Cotton Museum – Memphis Flyer

Look at what you’re wearing. With approximately 90 percent of clothing sold in the U.S. being made with cotton or polyester, it’s likely that you have cotton on you right now or did yesterday or will tomorrow, and it’s even more likely you don’t know who made that article of clothing or what their working conditions were. After all, the industry behind cotton has a complicated, exploitative history, especially in the U.S. — a history that The Cotton Museum expands upon in its Diversity of the Delta series.

The first installment of the series occurred last week, with Rhodes professor Tim Huebner speaking on slavery, Memphis, and the Mississippi Delta. This Thursday, the museum will host its second installment, this time focusing on the first Italians to come to the Delta. “They came here as sharecroppers, and they suffered a lot,” says Ann Bateman, The Cotton Museum’s manager. “There’s no comparison with slavery, however. But they were also abused and discriminated against during the sharecropping era.”

Anthony Borgognoni will present the talk, based on his mother Elizabeth’s research into the history of Italian immigrants who came to the Sunnyside Plantation in Lake Village, Arkansas, in 1895. Bateman also says that museum will touch on the Chinese immigrant connection to the cotton industry in a future talk in 2023. “We’re going to keep trying to continue that series as long as we have people who will speak and people who are interested.”

Out of this series also came the inspiration for the museum’s latest temporary exhibit: “Cultural Influences in Quilting.” Just as cotton has an interconnected history between cultures so does the practice of quilting, and these cultural influences evince themselves in the different patterns, color blocking, and stitching.

Being able to see the different influences — Japanese, German, Indigenous, Italian, and African, among others — in one room, Bateman says, shows how cotton, “a wonderful and valuable crop,” has the potential to unify if used for good.

“Cultural Influences in Quilting,” The Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange, on display through October 31.

Diversity of the Delta, Thursday, October 13, 6 p.m., free.

There’s an anecdote about two writers, Hal and Al, who sit down to discuss their work. Hal pulls out a 1,500-page novel and hands it to Al, who flips through it and says, “Geez, Hal, this looks good, but it sure is long.” “Well,” responds Hal, “I didn’t have time to write something short!”

Point being, of course, that it is harder to make something good and simple than to make something good and complex. Longtime Memphis artist and educator Dolph Smith’s most recent show at the Cotton Museum is a testament to this idea. The exhibition — called “Parting Shots” because it is also (supposedly) Smith’s final show — features paintings, drawings, and sculptures that Smith pares down into their simplest gestures.

Rosie’s Window, part of Dolph Smith’s “Parting Shots” exhibit

Smith, who spent his teaching career at Memphis College of Art, is best known for his deeply hued watercolor paintings of Southern barns. Smith’s barns are myth-steeped and romantic without being wistful. The artist and craftsman’s work has a dark incisiveness that places his simple landscapes somewhere outside the literal. It is hard to see his barns, pitched under bleeding skies, without also seeing their hollowness. The structures are an empty point of contact with a big, and not necessarily kind, beyond.

“If you look at any one of these paintings,” Smith says, “you’ll see that watercolor is an act of nature. I could never paint these skies, but if you have water and you put a color on it, it will move. As it moves, it takes color with it. It will settle into the interstices of the paper. I collaborate with nature.”

“Parting Shots” contains some works from Smith’s early canon, as well as much more recent sculptural pieces. After his 1970s success as a painter, Smith says he entered a period where he felt as if he were artistically repeating himself. In response to this, he became a paper maker. “When you begin to build up surfaces,” says Smith about this process, “you feel like something is coming out to join you in the real world.”

Layered paper works such as Will We Know What’s Gone Before feel less like they are built to join us in the real world as they are to draw us more effectively into a removed and transcendent space. In the piece, graphite-coated handmade paper is sculpted to form a pile of sunken-looking detritus. A paper ladder grows out of the graphite detritus and morphs into a brightened, wooden version of itself — a version that is, once again, disrupted by the graphite toward the top of the work. Several other wooden ladders also appear, and disappear, near the piece’s center.

Will We Know What’s Gone Before takes place in a dream where, perhaps, the viewer climbs an endless ladder out of a silo, a factory, a well — and mid-climb, is caught in a strange, bright light. This dream-logic is echoed in a similarly constructed work, The Pearl Divers of Tennarkippi, in which a wooden boat sails over the cast-paper remnants of a wooden house. The work recalls sunken ghost towns or a hurricane-flooded gulf. The pearls, if they are there, remain hidden.

Smith’s works are not about place, though the works bear the signs of a storied South. Rather, pieces such as Parting Shot V: Leaving the Nest and Parting Shot III: Nerissa Knotgrass leaves for new ground center around a sense of displacement — a doubleness or tripleness of place, realized through small frames and images that he places throughout the work.

Smith’s work is not elaborate. It doesn’t need to be. He focuses on simple moments of paradox that, though deeply complex, need little elaboration to be understood.