Tag: art

Categories
News

Brooks Museum Names Interim Director

A lifelong Memphian is taking the reins, on an interim basis, of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Effective January 1, 2008, Al Lyons will oversee the daily operations of the museum while the search continues for a permanent director. Kaywin Feldman leaves the post at the end of 2007 to take a position at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Feldman describes Lyons as a “passionate trustee of the Brooks for over three years [who] has served with dedication on a variety of committees. He and his wife, Jan, are immense arts supporters who will work hard to further the museum’s mission in the community.”

A graduate of the University of Memphis with a BBA in accounting and a background in finance and psychology, Lyons has been president of the Bodine Company in Collierville for 12 years and will retire this year. He serves on the boards of Ballet Memphis, Memphis in May, RivertArtsFest, and the Collierville Chamber of Commerce, in addition to acting as vice president of the Brooks Board of Trustees.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

The Aristocrats

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was a radical aesthete and completely obsessed with surfaces. It’s his indulgent (and totally unironic) voice ringing out in The Picture of Dorian Grey, declaring the complete uselessness of art. It’s sometimes helpful to remember that much of the wicked wit’s finest work was intended to be digested as art for art’s sake and to revel in the comic craftsmanship.

The Importance of Being Earnest is so obstinately unimportant, it’s utterly meaningless: a bad pun wrapped up in an absurd sex farce artfully doodled over two symmetrical hours. It’s a nouveau puzzle box that revels as much in the perversity of its own cucumber-sandwich-eating decadence as it does in the cognitive dissonance of Victorian morality. It’s an enduring hymn to hypocrisy and grotesque seriousness, and Germantown Community Theatre has done it up like a proper English tea — with lots of lumps and cake.

Director John Rone and set designer/actor Bill Short have created a versatile space filled with glass buddhas, exotic masks from far-off lands, and a big squiggly painting that may or may not look exactly like a mighty scrotum. It’s a visual feast of high-toned whimsy that uses small gestures to make the most out of GCT’s matchbox stage.

“Ignorance is a delicate, exotic fruit,” says Wilde’s practically perfect ingenue Gwendolyn Fairfax (sounding for all the world like a foreign correspondent for Fox News). Gwen lives in the city but detests crowded places and wishes to marry Jack Worthing mainly because she thinks his name is Ernest, though it isn’t (but it is). “Touch it and the bloom is gone,” she says, in praise of her beautifully undefiled (ahem!) mind. Mary Buchignani, a rock-solid comedian who almost never fails to satisfy, delivers these iconic lines like they were newly minted and just for her. Her nearly sociopathic moral flexibility and reflexive preening makes her the perfect foil for Laurence Goodwin’s brassy soubrette take on Cecily Cardew, the earthy and iconoclastic country heiress who is in love with the wickedly witty Algernon because she thinks he’s bad (which is true) and because she thinks he’s Ernest (which isn’t).

It’s been suggested that Lady Bracknell’s response, upon discovering that Jack Worthing was a foundling discovered in a handbag in Victoria Station, is the most diversely interpreted snatch of dialog in the history of the English-speaking stage. Veteran actor and director Jo Malin returns to the stage after a long absence to put her stamp on Wilde’s famous gorgon. “You can hardly imagine that I would dream of allowing a girl brought up with the utmost care to marry into a cloakroom,” she asks with cool, ironic bewilderment. “To form an alliance with a parcel?” Very nearly perfect.

Jason M. Spitzer and Julie Reinbold turn in textbook performances as the Reverend Dr. Chasuble (a randy cleric) and Miss Prism (the no-less-randy governess). Justin Willingham charms as the irascible Algernon. Only Tripp Hurst, weighted down by a British accent he can’t quite get control over, fails to make the most of Wilde’s deliciously sly banter.

Rone has turned in a smart, vibrant, often snappy, and always stylish production of a certifiable classic, finding lots of new laughter along the way. The cast, with noted exceptions, is very nearly perfect. The director’s command of the material is as obvious as it is impressive, and his choreographed set changes are nearly as much fun to watch as the scenes. And yet, in spite of all this, everything stalls in the second act. Just as the farce starts to unwind, this Earnest starts to run out of steam without ever completely running out of charm.

The logical inversions that Wilde employs may be clever to the last, but they aren’t completely unpredictable. It doesn’t help that his barbs have set the standard for jokes about marriage for the last century. If the actors don’t maintain a brisk pace, all the verbal gymnastics can seem ridiculously ornamental and cumbersome. Considering that the play’s big final punch line is so deliberately bad (“I’ve now realized … the vital importance of being earnest”), speed may sometimes be preferable to more obvious virtues.

At Germantown Community Theatre through October 21st

Categories
Art Art Feature

Something Old, Something New

Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints,” the current exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, chronicles a pivotal moment in the history of art. The prints’ titles (Pictograph, Hieroglyph, Omen, Voyage, Aura) tell the story. From 1933 to 1948, the time frame during which these works were created, Gottlieb printed and painted his way through other artists’ styles and the motifs of other cultures and, with the help of surrealism, recorded images from his own dreams and personal visions.

In the 1945 etching Untitled (E # E), two necks grow from each side of an upside-down face whose features have been rearranged by cubist distortion. Whorls morph into waves into phalluses into snakes into fingers. One of these fingers presses into the body of a large fish-like creature whose mouth opens wide with surprise.

In this and many of the other prints in the show, Gottlieb develops an increasingly original, gestural, nonrepresentational style that foreshadows the work of the abstract expressionists (Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline et al.), artists who changed the face of art in this country and around the world.

At AMUM through October 20th

You’ll find the most unsettling, show-stopping symbolism at L Ross Gallery in Margaret Munz-Losch’s exhibition, “Damnatio Memoriae.” An armadillo sits inside a rotting cypress stump in Munz-Losch’s primordial six-foot-tall painting Lullaby: Madonna of the Moss. Instead of her own litter of pups, the armadillo holds an armless human baby whose left eye is milky white. Fire ants march around the infant’s forehead like a crown of thorns.

Adolph Gottlieb image: Adolph and Estther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by Vaga, NY, NY, AEGF #4682P

The armadillo is either cradling or consuming the infant. Both readings are possible in a world where life, death, and decay are inseparable. Saplings grow out of rotting logs; cypress knees thrive in fetid, microbe-rich waters. This work’s subverted religious symbols, swampy environment, and green vines wrapped around cars and a school bus suggest that the lullaby the Madonna/armadillo croons to the infant goes something like this: Neither textbooks nor creeds nor motorized vehicles can deliver us from nature which, ultimately, reclaims everything. The more we try to insulate ourselves inside our books, inside our minds, inside our cars — the more we miss out on life’s raw beauty and power.

At L Ross Gallery through October 27th

Using skills and sensibilities learned from Chinese landscapists and sculptors of miniature stone mountains, Michael Costantini casts lean weathered bronzes whose irregular surfaces look architectural, organic, and geologic. In Perry Nicole Fine Art’s current exhibition, “Michael Costantini,” these evocative totems look like beams of a skyscraper excavated in some distant future, 200-year-old saguaro cacti whose wounds have been faithfully recorded, and/or vertical rock faces blanketed with moss and lichen.

Costantini’s acrylic paintings are also composed of rough-edged, irregular geometries. Scumbled and overlapping blue, beige, and indigo rectangles in The Outer Banks hover and shift like the seas/sands/storms of the coastal community in North Carolina where Costantini lives.

At Perry Nicole through October 29th

Hamlett Dobbins’ abstract paintings are visual shorthands for patterns as simple as the shape of a friend’s head and for processes as complex as the evolution of friendship. In his David Lusk Gallery exhibition, “Every One, Every Day,” Dobbins digs deep into mind and matter and paints what look like shadows moving across mental and physical landscapes, moisture oozing through cellular membranes, the centrifugal force of orbiting planets, and worm holes in facets of light.

Two of the show’s most understated works clearly demonstrate Dobbins’ mastery of color and light and, like much of Dobbins’ art, evoke a synesthetic response. A 3 o’clock sun blazes at the bottom of Untitled (for L.T./G.M.). Alternating layers of transparent yellows and greens turn the canvas into a meadow shot through with light. What looks like a piece of fabric, stained green and gold, billows at the top of the painting. Stand in front of this work, and you’ll feel sun on your body, breezes in your hair.

Two golden diamonds overlap and fill Untitled (for L.T./J.V.T.). At each of the diamond’s tips are small portholes. Like the view through a keyhole in a Dutch masterwork, you’ll see detailed worlds through these portals. Complex patterns of cumulus clouds float through 10 different shades of blue above forested hillsides, crows on pitted stone walls, and meadows covered with grains and grasses.

These small, surprisingly complex scenes demonstrate Dobbins’ skill at landscape as well as abstraction and prove him to be a magician whose sleights of hand and mastery of materials teach us to look, really look, at each scintilla of shape, color, and light.

At David Lusk through October 27th

Categories
News The Fly-By

Art Felt

CREDIT: Courtesy of Carpenter | Sullivan | Sossaman

As part of a new campaign called “With or Without,” the urbanArt Commission created two booklets. The first, labeled “with,” has pictures and information on 17 of the group’s more than 70 completed projects. The complementary book, labeled “without,” is more than without: It’s completely blank.

“It really came out of conversations with the board of urbanArt,” says member Doug Carpenter. “I think most people are not aware of the breadth of work urbanArt has done over the past 10 years.”

As part of its 10th anniversary, and with an enhancement grant from ArtsMemphis and help from Carpenter’s ad agency Carpenter|Sullivan|Sossaman, urbanArt aims to make Memphians aware of what the city would be like without them. The group plans to run print ads and has a new Web site, withorwithout.org.

“We’ve grown up,” urbanArt executive director Carissa Hussong says of the site. “We look better now.”

The urbanArt Commission began with seed money from the Greater Memphis Arts Council, recently rebranded as ArtsMemphis. Their first project — the one that was supposed to be a demonstration piece for public art — was the main library on Poplar.

“As the main library project began, we asked, How do you make this building a unique gem for the city? Public art is a way to make sure you are creating a landmark,” Hussong says.

But the library project — and perhaps the entire commission — came at the right time. Other projects began with Ballet Memphis and the Hope and Healing Center and were completed before the library.

One of the most striking images from the Web site is a picture of Jill Turman’s trestle in Cooper-Young and what the abandoned railroad tracks had looked like before.

“When we were first approached about the trestle project, I said I’ll come back with a bunch of images and show you what’s been done in other communities,” Hussong says. But she couldn’t find any. “There were none.”

Now completed, the trestle has received national attention, both from arts organizations and from other communities as they wrestle with what to do with similar train tracks.

Since it began, urbanArt has completed dozens of projects throughout the city, many of them at community centers. Both the city of Memphis and the Memphis City Schools have a percent-for-art program, which allots 1 percent of a capital project’s funding for public art.

Hussong says cities like Chicago, New York, and Seattle have had a longer history of public art, both commissioned by the local governments and by private individuals and corporations.

“Other communities have had a more continuous commitment to art. That’s why people here don’t see as much as they think they should,” she says. “We don’t have a tradition of doing that.”

For its 10th anniversary, urbanArt is doing an exhibition entitled “Interactions/Interruptions.” The exhibition will include a show of drawings and photographs of previous urbanArt projects and 10 temporary public art installations. One, proposed by local artist Tad Lauritzen Wright, will wrap street trees in blue vinyl bands. Another, by Memphis-born Phillip Lewis, will transmit the sound of the Mississippi River around greater Memphis.

The biggest change in the 10 years that urbanArt has been around is that “people see the value of public art,” Hussong says. Before, they would have to explain how public art could enhance Memphis.

“Now we don’t have to do that,” Hussong adds. “The reaction is that there is not enough [public art]. … For me, it’s about who we are as a community and what we want to be. It’s about visually expressing our heritage.”

Public art can define a city’s spaces; it can take something utilitarian and mundane and make it memorable. And in a world of Starbucks and WalMarts, being unique is no small feat.

“It’s about creating a sense of place. You can say, we’ll meet by the sculpture,” Hussong says. “It becomes a way of seeing your community and creating gateways.”

The trestle is a perfect example of a landmark that defines a neighborhood both spatially and architecturally. Since the piece was installed, “Cooper-Young” has crept north to meet it.

“The trestle is now part of Cooper-Young’s recognized border. It’s changed the impression of the space,” Hussong says. “You can’t pick it up and stick it somewhere else.”

But the “With or Without” campaign comes about in part because urbanArt has done its job so well.

“They forget we were ever involved,” Hussong says. “That means we did our job. It’s part of their experience and their neighborhood.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Crafters’ Paradise

The Memphis weather has gone from wretched to nearly perfect with the flip of a calendar page, so that must mean it’s October. And if it’s October, it must mean it’s time to partake in the Pink Palace Crafts Fair. Celebrating its 35th year, the fair has become a mainstay in Memphis across generations.

The fair runs Thursday through Sunday, October 4th through 7th, at Audubon Park. This year’s lineup is impressive. Among other things, there’ll be demonstrations of weaving, rug hooking, chair caning, glass blowing, tatting (it’s not making tattoos, I looked it up), spinning, blacksmithing, and broom making, so put that in your gristmill.

For the tots, there’ll be a petting zoo, children’s train, sand art and pinch pots for the making, and fossil cleaning. For the kids at heart, the Memphis Society of Model Railroaders will be on track, and for the kids in profile, Oliver Belote will be on hand making silhouettes. Plus, you know, crafts by the ton will be for sale.

FYI: The traditional 35th-anniversary gift is coral (pink, natch) and the modern gift is jade. Now you know just what to buy at the fair.

Pink Palace Crafts Fair, Audubon Park, Thursday-Saturday, October 4th-6th, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Sunday, October 7th, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission at the gate is $7 adults, $5 seniors, $3 children under 12. Two-day passes are $12. Go to memphismuseums.org

for more information.

Categories
Best of Memphis Special Sections

Arts & Entertainment

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Watch more than one episode of a reality show such as “Super Nanny” or “Project Runway” or “Dog Whisperer” or any of the home-design shows (or “Flava of Love,” for that matter), and you’ll notice a theme: Consistency matters. The winners of this section are a reminder of that point. Of the 13 categories, 11 of the first-place winners were in the same spot last year. One exception was in the “Best Local Athlete” category, for which there was no clear winner. But it’s the other category — “Best Sports Team” — which is particularly telling and proves the consistency maxim. Last year, the Grizzlies ruled. This year, after a very disappointing season, they’re in third place behind the (undeniably hot) University of Memphis men’s basketball team at number one and the Memphis Redbirds (who had an awful season themselves) at number two.

Best Golf Course

1. The Links at Galloway

2. TPC at Southwind

3. The Links at Overton Park — tie —

Spring Creek Golf Course

Tucked into one of our city’s nicest neighborhoods, Galloway has been one of our city’s finest courses for almost half a century. A recent multimillion-dollar renovation made something good even better, with much nicer fairways, greens as flat as a pool table, a lovely clubhouse that replaced the stone-covered building — all in a parklike setting.

Best Museum

1. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

2. Memphis Pink Palace Museum

3. Children’s Museum of Memphis — tie —

Dixon Gallery & Gardens — tie —

Stax Museum of American Soul Music

The oldest art museum in Tennessee continues to draw crowds to its galleries. Originally a tiny jewel box in Overton Park, a massive expansion project helped turn the Brooks into one this country’s top museums.

Best Art Gallery

1. David Lusk Gallery

2. Jay Etkin Gallery

3. D’Edge Art & Unique Treasures

We’ve spent many fine evenings attending openings at David Lusk, which features an outstanding roster of artists. They also host an absolutely-have-to-be-there event for Memphis art lovers — “The Price Is Right,” an annual sale of works for under $1,000.

Justin Fox Burks

Best Live Theater

1. Playhouse on the Square

2. The Orpheum

3. Theatre Memphis

Jackie Nichols’ Playhouse on the Square has consistently presented top-notch performances for more than a quarter century. Operating out of the old Memphian movie theater on Cooper, Playhouse is in the midst of erecting a state-of-the-art facility across the street, which will provide them even greater opportunities.

Best Movie
Theater

1. Malco Studio on the Square

2. Malco Paradiso

3. Muvico Peabody Place

We can remember when the only thing that stood behind Paulette’s was a parking lot. Then Malco had the idea to construct a “boutique” theater, one with intimate auditoriums and featuring films that somehow missed the larger circuits. Well, that gamble paid off, big time, and Studio on the Square is without question one of the best places in town to watch a movie.

Best Casino

1. Horseshoe Casino

2. Grand Casino

3. Sam’s Town

Our readers must feel lucky at the Horseshoe, a perennial Best of Memphis winner. Horseshoe also features some of the coolest musical and comedy acts on tour.

Best Picnic Spot

1. Shelby Farms

2. Overton Park

3. Chickasaw Gardens Lake/Pink Palace Museum

On weekends, it’s getting harder and harder to find a nice quiet spot to set down a blanket and have a picnic, but we agree that Shelby Farms probably offers the most choices, and it is an amazing thing to “get away from it all” even though you are still smack-dab in the middle of everything.

Best Place To Meet Singles

1. Church

2. Online

3. Beale Street

This category certainly told us a lot about our readers. We’d hoped that those of you who went to church did so for spiritual enlightenment and not to check out the hot chick or guy in the choir.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Live Theatre

Best Free Date

1. Mississippi River

2. Shelby Farms

3. Memphis Zoo on Tuesdays

We hope that everyone who listed “Mississippi River” meant watching the river from the safety of Tom Lee Park or some other vantage point, or maybe even boating in it (though not too many people we know seem to do that, for some reason). At any rate, we hope you didn’t mean swimming in it.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Free Date

Best Family
Entertainment

1. Memphis Zoo

2. Redbirds Game

3. Children’s Museum of Memphis

The Memphis Zoo seems to be a hit with our readers for any number of reasons. Perhaps because it really is one of the best zoos in the country.

Best Sports Team

1. University of Memphis Tiger
Basketball

2. Memphis Redbirds

3. Memphis Grizzlies

We’re anxiously waiting to see if the Tigers get a #2 — even #1 — preseason ranking, but no matter how they play, Coach Cal’s Tigers have captured the hearts of Memphians.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Family Entertainment

Best Grizzlies
Player

1. Pau Gasol

2. Mike Miller

3. Rudy Gay

When the Grizzlies first came to town, all anyone talked about was a fellow named Shane Battier. But a lanky Spaniard also began to pile up points in the paint, and when Battier jumped ship, Gasol quickly became the fan favorite. We keep hearing all this talk of trades, but new coach Marc Iavaroni insists Gasol is here to stay. We hope so.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Grizzlies Player

Best Local Athlete

READERS’ CHOICE

Pau Gasol

DeAngelo Williams

Mike Miller

Loren Roberts

John Daly

Chris Douglas-Roberts

One of our colleagues, who knows quite a bit about sports in Memphis, recently declared that if Memphis ever put up a statue to its greatest athlete, it would have to decide between Larry Finch or Pau Gasol. Coach Finch didn’t garner many votes this time, and nobody drew enough votes for us to declare first-, second-, or third-place finishes, but our readers love their sports, naming players from basketball, football, and golf.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Upside Down and Inside Out

In her exhibition “Beth Edwards: Inside Out” at David Lusk Gallery, Edwards’ saturate, surreal paintings take us deep inside memory and the creative process and, along the way, turn some of Baudrillard’s postmodern notions inside out. Instead of viewing representations (what Baudrillard calls “simulacra”) as perversions or pretenses of reality, Edwards welcomes all images as raw materials that feed her imagination.

All color schemes and combinations of high-and-low art are possible in Edwards’ worlds. In Happy Day, an exuberant anthropomorphic mouse stands in front of an orange divan and plastic plant and looks at the painting of a human figure fractured by cubism. In Annunciation, a baby doll with a green face and orange hair stands in a royal-blue room looking out an open window. In Edward Hopper-like fashion, sunlight pours into the otherwise empty room creating a geometric pattern on the wall.

All of Edwards’ art is filled with spirit and anointed with light. With the vintage dolls, cartoon characters, and modernist paintings of her mid-20th-century childhood, Edwards builds highly expressive worlds that suggest what is most “real” is unfettered memory and imagination.

“Beth Edwards: Inside Out” at David Lusk Gallery through September 29th

“NIA: Salon 3,” Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts’ current exhibition, showcases established artists and newcomers in an unsettling, exhilarating group show that depicts the world at a boiling point.

Frank D. Robinson’s mesmerizing installation, Full Support, covers the entire back wall with 21st-century posters and paraphernalia. In the large mixed-media painting, Baby Jesus, Ron Herd creates a mosaic of the hopes/needs/fears that drive us all. Crowns, crosses, and doves are everywhere. Large transparent wings flank Christ’s body. Red flames burn inside him, and his crucified feet cradle an ebony baby with an all-seeing eye.

Ron Herd’s Baby Jesus

A charred lump of clay, dressed in crudely stitched burlap, stands at the end of a road blown into rubble in Dail Chambers’ mixed-media installation Crossroads. While Chambers records what happens when disparate points of view collide, Aundra McCoy’s Spirit Dolls provides hope that the world’s cultures and creeds might find a way to co-exist. McCoy’s beaded and feathered fetishes are filled with spirit all-embracing and all-encompassing enough to weave Middle Eastern, Native-American, and African motifs into one exquisitely beautiful work of art.

“NIA: Salon 3” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through September 29th

Two of the most cogent images in Jonathan McNabb’s exhibition “New Works,” at Eclectic Eye, take us inside a cathedral and an abandoned prison.

In the silver gelatin print, Notre Dame Cathedral, Christ still hangs on the cross near the ceiling but is almost lost in the shadows. Candles burn far below.

In Prison Interior, light pours through the crumbling walls and jail cells of an abandoned correctional institute, where pictures of family members, Hollywood stars, and comedians are still tacked to the walls. The sunlight pouring through empty jail cells brings to mind Christ’s message — more powerfully than the shadowy scene of the crucifixion in a grand cathedral — of stones loosened, tombs emptied, and darkness pierced by light.

“Jonathan McNabb: New Works” at Eclectic Eye through October 3rd

Photo artist Ian Lemmonds is another artist who finds beauty and hope in unexpected places. Five out of eight prints in “Serial Monogamy,” Lemmonds’ current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, consist of piles of Barbie doll legs backdropped by various shades of monochromatic tiles. Light reflecting off the plastic and ceramic surfaces transforms the legs into glowing bouquets. The slender, long-stemmed shapes counterpoint the square tiles on which they lie. Lemmonds captures our attention with body parts placed in obscure settings. As we stand transfixed, searching for metaphor and meaning — is there something titillating, prurient, or brutish about these dismembered limbs? — he surprises us with an experience of beauty that means everything and nothing.

Another untitled print has a similar effect. Two minuscule human figures look at a huge luminous plastic rabbit materializing out of the floor. This is not the radioactive creature that ate New York. Instead, a father hoists his son onto his shoulders to better see the limpid-eyed creature embued with something like hope and the suggestion that beauty and wonder are all around us.

“Serial Monogamy” at L Ross Gallery through September 30th

Categories
News

“Memphis” is Back — Now With “Wow” Effect.

The headline reads: “Love it or loathe it, Memphis style with its color and kitsch is back.” But it’s all about the “Memphis” design group of Milan, Italy. And, yes, they’re back.

From the International Herald-Tribune: There were a couple of lessons for design buffs to learn from the last round of contemporary design auctions. One was that design, like art, is becoming vertiginously expensive. Another was that Memphis is back again.

Yes, Memphis. Remember the Milan-based group of designers and architects, who split the design world after their 1981 debut? There were those who loved the postmodernist wit of their kitsch, colorful furniture, and others that loathed it. Like Diva, the De Lorean DMC-12, Bow Wow Wow singles and Betamax video cassettes, Memphis was then dismissed as an early 1980s blip. There still isn’t a stick of the stuff in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

All that’s changing — MoMA’s antipathy apart. Among the most sought-after lots at Phillips de Pury’s most recent New York design sale were 1980s pieces by Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Branzi, both Memphis designers, and Alessandro Mendini, who was their chief collaborator in the Studio Alchymia design group during the late 1970s. All of Memphis’s hallmarks – super-sizing, dizzy colors, gaudy patterns and cheesy motifs – were visible in the most directional pieces at this spring’s Milan Furniture Fair.

They will surface again at this week’s London Design Festival. And cool young designers are suddenly citing Memphis and Studio Alchymia as inspirations.

“It’s the wow effect,” said Job Smeets, co-founder of Studio Job, the Dutch design duo whose Memphis-inspired objects often grace the windows of the Moss design store in New York. “When I open old Domus magazines and see those amazing pieces by Sottsass and Mendini, they seem so emotional and expressive. How were they able to think of those crazy shapes?”

Read the rest.

Categories
News

Art Wars: Fisk U. vs. O’Keefe Museum

Art wars between the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Nashville’s Fisk University have ended with the museum withdrawing a lawsuit demanding that Fisk give the museum the Alfred Stieglitz collection.

O’Keeffe donated the collection — named for her husband — to Fisk in 1949. The most recognizable piece from the collection is O’Keeffe’s Radiator Building — Night, New York. The collection also includes works by Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Marsden Hartley.

Fisk has since fallen on hard financial times. With the collection as one of its major assets, university president Hazel O’Leary proposed to sell two of its pieces in 2005. The O’Keeffe Museum sued, arguing that the sale would violate the rules of the donation.

O’Keeffe wrote in a 1949 New York Times editorial that the institution could sell whatever pieces it did not have use for after 25 years.

The Crystal Bridges Museum, under construction in Bentonville, Arkansas with Wal-Mart money, is said to have made a $30 million offer to split exhibition rights for the collection.

Categories
Book Features Books

The Funnies

CREDIT: Glenda Guion

Dateline: Ember Glow, a mound of raw granite in upstate South Carolina, which means it could just as easily be a half-buried asteroid in the middle of nowhere. But it’s home to a talented sculptor named Harp Spillman, whose drinking runs to a quart of bourbon a day; Spillman’s wife, Raylou, a ceramicist who makes a good living making “face jugs”; and a dozen snapping turtles, which Raylou recently rescued from the testing lab of an evil biotoxicologist.

Turtles saved from poisoning, it’s time someone saved Spillman from the quarter-century he’s spent perfectly soused. And what may be worse: He’s in deep trouble with the state Republicans, because the lifelike heads of prominent party leaders, which Spillman sculpted out of ice for a fancy fund-raiser, melted down to the core by the end of the evening. So: Inside that icy blockhead known as Newt Gingrich — and thanks to Spillman’s artistic skills (and leftist sympathies) — members of the Grand Old Party discovered the face of a real party animal: Koko (the gorilla).

But things are looking up for Spillman, because he’s just gotten a major public-art commission from the city of Birmingham to build a dozen 12-foot angels out of rebar and hex nuts, and he’s got 12 months to finish the job. Time enough to clean up his act if Spillman will agree to check into rehab and take some steps: the 12 Steps. So he does, and then he doesn’t, because, in no time, Spillman’s had it with both rehab and AA. But if it means keeping the commission (and holding onto Raylou), he’ll go cold turkey. And that’s with or without the help of a fellow alcoholic, who unsuccessfully performs a tracheotomy on himself, and with or without the help of a trio of misfits known as the Elbow Brethren, who couldn’t lift a glass if they tried. (Why? Because a surgeon in Costa Rica pinned their elbow joints good and straight.)

And that’s not all that’s up at Ember Glow. The four anteaters that belong to Spillman’s neighbor, Arthur, escape their pens, and Arthur’s mentally retarded sister, Arthette, goes and dies. Spillman’s father returns, after taking up with the wife of an Irish Traveler decades ago. And Spillman’s mother suddenly materializes from sunny Florida, and to no one’s surprise, she’s way off her rocker.

Not Spillman. He may be a recovering booze hound, but his existential outlook has always been in the right place: somewhere between being, nothingness, and nausea. His clear-headed conclusion — after a year of sobriety and after seeing those angels of his in shambles but his marriage intact and Sartre by his side:

“I figured out that nothing made sense, nothing mattered, and that spending a fucking lifetime trying to figure out causes, effects, and that which probably occurred through pure-tee chance meant spending a fucking lifetime confused and somewhat pessimistic about the entire ordeal.”

That, then, is Harp Spillman, sober at last. It’s also George Singleton, author, writing in his latest comic novel, Work Shirts for Madmen (Harcourt), and it’s no ordeal. It’s Singleton, again, in unsunny but very high spirits.

George Singleton will be signing Work Shirts for Madmen at Square Books in Oxford on Wednesday, September 19th, at

5 p.m. and at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on Saturday, September 22nd, at 1 p.m.

Tennessee Waltz, Operation Main Street Sweeper, and a mayor on the lookout for “snakes in the grass” — etc., etc., and etc.

If the scandal sheet that is Memphis politics has you down and lying low, you’ve got company: Toad Frogster (aka cartoonist Tom Foster), who offers a “frog’s-eye view” of public corruption in the Bluff City in his latest, self-published comic book, The Waltzing Senator.

Foster’s been busy this year with regular shows of his artwork, but in April he was extra busy — on the scene and literally on hand, sketching and quoting from Edmund Ford’s courtroom drama in downtown Memphis. And he’s been on the bus too (MATA’s #2 bus) heading to and from court, sketching and quoting from his fellow riders. But he’s had his eye east of downtown as well: from that Midtowner’s national-news-making technicolor-mohawk mug shot, to the trials of Save Libertyland, to the trial of Mary Winkler, to the open-and-shut case that was Virginia Tech.

What’s next for Foster? Networx? That could easily be the subject of volume three of “Strawberry Funnies.” In the meantime, he’ll be signing The Waltzing Senator, volume two of that series, at Burke’s Book Store (936 S. Cooper) on Thursday, September 13th, from 5 to 6:30 p.m.