Tag: Clough-Hanson Gallery

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Exploring Art: Clough-Hanson Gallery Hosts Webinar Series

CREDIT: Courtesy of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College

Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College is hosting a new series of webinar lectures, “Closer Than We Appear: Art and Sharing Space in a Time of Social Distance.” This series will look to art and artists to help us think in new ways about sharing space in communities large and small, distant and close.

First in the series is a look at the ways that Native artists have engaged with these issues for generations. Historian and co-founder of Native Rites, Amanda Lee Savage, will talk remotely about art and anticolonialism in the context of the exhibition “Native Voices, 1950s to Now: Art for a New Understanding,” on view through September 26th at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Courtesy of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College

Amanda Lee Savage will discuss anticolonialism and art — remotely.

The origin story for the United States requires remembering and unremembering during a contentious time in our history, says Savage. “This selective remembering and forgetting of indigenous people is critical to how the United States imagined itself in the 19th century.”

Savage challenges that origin story. To hear her lecture, a link to this webinar will be emailed to registrants prior to the event and posted on the Clough-Hanson Gallery Facebook page.

In October, the conversation will continue with Cannupa Hanska Luger, whose Mirror Shield Project is on view in the “Native Voices” exhibition and has been used in resistance movements across the country, including Water Protectors in Standing Rock.

More details will be announced soon. Be sure to check the gallery’s Facebook page for the most up-to-date information, or email parsonsj@rhodes.edu.

Thursday, September 3, 6 p.m., rhodes.edu/gallery, Visit the Clough-Hanson Facebook page for more information and registration, Free.

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Art Art Feature

2015: A great year for art in Memphis

“I Thought I Might Find You Here” by Brian Pera at Rhodes Clough-Hanson Gallery

Early in the year, filmmaker and author Brian Pera showed a series of sculptures made in the wake of a friend’s suicide. Pera used colorful yarn, wood, and other oddments to create a show that managed both warmth and solemnity. Pera included video, a slideshow, and a small booklet of photographs to further explore loss. What resulted was moving and brave work. — Eileen Townsend

“Lance Turner: Crosstown Studio Residency Exhibition” at Crosstown Arts

To explore the concept of endlessness, Lance Turner created a series of symmetrical, dizzying abstractions in a back room at Crosstown Arts. He repeated his strange murals until they covered the walls of the space and then built a series of models that echoed those murals, ad infinitum. Turner also showed excellent work this year at GLITCH, a Midtown house gallery and venue. He is perhaps best known for his downtown mural of late punk rocker Jay Reatard, whose image he painted in grey pixels on the side of a South Main business. — ET

Lester Merriweather’s “WHITE(S) ONLY”

“WHITE(S) ONLY” by Lester Merriweather at University of Memphis’ Fogelman Galleries

Merriweather’s exhibition, which consisted of all white objects, was hosted in a gallery with glass doors, white walls, white columns, and overhead spot lighting. The main focus was on a series of oversized paint swatches in degrees of white, with their corresponding names printed on them. Real product names like “Colonial White” and “Fresh Cotton,” provided a pointed commentary on the country’s past. Accompanying the swatches were objects covered in white, such as an old church with a steeple, an old washboard, a miniature ship with masts, and an American flag. The starkness of the room and the blankness of the items in it allowed viewers to focus on the textures and iterations of overwhelming whiteness, in many senses of the word, and what it feels like to exist in that space. — Elle Perry

“Mi Sur/My South,” group exhibition at Crosstown Arts

This exhibition represented Caritas Village-based Centro Cultural’s latest annual survey of Latino/a artists in Memphis. The exhibition featured more established, as well as emerging artists. Many of the pieces dealt with identity and the dualism that can come with being Latino/a in the United States, and, more specifically, Memphis. The show included work by artists who immigrated to the United States as well as those who grew up here. A broad range of both sculptural and two-dimensional work was included. — EP

“A Kind of Confession,” group exhibition at the Metal Museum

In another exhibition focusing on group and individual identity, the Metal Museum’s “A Kind of Confession” featured metalwork from 11 black artists at a range of career points from around the U.S. It explored culture and race in America through the lens of history, socioeconomic status, gender, and current events. Some pieces offered a nostalgic, often humorous slice of black life, while others offered social critiques of both contemporary black and American culture. — EP

“Meet Me Where I’m At” by Johnathan Robert Payne at Crosstown Arts

Payne paired his meticulous, methodical drawings with an hour-long performance, which was equally methodical: He spent an hour doing a Tae-Bo workout video and then, in a vulnerable gesture, bathed in front of a small audience. Payne’s show approached themes of loneliness and desire. It made us uncomfortable and made us think. — ET

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All Souls

The first painting you see when you walk into “No Fate But What We Make,” currently showing at Rhodes’ Clough-Hanson Gallery, is not a painting. It is a spell. This is not a weirdly phrased compliment, as the work is not spellbinding. It is an actual spell, colorfully marked out on a large canvas, hung front-and-center in the gallery, and titled Untitled 4. 

This spell — or this sigil (according to Wikipedia: a “symbolic representation of a magician’s desired outcome”) — is the viewer’s first introduction to the many alters and auratic objects that make up “No Fate.” The piece’s thick, inwardly tending brushstrokes suggest a centrifugal spirituality, though for whom or what this spell is aimed is not explained. The artist, Elijah Burgher, may be the only active magician who will be included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, but before he was a pagan art star making queer paintings in the ritualistic privacy of his studio, he was the online presence GHOSTVOMIT, and I followed him on tumblr. GHOSTVOMIT’s tumblr is an inexplicable reel of video art, nude photos, and poetry. 

“No Fate” is as much a collection of queer spiritual and pagan artworks as it is a nod to the spaces and communities where those artworks are created, the tumblrverse included. There are obsessive drawings by the inimitable Edie Fake, a Chicago-based tattoo artist and radical queer feminist; there is an alter of blessed oddments from back-to-the-lander and wayward gay nun Sister Soami DeLux. The exhibition, curated by Rhodes’ gallerist Joel Parsons, is both library and makeshift chapel, white box and crying room. It invokes dirty first apartments and distant wooded hollers, stairways to heaven and substances divined from the ground. Parsons writes, “Spirits bless this sacred, vulgar space. Bless the cheap wine and bless the cheese and the cookies from Costco, the blood and the body.” 

Soo Shin’s Battles of Possibility is an array of framed eclipses, black acrylic and pale rainbows arranged into sundial-shape at radial variance with each other. The piece serves as a celestial clock for the rest of the included work, some of which feels graduated from any particular time (Gordon Hall’s Not One But Many Silences, a ritualistically folded canvas from a previous performance), and some of which take a scalpel to every single tiny physical minute (part of Ivan LOZANO’s ERIK Rhodes Ex Voto reads “I’m losing the drive to put in the man-hours needed to fix this broken machine … I wanna give up and not look back.” Ex Voto, a collection of papers and clippings related to the death of gay porn star Erik Rhodes, is in critical gridlock with DeLux’ shiny mystical alter, directly across from it.).

For an exhibition that liberally invokes crystal magic, this show should not be mistaken for what a friend of mine once referred to as “woo-woo sh**.” Rather, it is a retrospective in the fullest sense: an attempt to place a queer artist community in time and relationship, be that cosmic or cardinal. 

The retrospective mission is most evident in a small side gallery reading room, assembled by Corkey Sinks, where visitors can read RFD (Radical Faerie Digest, the print-circular for queer farmers), listen to audio recordings about the founding of gay spiritual sanctuaries in the 1970s and 1980s, and browse books such as Arthur Evans’ Witchcraft and Gay Counterculture. Most of the included material hails from a time when the main discussion in the queer community was not marriage or legal exclusion, but HIV/AIDS and pervasive hate crime. Though “No Fate” is undoubtedly a new-agey show, its works take place in the context of dark and necessary politics. As a speaker on one of the audio transcriptions says, addressing his queer family: “We will find ways and means to survive … we will not die … we will invent. We always have, and we do it very well.”

Through March 29th

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Straight Ahead

Wardell Milan’s Clough-Hanson exhibition, “Landscape! Romance, Rottenness,” is a mesmerizing mix of figure and landscape, mystery and mayhem, ripeness and rot. In a series of mixed-media collages titled “Heroine: Nude and Landscape,” evocative and complex women stare at us with large, limpid eyes and secrets to share. The heads and long petals of purple sunflowers become Heroine #4‘s dark nipples and the translucent sleeves of a designer blouse that she has accented with skintight lizard-green gloves. Sultry and self-assured, she looks straight at the viewer as she touches the edge of her pubis, though not in shame or an attempt to cover herself. This is the gesture of a woman who feels empowered by sexual energy.

Roses sprout from the back and womb of Heroine #1. Her disproportionately short legs and slightly gangly body accentuate her youth. Small hands are cupped just beneath her chin in a gesture of surprise and an attempt to shield herself. In this compelling portrait of innocence, instinct, and sexual awakening, a third arm and hand (larger and more crudely drawn) reaches under the long mane of hair that covers the young woman’s breasts.

Heroine #5 is neither coiffed nor manicured. Part-woman and part-mother earth, her long strands of hair are tangled. Her torso morphs into a dense mix of vegetation and earth that looks like a compost heap, both fetid and fertile. The rest of her body is over-lit and stark-white. With the faintest of diagrams and drawings, Milan delicately traces part of her skeleton and reproductive system.

No detached oglings, no casual couplings are possible with Milan’s unnerving, iconic females. They draw us into the web of life, where we glimpse the part each of us must play in nature’s cycles of pubescence, full flowering, regeneration, and rot.

Milan’s digital C-prints of miniature stage sets — constructed from Pop art, family photographs, and myriad other sources — also teem with life and decay. Near the center of the C-print Christopher Columbus’ Discovery of the New World, Columbus wears what looks like an aluminum-foil spacesuit. He stands on top of an equally inept-looking aluminum-foil spaceship that bears the red cross that also appeared on the flags of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

Across the top of the C-print, a jet liner flies past ancient ruins toward a large stone edifice toppled by natural disaster, modern warfare, Armageddon. African tribesmen stand next to slave traders, slaves, odalisques, and eunuchs. Near the bottom of the work, African-American teenagers, circa the ’60s, sit beside their “wheels” and boom boxes. Far left, a young woman with her hair in curlers strolls with a friend across the rubble of a bombed-out city — or perhaps, the rubble of time. 

Instead of discrete timelines, concise textbook accounts of history, or simplistic statements regarding the meaning of life (or progress or manifest destiny), in Milan’s crowded, chaotic C-prints you’ll find something richer, more entangled, and real.

Through December 8th

 

It’s a pleasure to watch an artist grow. During the last four years, Matthew Hasty has evolved from a good, slightly garish landscape painter to an artist whose panoramas of the Delta in his L Ross exhibition, “Gravity,” are some of the most spectacular and subtly nuanced landscapes seen this year. In Crepuscular Rays and Cloudburst, rays of light spread across the entire surface of these 4-by-5-foot paintings. As the rays pass through cloudbanks and open sky, their colors change from silver to endlessly gradated shades of ochre, amber, and white-gold. The moist earth that borders the bottom of these works is also softly glowing.

In another subtly stunning landscape, Moonlit Cottonfield, thousands of tiny off-white puffs create hundreds of rows of cotton. Like lines of perspective, the rows narrow near the horizon, converging in a pool of soft light cast by a full moon. Hasty’s mix of mist and moonlight nearly obscures the slender pines that stand like ghostly sentinels at the edge of a field.

Hasty’s dark, effervescent, but still compelling, River Sunset does not blaze with saturate color. Instead, clouds scatter across a lavender-gray sky like embers. The sky’s reflection in the muddy Mississippi turns water into burgundy wine. Just beneath the setting sun, a slender shaft of light streaks across the river. Hasty glazes the earth with as much care as his sunsets and the surfaces of water. You’ll find burnt sienna and gold-green tints in the fertile Delta riverbank at the bottom of the painting. 

Hasty hopes this body of work will “elicit an emotional response and have a soothing effect on viewers that invites contemplation.” Hasty’s luminous landscapes succeed in this and much more. If we look, really look — this increasingly accomplished artist reminds us — each bend in a river, each sunset, each patch of umber earth is a masterwork of texture, color, composition, and light.

Through November 30th

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In the Abstract

Rather than ponder Platonic perfection, Peter Williams’ exhibition of “Recent Works” at Clough-Hanson confronts the world in all its complex, ribald, multicultural, paradoxical glory. You’ll find no vague shadows playing across stone walls in Williams’ 48-by-60-inch painting Plato’s Cave. Instead, stones shape-shift into montages of racial/sexual/cultural prejudice and dysfunction, including pornographic Aunt Jemimas and good-ole-boy sadism. Disembodied heads register awe, surprise, dismay, and horror. 

In Williams’ oil-on-panel portrait Plato, the Greek philosopher looks like a spunky, neurologically damaged street-fighter whose face has been beaten to a pulp on more than one occasion. Instead of meditating on ideals, Williams asks us to embrace the world as it is, to fight the good fight, to struggle to our last breath.

Williams’ bald head and brawny torso are the same color and texture as boulders closing in on him from all sides in his relentlessly honest self-portrait of courage and mortality Dr. NO. His crosshatched, red­-brown loins look like the soil beneath the stones. The lavender sky that backdrops his expressive mahogany face acknowledges life’s profound beauty and pain.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College through March 27th

In Laura Painter Stafford’s exhibition “Presents in Creation” at Perry Nicole Fine Art, dollops of paint become a field of ruby-red flowers in Job 9:10-11. A church’s bright-orange roof, thick stucco facade, and swaying architecture seem to move with the spirit of God in Psalm 68:35.

Instead of feeling stylized or too full of the trappings of religiosity, Stafford’s love of the poetry of thanksgiving in Psalms, her thick paint, and childlike exuberance are powerfully disarming. We feel Stafford’s excitement as she shapes her worlds, her joy as she beholds what she has wrought.

Also on view at Perry Nicole are Rod Moorhead’s provocative pit-fired clay figures. These winged creatures are part fallen angel, part Greek deity, part muse, part temptress. Even as they tumble head-over-heels down the wall in Regret, even as they lose themselves in bittersweet passion in Last Dance with Mary Jane, their soft, searching faces suggest that, whatever their missteps, these creatures will learn from their experiences and move on.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 31st

 

In the L Ross show “Ice Hockey Is For Abstract Painters Who Are Tired of Defending Formalism,” Ryan VanderLey explores art history with humor and panache.

VanderLey frees himself from the demands of formalism in Greenberg Was Cut II, creates an abstraction that is both two- and three-dimensional in Neo-plastic Ice, and in Stone Field Was Alright takes one of minimalist Carl Andre’s stones, plants it in a spring-green field, and breaks it wide open with slashes of turquoise and coral that look exotic and floral.

In the space- and mind-bending work I Saw That Stuff Over There, a wooden beam jutting out from the bottom allows us to “virtually” climb into the painting onto a warm brown ledge.

Steady yourself: This artwork becomes increasingly gestural and transparent as VanderLey splinters hockey sticks into expressive de Kooning-esque slashes and turns the ice into thin sheets that hover and glow like Mark Rothko’s fields of color.

Instead of defending particular aesthetic positions, VanderLey incorporates line, form, color, content, and context into playful, philosophical wholes that are some of the freshest, most satisfying works seen this year.

At L Ross Gallery through March 30th

The hypnotic paintings of Susan Maakestad’s exhibition “Traffic Land” at Material were inspired by traffic-camera images retrieved from the Internet. Maakestad’s worlds are composed not of crisp-edged details but boundless space, ceaseless motion, and palettes that look like mixes of oil slicks, soot, night lights, sunrises, and sunsets. 

In Mile Marker 3, we drive a long graceful arc of highway, swerve around a bend, and disappear into a purple-blue twilight. In Mile Marker 4, a broad, teal-green interstate narrows to a needle point beneath a soft-pink sky. And in Maakestad’s particularly haunting Untitled — Night, we drive past a crumbling cement causeway in need of repair toward a gritty halo surrounding a polluted metropolis far in the distance.

At Material through April 10th

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Tough Times

It was one heck of a year for Memphis art. The tougher things got, the more sardonic, surreal, and soul-searching artists became with their works.

Universities, museums, and galleries, also reflective of the times, mounted particularly moving exhibitions. Memphis College of Art’s January exhibition, “Close to Home: African American Folk Art from Memphis Collectors,” featured one of Hawkins Bolden’s untitled scarecrows. Made out of pots drilled full of holes and held together with brooms and frayed fabric, Bolden’s deeply textured testament to life conjured bullet-riddled WWI helmets on top of old wooden crosses and Don Quixote fighting injustice atop a broomstick horse.

For its summer show, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art exhibited 81 of Jacob Lawrence’s prints, including his masterworks, “The Legend of John Brown” series. These spare works were poignantly apropos for challenges we face today. In screenprint No. 1, Christ hangs on the cross back-dropped by what looks like fast-moving storm clouds, the wings of a large raven, or an omen — readings that reminded us that Christ’s crucifixion was a dark drama about government brutality and warring religious factions as well as the hope for redemption. 

“Lichtenstein in Process,” on view through January 17th at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, includes eye-popping, comic-book-inspired collages, etheric landscapes, wry homages to modern masters, and one of the most moving works of Lichtenstein’s career, Collage for the Sower.

Lauren Coulson’s fall show at Jack Robinson Gallery featured photos taken in Europe. By manually winding the black-and-white film in her inexpensive camera, Coulson made multiple exposures of crumbling statues and eroding architecture and clock towers. These blurred and distorted images were powerful portraits not of grand cathedrals or great generals but of time itself.

Jason Miller filled the rest of Jack Robinson’s fall show with kaleidoscopic mixes of digital images that included department-store Santas, Sunday school portraits of Christ, and corporate logos. Initially dizzying, the open-ended symbolism of Miller’s “Energy Fortress Series” and his free-flowing “Digital Mandalas” ultimately celebrated humankind’s ability to cut through corporate spin and childhood fantasy, to embrace what Miller described as “a more open form … where imagination and spirituality outweigh the need to belong to particular religious sects.”

Nine September exhibitions, collectively titled “Greely Myatt: and exactly Twenty Years,” celebrated Myatt’s sly humor and down-home wisdom in venues as varied as the Clough-Hanson Gallery, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the P&H Café. In A Brief History of Sculpture at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, soap bubbles spilled down the sides of a worn wooden plinth as Myatt took sculpture off its pedestal and suggested that art, rather than being concise or categorical, is effervescent and ever-changing. For his show at David Lusk Gallery, Myatt carved a wooden beam into a freestanding pair of pants titled Like a Lighthouse, which he mounted on a table. This wry, viscerally compelling sexual icon also served as a poignant symbol for the emptiness and isolation we sometimes feel in spite of the stimuli that flow 24/7 in our wired-up, plugged-in, cyber-spaced world.

John McIntire was at his quirky, cutting-edge best in the nearly seamless syntheses of the cerebral, the spiritual, and the sensual that shaped his female torsos in a November show at Perry Nicole Fine Art.

The most resonant metaphors for 2009 were the brambles and weathered branches that worked their way out of underbrush and crossed a sometimes arid, sometimes golden-ochre earth in Jeri Ledbetter’s November show of paintings, “Mano a Mano II,” at L Ross Gallery. Charcoal washes coalesced into the death throes of some prehistoric beast in Cielo II. Above the creature, in wild scribbles that arced and jabbed across a piercingly blue sky, we could feel both the artist’s and the ancient beast’s rage for life.

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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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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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In the Paint

More than a decade ago, Elliot Perry — then a point guard for the Phoenix Suns — was sharing a flight to Japan with fellow NBA’ers Charles Barkley and Darrel Walker when the conversation turned to art.

“I had no interest in it at the time,” Perry, a University of Memphis alum who earned a record-breaking 2,200-plus points for the Tigers before graduating in 1991, quickly confesses, “but Darrel showed me books and catalogs and some things from his collection.”

He was immediately hooked.

Talk to Perry for five minutes, and he’ll discuss the merits of Mississippi-born painter William Tolliver and dissect the life and work of the 20th-century African-American master Jacob Lawrence before making predictions about his beloved Tigers’ upcoming season.

Today, his zeal is reflected in his collection, which includes hundreds of pieces in mediums that range from photography and painting to drawing, sculpture, and video.

For the next month, 15 choice works are on display at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery. The selection includes pivotal pieces such as Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture Untitled (Negro Sunshine), Renee Cox’ portrait American Beaute, and Wardell Milan’s Cibachrome collage of lush greenery, dinosaurs, and African figures.

“Most African-American people don’t grow up appreciating art,” Perry says. “They’ll like a cotton-picking scene or a portrait of a mother and child — something figural we can all relate to. For me, it’s been a growing process. In the beginning, I couldn’t appreciate abstraction or anything conceptual.

“Over the last four years, I’ve made a 360 on the work I collect and began moving toward young contemporary artists, artists of my time. I read about when [noted African-American art collector Dr. Walter Evans] started collecting in the ’70s and how he built friendships and working relationships with artists. I thought, Hey, I can do the same thing. So I started getting in touch with young contemporary artists.”

Clough-Hanson’s director, Hamlett Dobbins, says, “It’s one thing to buy something, and another thing to build that relationship. And in that way, Elliot is like a patron, someone who is aware of how important his support can be to a young artist.”

After crossing paths at a Brooks Museum exhibit that featured work on loan from Perry’s collection, Dobbins began laying the groundwork for “Taking Aim: Selections from the Elliot L. Perry Collection,” which will be on display at Clough-Hanson through October 11th.

Dobbins and Perry handpicked the pieces from 15 different artists, including hoop-dreams-themed works like photographer Hank Willis Thomas’ luminously deceiving Basketball and Chain, Michael Ray Charles’ Untitled (an arresting, nearly 5-foot tall painting which features a cartoonish figure stuffed into a fishbowl, while a carrot, a basketball, and words like “prosperity” and “influence” dangle above him), and Robert Pruitt’s ominous Sandinista, a drawing that depicts a figure dressed in half-bushman, half-NBA attire, a fatigue-styled cap on his head and a pistol at his feet.

The oldest pieces in the show, mixed-media work such as Kerry James Marshall’s The Face of Nat Turner Appeared in a Water Stain and Radcliff Bailey’s Untitled, date back to the ’90s; everything else is 21st century and as breathtakingly contemporary from a socio-political standpoint as they are on a purely artistic level.

“People paint what they know,” Perry says. “This collection tackles so many different issues. It shows the rich heritage of African-American people in so many diverse ways.

“Since I began collecting, I’ve always wanted to share art with other people,” he continues. “For me, it’s an inspiration. People think of it as a rich person’s game, but I know guys who have built significant collections by paying out a little bit at a time, doing their homework, and going out there and being a part of the scene.”

Now, Perry, a part owner in the Memphis Grizzlies, sees his collection as much more than a monetary investment.

“Being a collector has broadened my horizons,” he says. “I’ve gained an appreciation not just for visual art but for music, from opera to classical. Dance and performance art too — the whole nine yards. Wherever I go, whether it’s basketball season or not, I’m always talking to people and always collecting.”

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Outside the Box

The artworks in Memphis College of Art’s group exhibition “Reasons To Riot” tease, rankle, inspire, and horrify. In Hank Willis Thomas’ Jordan and Johnnie Walker in Timberland circa 1923 (inkjet print on canvas), a black man, with a basketball in his right hand and a noose around his neck, swings from the limb of a tree in a slam-dunk position. A dapper, well-dressed gentleman (the Striding Man logo for Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky) walks past the lynched man with blithe confidence. “Just do it,” the signature advertising slogan for Nike sportswear, is printed at the bottom of the canvas. “Keep Walking” is printed beneath the Striding Man.

Slick advertising combined with sadistic slapstick is hard to take, but Thomas has created one of the most telling works in the exhibition. It slaps us in the face with a crass brutality that incites riot/revolt/rebellion. It brings us face-to-face with a callous mindset (“Just do it and keep walking”) that makes ethnic cleansing, holocaust, and apartheid possible.

Many of the artists challenge us to think outside the box. Derrick Adams’ installation, Playthings, invites us to get down on the floor and into a town painted on a rug. Possibilities for playacting are wide-open in this small community whose citizens are Kenyan tourist figurines as slender as Masai warriors, as sleek as gazelles. These 12-inch-tall wooden figures are dressed as McDonald’s fry cooks, divas in designer evening wear, basketball players, National Guardsmen in camouflage fatigues, and cross-dressers in pink feather coats. At the Internet café painted at the edge of the rug, you can join in the free-wheeling debates about beauty, politics, and fashion.

Chris Scarborough’s untitled portrait of ‘Sara’

With hips moving gracefully from side to side and books balanced on top of her head, digital video artist Leslie Hewitt records herself walking slowly across a landscape of deteriorating concrete, rubble, and weeds. Played again and again, this sparest of narratives gives us time to reflect and to wonder whether the burden the woman carries is a metaphor for the limiting effects of illiteracy or if the books (and the knowledge they contain) serve as her stepping stones out of the ghetto.

In the searing, sardonic, overtly sexual mixed-media drawing Destiny, Zoe Charlton whites-out the face and upper body of a man leaning back on his haunches. She straps what looks like the prow of a 17th-century clipper ship (crammed with human cargo for the slave trade) around the man’s waist like a dildo. A small undecorated Christmas tree dangles from its tip. Charlton takes the unexpressed (cut-off, repressed, denied, watered-down, expurgated) passions of humanity and channels them into a phallus as pointed as this artist’s insights, as unadorned as truth, as double-edged as our species’ capacity for cruelty and joy.

“Reasons To Riot” at Memphis College of Art through April 6th

Chris Scarborough’s exhibition “Living on Cloud Nine” at Clough-Hanson explores gender stereotypes. Scarborough’s most expressive works are digitally altered photographs of a girl named Sara. With subtle computer manipulations, Scarborough reduces her mouth, enlarges her eyes, elongates her limbs, and transforms her into a petite princess of Japanese anime whose kingdom is the cosmos or that vaguely remembered part of ourselves that at age 5 or so was astonished by just about everything.

One of Scarborough’s Saras sits in the sand looking out to sea, another is completely surrounded by darkness, and a third stands in black water looking up into an equally black sky. All three Saras are wide-eyed and open-mouthed with wonder.

Scarborough also digitally alters photographs of a blue-eyed, platinum-blond teenager named Shannon whose matte complexion and broad, photo-op smiles replace Sara’s freckles and look of amazement.

Hair-tousled and dressed in form-fitting sweater and slacks, one of the Shannons lies on a thick white rug looking up at the viewer with sex-kitten coquetry. Another image of the same young woman hangs on the wall to our right as we leave the gallery. This Shannon is slimmer; the texture and tone of her complexion has gone from matte to plastic. With the same seamless manipulations that transform Sara into an archetype of unadulterated awe, Scarborough turns Shannon into a Barbie doll lying in a trash-strewn lot, her limbs bent in exaggerated positions. Scarborough’s Shannon/Barbie composite could be a victim of drugs, foul play, or suicide, or she may stand as a metaphor for the soul-numbing effects of focusing on surface beauty.

And then there are the faces of Sara. Once you’ve recovered from the longing and regret these images engender — look again. In small increments (like Scarborough’s digital manipulations) relax and let Sara take you back to a time when you could see worlds of possibility inside and out.

“Living on Cloud Nine” at Clough-Hanson Gallery through April 4th