Tag: arts

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News The Fly-By

Week That Was: Coronavirus Hot Spots, Graduations, and Clean Water

Map shows coronavirus concentration, colleges seek alternative graduation plans, groups want to postpone water permits

Commencement Canceled
The coronavirus pandemic has upended all parts of life and halted plans here, around the country, and across the globe — from weddings to funerals to long-awaited graduation ceremonies.

Thus, colleges in the Memphis area have begun looking at alternative ways to celebrate their seniors. Those alternatives include virtual ceremonies, in-person ceremonies at a later date, or combined spring 2021 ceremonies.

Travel Distance
Travel distance in Shelby County was among the top in the country on Friday, according to a report by The New York Times.

Using anonymous cell phone data from 15 million people, The Times released a report on Thursday morning showing travel patterns in every county in the country.

On Friday, March 27th, residents of Shelby County traveled an average of 2.5 miles (see below). It’s 12th on the list of average travel distances in counties with more than 500,000 residents. Florida had the most counties listed, followed by Utah, California, and Oklahoma.

Call 311
What can you do if you see someone violating the city’s Safer at Home order?

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said Memphians can call 311 to report violations of the order.

Dan Springer, chief media affairs officer for the city, confirmed that this order also applies to private gatherings at residences. If a neighbor witnesses a gathering or disregard of social distancing guidelines, they can call 311, and Memphis Police Officers or other city employees will respond.

Coronavirus Hot Spots
New data from the Shelby County Health Department shows the county’s highest concentrations of coronavirus are in Cordova, East Memphis, and South Memphis.

The ZIP codes with the highest coronavirus are 38106, 38108, 38028, 38119, 38120, and 38109 — all with between 28 and 40 cases each. Downtown and Midtown ZIP codes have between 12 and 20 cases.

Mental Health Help
Shelby County employees will now have access to unlimited virtual counseling services, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris announced last week.

The expansion of employee benefits will allow all county employees to receive video, phone, or in-person counseling for free, regardless of if employees are insured through the county.

Art Funds
ArtsMemphis is allocating $50,000 to provide funding to artists most impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences.

The flexible funding will be used to help in recovering from lost income due to canceled events, job layoff, or furlough. Applications are being accepted from self-employed artists of all arts disciplines as well as artists employed or contracted by nonprofit arts and culture organizations in Shelby County.

Artists may request up to $500 to compensate for work that was scheduled or contracted and canceled or lost. The fund is not available to compensate for potential future loss of business or income.

Essential Service
With a smaller staff and a slightly different set of operating procedures, CHOICES, one of two clinics in the city that performs abortions, is still open and providing services.

Katy Leopard, assistant director of CHOICES, said the clinic’s call volume has been up, some staff members are working from home, and the clinic has had to decrease the number of patients it sees, but services will continue. CHOICES’ main focus, she said, has been to provide the essential services patients need, while ensuring that staff and patients remain safe and healthy.

Job Loss
The Memphis metro area could lose around 20 percent of all jobs due to the coronavirus, according to a new report from the Brookings Institute.

The report analyzed metros from across the country, predicting which ones would be hardest hit by the pandemic. Not all areas will be hit the same, according to the think tank. Those with concentrated energy sectors like mining, oil, and gas will likely be hardest hit. Hit hard, too, will be metros with concentrations of transportation, employment services, travel arrangements, and tourism (like Memphis).

Coronavirus Projections
About 1,067 Tennesseans will die from coronavirus.

Tennessee won’t run short of hospital beds or ICU beds during the coronavirus pandemic, and the state can expect to see 26 deaths per day until a peak of 35 deaths in one day on April 26th.

Those are projections released late last week by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine.

Park Access
The city began limiting access to public parks last week. This comes as hundreds of people have been flocking to city parks as the temperatures rise in the city. Last week, many noticed the large crowds of park-goers and took to social media to express concern.

Strickland moved to limit the number of people in parks, by restricting the number of cars allowed in parks. To aid this effort, Riverside Drive and “as many roads in and around parks that the fire marshal will let me” will close.

Clean Water
Clean-water advocacy groups are asking state officials to postpone new water permits until after coronavirus orders have been lifted here to ensure the public has a say on projects that affect the “lives and lands of Tennesseans.”

State officials can now legally hold meetings electronically. But members of the Tennessee Clean Water Network (TCWN) and more say public input is vital to decisions that allow permits under the federal Clean Water Act. These permits include permissions to pollute or to alter a stream, river, lake, or wetland.

The request was formalized in a letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and members of his administration Monday.

Maintaining Access
Though understanding the need for the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) to reduce its service amid the spread of coronavirus, a spokesperson for the Memphis Bus Riders Union (MBRU) still worries how the cuts will limit people’s access to necessary locations in the city.

MATA announced late last month that it would be reducing its service in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in the community and the number of businesses across the city that cannot currently operate, due to orders by the mayors of Shelby County and Memphis.

Justin Davis, secretary of the Memphis Bus Riders’ Union, said the group understands MATA’s need to adjust its service hours and coverage for public health reasons, but wants to ensure people are still able to access the services they need.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Escape For the Homebound Just a Click Away

Thanks to the Great Quarantine of 2020, we don’t get to visit galleries, hang out at juke joints, or take in a play. But creative people are relentlessly creative, so you don’t need to go without, you can just go online.

Here’s a sampling of who is doing creative programming that you can enjoy from home:

  • Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s Decameron Project on its Facebook page presents literary readings and speeches by the Bard. Goes live at 10:15 a.m. Mondays-Fridays.

    Peter Pan

  • The Facebook page of Playhouse on the Square (POTS) is featuring “Story Time in Neverland” with Peter Pan reading the classic story and teaching some choreography to boot. The POTS page also has scads of videos of many of its productions with interviews and performance excerpts.
  • New Moon Theatre Company has been posting a Shakespeare blowout, full performances of past shows on its Facebook page, from Hamlet to Titus Andronicus (adults only!) to 12th Night and more.
  • The Memphis Symphony Orchestra’s FB page has plenty to hear, such as the Lockdown Sessions — check out the “Horns in Time of Plague” duet with Caroline Kinsey and Robert Patterson.
  • Hit up the FB page of the Art Museum of the University of Memphis and you’ll find plenty to see. Artworks, of course (photos by Lawrence Jasud, for example), and interviews (Carl Moore), and an opportunity to be part of the “In 7, 6, 5…” exhibition.

  • Find our more about the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s Virtual ChalkFest at its Facebook page.
  • The Dixon Gallery and Gardens virtually continues its weekly Tours at Two with curator Julie Pierotti talking about various works in the museum’s collection. And there are pictures of flowers. So many pictures of flowers. 

  • Art Village Gallery’s Online Viewing Room has the new exhibit “‘Twas Her Undoing,” provocative works by several local women artists.
  • The Pink Palace is offering its Museum To-Go experience with activities, movies, planetarium shows, and more.

More things are going on as well, from at-home jookin’ lessons (New Ballet Ensemble), to the Digital Aria Jukebox from Opera Memphis.

Just look and listen around you — art is everywhere.

Categories
Music Music Blog

The Arts and the Pandemic: Who Will We Become?

My brain, like many others, is exploding, but I need to share this.

Early in my time leading Opera Memphis, I was in a multi-week workshop run by the Assisi Foundation. I was one of only a handful of non-social service organization people. One of the questions we all needed to answer was “what would happen if your organization closed.” This was mainly to find out who might have overlapping or redundant services, so maybe wasn’t relevant to an arts organization. However, the question has never left me. I ask it to myself often, moreso in times like these. I could answer, “We are the only opera company for hours in any direction, so our closing would leave Memphis without opera.” I, and many of my friends, would say that is a terrible thing. Maybe it is. I fear that far more people might never even notice we were gone.

This is turning into one of the most challenging times in decades for so many people, parts of society, segments of the economy, etc. I do not mean to imply that opera (or any live art) has it worse than restaurants or churches or hospitals; that is not my point. My point is that every single person who loves or makes opera must now answer the question: What difference did our shows make in their absence? Beyond the walls of the opera house, who has suffered when the curtain didn’t rise? And are we comfortable if that number, as I think it may be for many of us, is very, very small?

This is a time for all of us to think creatively, but most importantly to ask ourselves: Who are we without performances? What role can we play, or must we play in this crisis, and in our communities?

I say this not to preach but to remind myself that how we act in the next few months, or longer, will likely have more impact on the field of opera than any full decade before now. We all now have a chance to embrace the change that is going to be necessary; to view it as an opportunity, not a tragedy. I have no idea what opera will look like in 5 months or five years, nor does anyone. But I know it will be here for as long as people have ears and souls. I never worry about opera disappearing. I do worry that if we spend too much time fighting against change, we allow ourselves to be Blockbuster instead of Netflix; Sears instead of Amazon.

My job at Opera Memphis is to do everything in my power to ensure we are Netflix, and I intend to do so.

This week we started asking for folks who are cooped up by the coronavirus to email us at singtome@operamemphis.org. We are going to drive our van and flatbed trailer to where they are, and sing to as many of them as possible. Will an outdoor performance on a trailer that just last month was hauling hay in Mississippi be the same as a show on the stage of GPAC, the Orpheum or POTS? Nope. Not even close. But again, not the point. The point is that when times like these arise, we cannot respond by worrying about what will become of the old way of doing things.

We need to remember that this is Memphis. We invent things. We innovate things. We export music to the world. We don’t mope. We don’t wallow. We grit, we grind, and we get on with the work of making something amazing. Whether that something is for 2 people on a Vollintine-Evergreen porch, or for thousands at the Levitt Shell, I have no idea. Frankly, I don’t care. If I know that there is one more person out there we can reach, who will hear our music and feel? That is something worth trying. Worth getting up for every morning. And so I shall.

Stay safe everyone, and #keepthemusicgoing.

Ned Canty has been general director of Opera Memphis since 2010.

Categories
Cover Feature News

2020 Vision

There’s no turning back now. The decade’s in the rearview, and our eyes are set on what’s to come in 2020 — in politics, sports, film, music, and more. Happy New Year, Memphis!

CannaBeat

Medical cannabis died in Tennessee in April. Well, a bill that would have allowed it did anyway.

But the sponsor of that bill, Sen. Steve Dickerson (R-Nashville), told The Daily Memphian in June that he intended to bring the bill back to the Tennessee General Assembly in 2020. The strategy to pass it may change, he said. He and House sponsor Rep. Bryan Terry (R-Murfreesboro) plan to reroute the bill through the legislative process, avoiding committees with members unfriendly to medical cannabis.

Terry, chairman of the House Health committee, issued a formal invitation to actor Michael J. Fox in December to appear before the committee during the 2020 session to talk about his foundation’s work to support expanding research on medical cannabis.

A September poll of influential Tennesseans found that many across the state were in favor of loosening cannabis laws. “In Memphis and Nashville, clear majorities favor making it completely legal for both medicinal and recreational use [57 percent and 58 percent respectively],” according to the Power Poll. About 29 percent of those polled in Memphis thought cannabis should be legal for medical purposes. Only 15 percent thought it should not be legalized at all.

There will be one major change for the possibility of cannabis legislation in 2020. In November, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would legalize marijuana on the federal level. — Toby Sells

Gaydar

When lawmakers return to Nashville in 2020, they’ll also consider a slate of bills against the LGBTQ+ community called the “Slate of Hate” by the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP).

The recurring anti-transgender student bathroom bill would give state legal support to public school districts that experiment with anti-transgender student policies. An adoption discrimination bill would make private adoption/foster care agencies eligible for tax dollars, even if those agencies decide to turn away potential parents because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious views.

A business license bill would prevent local governments from favoring businesses with inclusive policies in their contracting. The so-called “God-Given Marriage Initiative” may emerge here in 2020. It would end marriage licensing and replace it with a man and a woman registering their marriage contract with the state. — TS

A rendering of the MRPP-helmed redesign of Tom Lee Park

Memphis in May/ Tom Lee Park

The sounds of music and the smell of barbecue will again rise from Tom Lee Park in May 2020.

It’s one stipulation of the mediation between the Memphis River Parks Partnership (MRPP) and Memphis in May International Festival (MIM). The mediation ended in December, closing months of talks between the two groups over a redesign of the park proposed by MRPP in February. MIM officials feared the new design would not allow enough space for its festivals in the park.

The festivals will be moved to another location in 2021, however. Tom Lee will close after the festivals in 2020 for the construction of the park’s many new features. — TS

Marc Pegan

Avant-garde jazz ensemble The Dopolarians

Music

Shopping around for a New Year’s resolution? Here’s one that will have a ripple effect: Get out to see more live music. Compared to the late 20th century, this is a veritable Golden Age of venues and performers for Memphis. And the list keeps growing.

Consider New Year’s Eve at what may be both the newest and the oldest club in town, Hernando’s Hide-A-Way. Co-owner Dale Watson and his Lone Stars often hold court there, as they will on the last night of the year, recording a live album to boot. But there are plenty of other national acts already taking advantage of this mid-sized venue, intimate yet spacious, swanky yet country.

Piper Ferguso

Booker T. Jones

If 2019 was the year that Crosstown Theater reached cruising altitude and the Green Room at Crosstown really came into its own, the year to come looks to continue that upswing. At the former space, January 18th will witness a homecoming show of sorts for the great Booker T. Jones. Those who saw him speak at Stax in November got a taste of his new album; now Memphians can hear that album and more, live and in the moment. As a perfect contrast, acclaimed avant-garde jazz ensemble The Dopolarians, boasting two Memphis-associated players and some elder legends of the genre, will play the Green Room on February 7th.

In the classical realm, watch for the remainder of the Iris Orchestra’s season at both GPAC and the Brooks Museum, starting with their performance of “Spoonfuls,” pianist Conrad Tao’s new work in honor of Memphis’ bicentennial, on January 25th. Meanwhile at the Cannon Center, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra will feature Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and a Marimba Concerto by Abe, among other works, as they continue their season from January through April.

The city’s newest club, The Lounge at 3rd & Court, promises to be the jazz viper den that many in the city have longed for, often featuring guitar great Joe Restivo and band. And then there are the unsurpassed standby clubs for rock, country, and jazz, which continue to feature original music: Bar DKDC, Lafayette’s Music Room, Wild Bill’s, B-Side, Hi Tone, Minglewood Hall, Murphy’s, Lamplighter, Blue Monkey, and many others, including the ever-reliable Beale Street. Get out there and keep it alive! — Alex Greene

The Memphis City Council moves into 2020 with six new members

City Council

The Memphis City Council will move into 2020 with six new members. This is the first time five African-American women will sit on the council together. Councilwoman Patrice Robsinson will chair the group in 2020, with Frank Colvett Jr. serving as vice chairman.

Jeff Warren, Rhonda Logan, Chase Carlisle, Edmund Ford Sr., Michalyn Easter-Thomas, and J.B. Smiley Jr. will join the council next year.

“We’re going to make a better Memphis as a team,” Robinson said of the new council.

After approving Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) rate hikes for water and gas at its last meeting of the year, the council will return to the issue of electric rate hikes in 2020. Beginning in July, MLGW customers’ bills will go up $2.23 if no rate increase is approved for electric.

MLGW proposed increasing electric rates by a total of $9 for the average customer. The council voted this move down, prompting the MLGW board to reconsider their proposal. The council will consider MLGW’s new proposed increase once the utility’s board comes up with the new numbers. — Maya Smith

Bikes

Next year the city is slated to add about 20 miles of new bike facilities, says Nicholas Oyler, the city’s bikeway and pedestrian program manager. One new bike facility will be the completion of the Hampline in early 2020. This is a project nine years in the making that will connect the Shelby Farms Greenline to Overton Park.

In other bike news, the city will get 500 new federally funded bike racks primarily located near existing bus stops to “encourage synergy between using transit and bicycling for the last- and first-mile connections,” Oyler says. — MS

Police Surveillance

Later this year, U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla will decide what to do with the 1978 Kendrick consent decree that prevents police surveillance by the Memphis Police Department (MPD).

McCalla ruled last year that the city and MPD had violated the decree and imposed sanctions. Since then, a court-appointed monitor team has been working with the police department on improving its adherence to the decree and developing policies and procedures related to the decree. At a final evidentiary hearing scheduled for June, the court will decide if the decree should be modified, and, if so, how.

In the meantime, the monitor team and MPD are in the process of finalizing updated social media and training policies for MPD, which are subject to the court’s approval. Additionally, the monitor team will organize focus groups in early 2020 to hear more from the community on the consent decree. — MS

Larry Kuzniewski

Coach Penny Hardaway points the way to Tiger victory

Sports

The new year — new decade — in Memphis sports will be unlike any we’ve seen before. Such is the case every year, of course, as the sports world remains among life’s few truly unscripted delights. Perhaps, even without the recently departed James Wiseman, the Tigers will will make a deep NCAA tournament run. Perhaps Ja Morant returns to full health and dribble-drives his way to the NBA’s Rookie of the Year trophy. Perhaps the University of Memphis football team finds a way to top its 2019 season. Okay, let’s be realistic …

Penny Hardaway’s Tigers will regain center stage with conference play, his program seeking a first American Athletic Conference championship. The nation’s top freshman class — prior to Wiseman’s departure — will find its biggest test come tournament time in March. (Memphis hasn’t reached the NCAA tournament since 2014.)

The Ja and Jaren era is upon us with Grizzlies basketball, Mr. Morant and Mr. Jackson having become the faces of a franchise now climbing back toward playoff relevance in a Western Conference top-heavy with superstars, most notably those playing for the two Los Angeles franchises. Still shy of his 21st birthday, Morant could become only the second Grizzly to earn top-rookie honors (and the first since Pau Gasol raised the hardware in 2002).

Spring could bring one of the top prospects in baseball to AutoZone Park. Outfielder Dylan Carlson earned the St. Louis Cardinals’ Minor League Player of the Year honor for 2019, primarily for his performance at Double-A Springfield. The 21-year-old slugger will compete for a spot on the Cardinals’ major-league roster in March but will more than likely fine-tune his swing in Memphis with the Redbirds before making his big-league debut.

901 FC will take the pitch (pardon the pun) at AutoZone Park for its second season in the USL Championship. The Bluff City’s new soccer outfit went 9-18-7 in its first season, making up in fan-base passion what it may have lacked in finishing ability. With the likes of Louisville City FC and Birmingham Legion FC to catch in the standings, regional rivalries are already growing, gas to the fire for the local futbol faithful.

As for football, American style, the Memphis Tigers will have to follow-up on the finest season in program history, one that ended with an American Athletic Conference championship and an appearance in the prestigious Cotton Bowl. A new coach will be on the sideline, Mike Norvell having taken his stellar four-year mark (38-15) to Florida State. Star running back Kenneth Gainwell will return to spark the offense, which suggests winning won’t be a thing of the past at the Liberty Bowl. Since 2014, the Tigers are 35-5 at home.— Frank Murtaugh

Jackson Baker

Bill Lee

Politics

It may well be that, as politics takes its course in 2020, the nation’s currently beleaguered president, Donald J. Trump, will survive a vote of confidence this year, as, locally, Mayor Jim Strickland did at the city polls in 2019 and Governor Bill Lee’s program probably will with the legislature. But advance polling always had Strickland comfortably ahead of his rivals, and a just-concluded Vanderbilt University poll of state voters has given first-termer Lee a 62-percent approval rating. Trump, uniquely, has never been over the 50-percent mark — not even in 2016, when Hillary Clinton actually out-polled him nationally. Trump’s only sure win would seem to be in the GOP-dominated Senate, over the sudden-death matter of impeachment.

And Republican numerical domination, not popular demand nor irresistible logic, will empower the Governor’s prospects in the General Assembly. But not necessarily. It is famously (or infamously) true that Lee’s controversial bill to permit private school vouchers (or “education savings accounts,” in the euphemism of the day) passed by a single vote in the state House and only by means of highly devious wheeling and dealing and overtime arm-twisting on the part of the since-disgraced GOP Speaker Glen Casada, who was later forced into resigning. The new Republican Speaker, Cameron Sexton, is a sworn foe of vouchers and has indicated that, at the very least, he’d like to delay the onset of ESAs, which are due to be imposed (take that, you blue bailiwicks!) only on Shelby and Davidson Counties.

In the long run, Democrats are hoping for a swing of the electoral pendulum that could bring them more of the incremental suburban vote gains that got them close to a couple of major legislative upsets in Shelby County in 2018. The expected large Democratic vote in the presidential election will be helpful in that regard. The timing of vouchers, health care, and the question of freeing up TANF (temporary assistance for needy families) will be on the agenda in Nashville, as will, very likely, the return of the “fetal heartbeat” anti-abortion measure.

A U.S. Senate race will be on the statewide marquee, with primary races in both major parties. The Republican winner will be heavily favored. In city politics, it will be interesting to see if the development community’s hold on the Council will be loosened by the addition of some of the grassroots winners from the October election. In Shelby County politics, Mayor Lee Harris is on again/off again on solidarity with the County Commission. It is universally assumed that he is looking ahead to a future-tense congressional race, but in the meantime he has seemingly (and sensibly) committed himself to some center-left populism focused on wage equity and minority/women-owned business enterprises advances.

Former Shelby County Democratic chairman Corey Strong will meanwhile take a crack at the 9th district Congressional seat now held by long-running Democratic monolith Steve Cohen. — Jackson Baker

Film

No doubt the biggest story in the Memphis film scene for 2020 will be the opening of the new Indie Memphis Cinema. Just before 2019’s annual film festival, Malco Theaters struck a deal with the nonprofit to turn over operation of one of the screens at Studio on the Square in Midtown’s Overton Square.

Malco will be renovating the aging Studio to bring it up to the standards set by Malco Powerhouse (read: new seats and a greatly expanded food and drink program) this winter and spring. Then, Indie Memphis will begin daily showings of the acclaimed films from the festival circuit and repertory offerings that have populated their increasingly popular weekly screenings.

This will be a sea change for film fans in Memphis. The Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill has built a steady audience with sophisticated, non-blockbuster offerings in East Memphis, but this new arrangement will mark the beginning of a true art house in the Bluff City. The seeds of Indie Memphis were sown in the mid-1990s with an effort to build such a theater in Midtown before morphing into a festival, so this new cinema is the realization of a long-term dream.

2020 will be the year the mainstream industry fully faces Disney’s market dominance. Since the acquisition of 20th Century Fox, the House of Mouse is now set to control almost half of the total global box office. Their slate for 2020 is a mixed bag. In February, Fox Searchlight drops Wendy, a retelling of the Peter Pan story from the heroine’s POV, and 20th will offer an adaption of Call of the Wild with Harrison Ford that looks promising. March begins with Pixar’s urban fantasy Onward and ends with the live-action remake of Mulan, which looks to have slightly more reason to exist than the flaccid Aladdin. In April, Marvel takes a mulligan on the last X-Men film with The New Mutants, then the long-anticipated Black Widow premieres on May Day. Pixar’s second film of the year is Soul in June, a musical by Inside Out director Pete Docter. In the fall, expect Marvel’s The Eternals and Disney Animation’s Raya and the Last Dragon.

Studios not named Disney also have anticipated offerings. Robert Downey Jr. will talk to animals in his first post-Iron Man role as Dr. Doolittle in January, which will go up against Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Bad Boys for Life. In February, Warner Brothers will again attempt to make a watchable DC comic book movie with the Margo Robbie-led Birds of Prey, and the cringeworthy Sonic the Hedgehog will face a horror adaptation of Fantasy Island from Blumhouse. In March, Paramount will try to replicate a sleeper hit with A Quiet Place Part II. Daniel Craig will strap on the Walther PPK for the last time as James Bond in No Time to Die. June is stacked with the return of Diana Prince in Wonder Woman 1984, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, and the Lin-Manuel Miranda-penned musical In the Heights. In July is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which will reunite the original cast, and the Kristen Wiig road trip comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

Speaking of reuniting the original cast, in August, Bill and Ted Face the Music brings back Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter as the Wyld Stallyns. Edgar Winter takes a swing at psychological horror with Last Night in Soho. In October, Kenneth Branagh does Death on the Nile, and Jamie Lee Curtis returns for Halloween Kills. The biggest film weekend of the year looks to be the titanic matchup on December 18th, when Dennis Villeneuve’s science-fiction epic Dune, Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, Columbia’s adaptation of the Uncharted game franchise, and Memphis’ own Craig Brewer directing Eddie Murphy in Coming 2 America battle for box office supremacy. See you at the movies. — Chris McCoy

P/K/M Architects

Rendering of the proposed new South of Beale

Food

There’s no doubt that big things are going to happen in 2020, and many of us — myself included — may find ourselves stress-eating or self-medicating with food. With that said, Memphis foodies have a lot to look forward to in the year ahead, including more French food, riverfront views, and even a brand-new brewery. Cheers!

Out east, the fine dining establishment Erling Jensen: The Restaurant will undergo an expansion in early 2020, more than doubling the size of its bar menu and dining room. East Memphis will also welcome a new crab restaurant when The Juicy Crab opens a new location in a 7,200-square-foot space in the Eastgate Shopping Center.

In the suburbs, Slim Chickens plans to open a second location in Collierville in late spring at the corner of Poplar and Maynard Way, and Wing Guru is expanding to new locations in Collierville and Hernando, Mississippi. Their current locations can be found on Mt. Moriah in Memphis and on Stage Road in Bartlett.

Downtown, Memphis’ newest brewery, Soul & Spirits Brewery, will open in the Uptown neighborhood at 845 N. Main. Owned and operated by husband-and-wife team Blair Perry and Ryan Allen, the brewery will likely focus on traditional German-style beers “inspired by the diverse music culture of Memphis” (per their Facebook page).

South of Beale, Memphis’ first gastropub, will move to a new location. The new venue, located on the first floor of the old Ambassador building, will open in the spring at 345 S. Main.

Memphis chefs Michael Hudman and Andy Ticer will bring a taste of Europe Downtown when Bishop, in the Central Station Hotel, has its grand opening in January. After a soft launch in December, the French restaurant will be fully open in January serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Also Downtown, One Beale finally broke ground in 2019 and has a projected completion date in 2020. Besides apartments and hotels, the massive development project will include a new riverfront restaurant and a rooftop whiskey bar with indoor and outdoor seating.

As that project comes closer to completion, another project will begin: Construction on Union Row is projected to start in 2020, and the plans include a few new restaurants and a hotel overlooking AutoZone Park.

In keeping with the Downtown hotel boom, Memphis’ first Aloft Hotel will also open at 161 Jefferson in the summer of 2020. The hotel will include a full-service restaurant and the brand’s signature WXYZ bar. — Lorna Field

Categories
News News Blog

U of M Moves to Brand Central Avenue as Arts Corridor

CREDIT: Google Maps

Google Maps

Future home of the Central to the Arts Hub

The University of Memphis is working to designate a stretch of Central Avenue as the “Central Arts Corridor.”

To help brand this part of Central, between Patterson and Zach Curlin, as an arts corridor, the College of Communications and Fine Arts (CCFA) is taking over the former information kiosk at Central and Patterson and reopening it as the Central to the Arts Hub.

The small, circular building will serve as a “gateway” to the arts corridor, which will be a “real arts destination,” Anne Hogan, dean of the university’s CCFA, said.

“I think this building is an opportunity to brand and designate this as an area for Memphis where students, the university, and the wider communities can come and benefit from the resources and arts,” Hogan said. “We want everyone in the city to know we’re doing creative stuff over here.”

Once open, the art hub will house pop-up galleries featuring one student’s work for two weeks at a time. This gives students the opportunity to curate their own gallery and sell their work. There will “always be fresh art to see there,” Hogan said. Genres of art to be featured include everything from sculpture to ceramics to photography.

[pullquote-1] The art hub will also be a place where the public can come and learn about the university’s art programs and upcoming events.

Hogan said the goal is for the arts corridor and the new hub to bring attention to the many performances happening at the university throughout the year.

“Our students are just so talented and they do great work,” Hogan said. “We have performances going on all the time that are open to the wider public, but a lot of times, people just don’t realize that they are here.”

Hogan said the college has “amazing art facilities and resources” that are all located just off of Central. On this segment of Central sits the university’s art museums, galleries, theater, and concert hall.

archimania

Rendering of Scheidt Family Music Center

A big piece of the college’s rebranding effort is the addition of the new Scheidt Family Music Center, for which construction is slated to begin this fall and wrap up in the spring of 2021.

It will occupy much of what is now a parking lot on the north side of Central just east of Patterson.

The 90,000-square facility is going to be a “beautiful, highly visible building,” Hogan said. It will be a state-of-the-art facility, she said, and an “incredible asset for the larger Memphis community.”

Not only will the center host student performances, but the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and other community organizations will also perform in the new space.

Hogan said when she assumed the role of dean for the CCFA two and a half years ago, the college had been talking about building a new music center “for literally decades. It was a dream everyone had, and now it’s finally happening.”

archimania

Rendering of Scheidt Family Music Center interior

The public is invited to take a sneak peak of what the music center will look like on Saturday, October 5th, during the unveiling of the Central to the Arts Hub. There will be renderings of the Scheidt Family Music Center on display in the newly opened hub.

The half-day event, scheduled for noon to 4 p.m., will also feature live music from students in the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music and stage combat demonstrations from the Department of Theatre & Dance.

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Art Art Feature

Southern Women’s Art on View at the Dixon

Don’t make the mistake of categorizing 19th- and 20th-century Southern women artists as mainly genteel painters of magnolias. Not that there’s anything wrong with such endeavors, but to imagine the ladies doing no more than amusing themselves for an afternoon with easel and palette is to misjudge their impact.

The proof hangs at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, where “Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection” and works by Kate Freeman Clark are on display. This series — which includes works by Memphis artist Elizabeth Alley — examines women artists from the 1890s to the present.

Africa, 1935.Loïs Mailou Jones

Julie Pierotti, curator at the Dixon, points out that, “It’s not necessarily Southern women artists painting the South. They lived and traveled just like everybody else, and they painted what they experienced. Sometimes Southern women artists left the South permanently and went to New York and California and Colorado — different places — and planted themselves there. But of course we still consider them Southern or having a Southern sensibility.”

The Johnson Collection of 42 women artists covers work from the late 1890s to the early 1960s. As the text for the exhibition notes, “Women’s social, cultural, and political roles were being redefined and reinterpreted.” Clark, from Holly Springs, Mississippi, has art in the Johnson Collection, but the Dixon wanted to showcase her particular story in a companion exhibition of nearly 40 works.

“We’re showing people in the larger survey of Southern women artists and then this super-specialized exhibition of someone so close to us,” Pierotti says. “Clark is a good example of an artist from the South, from this old Holly Springs family.” She wanted to go to New York to study art, enrolled in the Art Students League in 1895, and soon found a mentor in William Merritt Chase, the acclaimed artist and teacher. She was closely shadowed by her mother and grandmother as escorts. “Many of the figure paintings in this show are of them or people who were close to her,” Pierotti says. “Her mother and grandmother were supportive of her painting but not of her exhibiting or selling her work. Selling wasn’t a respectable thing to do.” On the rare occasions she showed, she signed the paintings as Freeman Clark to obscure her gender.

So she wasn’t acknowledged in her time, although Chase thought a lot of her work. Clark was influenced by the Impressionists, and worked with “a good grasp and clear understanding of how to communicate light and shadow,” Pierotti says.

There are paintings of gardens, which are thoroughly planned out, and the work is linear and brushwork tight. But then she’d do unfettered landscapes with a looser brush and sometimes on burlap. “As a Southerner, she understood that kind of rustic nature of rural landscapes,” says Pierotti.

Chase died in 1916, and Clark’s grandmother died in 1919 and her mother in 1922. She then went back to Holly Springs, leaving her passion behind forever. Her works were kept in a warehouse in New York until her death in 1957 at age 81. But she willed hundreds of her pieces to Holly Springs, along with her house and money, to build what is now the Kate Freeman Clark Museum.

“The museum is her champion,” Pierotti says, “and it has done a good job maintaining the work. They’re promoting it, and the Johnson Collection has also backed her work. We’re trying to put some scholarship behind her work with a serious discussion of her technique. As often happens, especially with female artists, we’re in this period of discovery of many of these women whose stories really haven’t been told.”

“Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection” and works by Kate Freeman Clark are on display through October 13th at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

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News News Feature

Found Art: Federico Uribe’s Socks at the Brooks

Federico Uribe’s socks are hanging at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

They’re among the hundreds of sock “leaves” hanging on his 25-foot-tall tree, which, after almost a year in the museum’s rotunda, will be taken down August 11th. The tree and other Uribe creations are part of the museum’s Rotunda Projects series.

“I used some of my socks and my assistants’ pants, my assistants’ socks, and [clothing from] people who work in my studio,” says Uribe, who was born in Colombia but now lives in Miami.

Federico Uribe’s colorful artwork, made from repurposed items, is on view at the Brooks Museum through August 11th.

His idea? “I thought about the tree of hard life.”

The tree bark is made from khaki pants. “Somehow my idea came from the idea of making an homage to people who work with their hands,” he says. “Manual work.”

Most of the socks are white ones from Goodwill. “We painted them green,” says Uribe. “Also, pants from Goodwill and Salvation Army. New socks. Used pants.”

His tree also “talks about the neighborhood and the projects,” he says.

It includes shoes, which stand for gang members’ shoes. “If a gang takes territory from other gangs, they take their shoes and hang them on electrical lines. They hang the shoes they took from the enemy.”

Uribe painted when he was younger, but, as he got older, he stopped painting and started “playing with objects.”

His first sculptures were made of “very small objects — toys and things I found on the streets in Mexico.”

These included “plastic forks, baby [bottle] nipples, toys, doll hands,” he says.

Later, he began using other objects. He made a landscape out of remote controls. The piece stands for “a city under control.”

Uribe also made a statue out of screws after he heard the expression “getting screwed.” He made a donkey out of suitcases, which he calls The Immigrant. Uribe also created whimsical animals out of bullets and shotgun shells.

“Art schools don’t teach you how to do stuff,” Uribe says. “You have to figure that out. I have to create my own technique for every object I create.

“To me, it’s all my private thing. People get it or they don’t get it. I don’t really care. It makes me smile when I realize these ideas.”

As for fame and fortune, Uribe says, “I don’t really like the public part of my life. I don’t enjoy that at all. I like my studio. I like it quiet. I listen to books.”

And, he says, “I’m interested in making enough money to produce my own dreams and that’s it.”

Uribe currently is working on a sculpture of a woman, which he’s making out of surgical instruments. It’s “about people who have thousands of plastic surgeries thinking they look better,” he says. “And they take selfies and publish it on Instagram and all this bullshit. It’s not a criticism, just a fact of life.”

He sees so much plastic surgery in Miami. “Fake asses, noses, and waists. And it’s all built by a doctor. So then they think they’re happy.”

The title of the piece will be Selfie Esteem.

When he’s not working, Uribe loves to grow flowers. “Flowers bring butterflies,” he says, “and butterflies bring lizards.”

Uribe says, “I work with a purpose of beauty.

“I like the idea of people smiling at my work when they see it. I don’t want to teach people that life is hard. Everybody knows that. I’m trying to tell them that beauty is out there. There is beauty in bullets, in medical instruments, in remote controls, in screws. There’s beauty everywhere if you’re looking for it.”

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Art Art Feature

“Bouguereau & America” at the Brooks

Traveling exhibitions that visit the Brooks Museum of Art typically bring works of great artists or celebrate a significant period or movement in art history. Greatness is expected.

But then there’s “Bouguereau & America,” co-organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, opening Saturday and bringing with it some notoriety. The works by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) are remarkable — and critics have done their remarking by hammering the artist’s works despite the fact that he’s technically gifted and was the best-selling artist in America’s Gilded Age. His works made him a millionaire in the 19th century, which was extraordinary for someone who wasn’t a robber baron.

Virgin of the Angels

So why is the Brooks doing this, and why should you see it? Because the French artist had chops and is something of an American phenomenon.

Dr. Rosamund Garrett, the Brooks’ associate curator of European and decorative arts, is fascinated by the artist and his work. “Bouguereau is the epitome of academic painting,” she says. “But you’re looking at more than just a French academic painter or exhibition about French academic painting. You’re looking into the taste and aesthetic sensibilities of the elite in Gilded Age America.”

And it is that question of taste, Garrett says, that is at the center of how we regard the exhibition. She is cautious: “I personally would argue that there is no such thing as good or bad taste.” The notion does challenge objectivity: Nobody believes that they have bad taste.

Garrett continues: “What you are seeing here is the taste of these particular people who are buying his work. You are getting a glimpse of the identity that they want to project into the world.” Some of the buyers of Bouguereau’s works had established money, but most were the newly monied, often entrepreneurs.

“They want to borrow a bit of the cultural legacy of Europe,” Garrett says. “Because that gives them a sense of history, a sense of legitimacy. And if you have that, it means you have reached a certain level in society and you are here to stay.”

Dr. Stanton Thomas is a co-curator of the exhibition. He is Garrett’s predecessor at the Brooks and is now at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has written: “Bouguereau delights and confounds us. It’s hard not to be seduced by his exquisite technique and the shameless beauty of his modest nymphs, woebegone children, and polished peasants.”

How else to describe B’s work? Debra Brehmer, a critic for the art blog/magazine Hyperallergic, writes, “His work still refuses to settle into a comfortable category, remaining a gelatinous melange of kitsch, academic virtuosity, and unsavory sensuality.”

The depictions are idealized: heroic men, sensuous women, playful cupids. The dreamy portrayals of peasants and beggar children are almost laughable: “These children look absolutely perfect,” Garrett says. “They’re really clean, they don’t have any dirt under their fingernails. It’s like a Photoshopped version of reality.”

For the discerning viewer, it can be a struggle. “Bouguereau has been accused of being shallow and vacuous, and these are sort of sugary confections, but at the same time just so beautiful,” Garrett says. “You cannot help but stand in front of these pictures reveling in their beauty, but afterward, when you’ve stepped back, you realize you’re having some exceptionally complicated feelings.”

Unrelated to the artistic merit of the exhibition but relevant to the museum’s plans to become Brooks on the Bluff, is the size of the show. “This exhibition has absolutely pushed our current building to the limit of what is possible here,” Garrett says. The plan for the new building would take care of such issues, the Brooks promises.

There will be a membership reception for “Bouguereau & America” on Friday, June 21st, and a free community day from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 29th. View the exhibition for free at Orion Free Wednesdays at the Brooks, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.