COGIC-attorney Jay Bailey decided recently that the mural will stay intact until a mutually beneficial agreement can be reached.

Mafa asserts that he has the right to paint the building whenever he chooses but is giving the arts community until December 1st to come up with a plan.

“I could paint now,” he says, “but I’m not going to. … I am a businessman first. I want my business to look attractive.”

David Simmons of LongRiver Art/Source, George Hunt’s gallery, says the artist has qualms about the condition of the mural.

“We’ve talked about these murals in the past, and he felt that they had been neglected,” Simmons says. “When people talked about saving them or restoring them, his opinion was to let them live their life or paint over them.”

Bennie Nelson West, who originally helped organize the mural project in 1983, agrees. West, now director of the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, says the best option is to find funds to paint a new mural over the old one.

“And maybe do a few more around the city,” she adds hopefully.