Tag: Elizabeth Alley

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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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Art Art Feature

Local Artist’s Travels Find Expression with “Place Shapes” at the Dixon

As a child, Elizabeth Alley assumed every household had ebony pencils and kneaded erasers laying around. They were everyday objects at home where her father, Rick Alley, was an artist who worked for The Commercial Appeal for more than 30 years. He made sure there was a stack of newsprint around for his kids to draw on, a fitting medium since Rick’s father, Cal Alley, and his grandfather, J. P. Alley, were editorial cartoonists for The Commercial Appeal, J. P. having won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1923.

So for Elizabeth to find her passion as a fourth-generation artist is hardly a surprise, but she has assuredly followed her own path, one that has led her to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens where she has an exhibition opening this month.

Her exhibition of recent oil paintings, “Place Shapes,” runs from July 14th to October 6th in the Mallory/Wurtzburger Galleries.

Pinhao Road, oil on paper

Alley graduated from the University of Memphis in 1998 and soon after began exhibiting. And she found that she had to assign herself projects, such as a series of paintings. “After I got out of school,” she says, “I missed the regularity of it, and I kind of needed that structure. I really am best when I work in a series.”

In school, she did what art students do, which is to carry a sketchbook with her everywhere. After graduation, she still kept it with her, but, she admits, “I was lazy about sketching at the time, meaning I didn’t have a direction or a purpose for it.”

That would change.

Around 2009, Alley discovered the group Urban Sketchers, which is devoted to art done by direct observation on location, not from photos or memory. “It was a group of people doing the same things that I was doing, only doing it a little bit better,” she says.

She was motivated to start a Memphis regional chapter of the organization and has been involved in the local and the parent group since. About the time Alley got interested in Urban Sketchers, she started teaching at Flicker Street Studio where she continues to instruct in sketchbook drawing and beginning oil painting.

It is this devotion to sketching that has shaped Alley’s direction and work. She’s traveled quite a bit and has carefully recorded her experiences in far-flung places. “My connection to these places is that I’ve been there and seen them, but also that I’ve sketched them,” she says. “When you sketch anything — a place, a person — you develop this connection with it. So all of these places live in my heart now.”

How, then, did her sketchbook work in her travels turn into oil paintings in the Dixon exhibition? The works in this show all emerged from trips she made to Iceland, Newfoundland, and Portugal, where she particularly noted how the built environment blends with nature. You’ll see walls and roads but also desire paths, which, Alley says, “are where people walk in a natural environment so much that it creates a path.” She doesn’t see the world as “us versus nature,” but rather how societies can coexist with nature.

She decided to get back into oil painting, which she’d set aside for two or three years in favor of ink and watercolors, and she realized she wanted to turn the time she spent traveling into oil paintings. “In the past year,” Alley says, “I have been working on these in oils just to see what else I could do with it other than what I had already done.”

Alley has been working with the Dixon for some time now. She’s had other works on display there, and she was bringing her Urban Sketchers to the gallery, so she got to know the staff and has been doing some teaching there. The “Place Shapes” exhibition is the happy result of the ongoing association between artist and gallery.

An opening reception for “Place Shapes” will be held on July 18th from
6 to 8 p.m. at the Dixon.

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“This Art Has Cooties” at Marshall Arts

Artist Elizabeth Alley says that the title of the show she’s curating, “This Art Has Cooties,” came from a joke between her and a friend. The friend told Alley that he could never hang her art in his home because it was too feminine. Alley replied, “Oh, does it have cooties?”

Jenean Morrison’s The Adventure

“This Art Has Cooties” opens Friday at Marshall Arts and features the work of 15 local artists, including Alley, Mel Spillman, Lisa Tribo, and Mary Jo Karimnia.

Alley says there’s no hard-and-fast criteria to measure a work’s femininity, but she says she does see patterns, such as, well, patterns. Feminine art depicts women and children or focuses in on textiles. The works may be small, suggesting intimacy, Alley says, giving as an example Chandler Pritchett’s small watercolors. “It’s like peeking into her memory,” Alley says.

Jennifer Sargent’s Shadow Warrior (Bird)

For “Cooties,” Pritchett is doing a series of self-portrait watercolors — one for each year of her life. Jennifer Sargent is showing drawings and weaving work. Mary K vanGeisen is doing a series of paper works that are shaped like shopping bags with images of family photos on the outside of the bag and writing on the inside of the bag.

“It’s people whose work I want to see,” says Alley of the group. “And it’s a show I want to be in.”

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En Route

There are no people, no cars, no buildings in Susan Maakestad’s spare visions of modernity. Swerving interstates, eerie colors, and complex textures make for compelling abstractions that look like the opening scenes of a film noir and recall the cityscapes of Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.

Sunset and unshielded streetlights turn Culvert #3 smoky-red. A glowing pink ribbon of sky tops the concrete rubble of the sharply inclined Ramp #1, and in Street, Maakestad’s dry brush lets the fibers of cotton canvas show through to suggest gritty pavement narrowing to a point under a stormy, sooty sky.

Eighteen of Maakestad’s midsized canvases lining the right wall of Perry Nicole’s front and back galleries create an impression of unbroken movement. We speed past a blur of ochre fields and distant tree lines in Concrete & Trees #2, swerve around waterfronts in River and River #2, and in Speed Bump #2 we glide on a surfboard-shaped section of highway above a pitch-black sky.

Many of the works are painted low-to-the-ground and angled up, suggesting the perspective of a motorist focusing on the road ahead in a long drive that invites meditation. At the apex of Overpass, the highway disappears into an equally pale sky, reminding us of the impossibility of shoring ourselves against boundless energy and space no matter how sophisticated our concrete and steel infrastructures. Dusty pink expressways crossing smoky-red rivers (Barrier and Barrier #2) bring to mind the turmoil and emotional intensity in the cities Maakestad’s interstates connect.

When we end our journey at Parking Space #3 (a scumbled lot bordered by barren gray sky and an equally barren patch of yellow-green grass), there are still no people, no cars, no homes, no trees. Maakestad’s stark interstates have taken us for a mesmerizing ride that seems to ask: Beyond the concrete and beyond the frenetic pace of modern life, when/if we finally slow down, what will remain of our sense of community and self?

Susan Maakestad’s Overpass

Elizabeth Alley also takes us for a ride with eight small oils on canvas depicting commercial signs, the flat roofs of small businesses, the tops of treelines, and an occasional telephone pole.

The signs’ simple geometric shapes, vivid colors, and crisp lettering allow us to process their information and read their words quickly. Their oblique angles suggest the world we see when we crane our necks in fast-moving cars scanning strip malls for grocery stores (Ramona’s Tomato), candy shops (Flower’s Kiss #2), and fast-food restaurants (Pocky). Oriental lettering and the word “Pocky” printed on a maroon sign back-dropped by a clear blue sky bring to mind a combination gas station/fast-food restaurant that serves up sushi and Southern-fried chicken.

Nine of Alley’s figurative works hang in Perry Nicole’s front gallery, including the tiny, provocative Fishnets. In this 8-by-8-inch dramatically cropped portrait, a woman’s legs are bare except for a pair of wide-mesh stockings. Another figure’s high-heeled foot straddles the first woman’s thigh in a close-up that raises more questions than the scene’s modicum of information will ever answer.

Paintings derived from vintage family photos prove Alley a magician of memory. In the particularly resonant, conceptually rich Family Car, crisp shadows and confident strokes of impastoed paint make a scene from the early ’60s come alive. Bright gallery lights shining on the thick oils convincingly replicate the gloss of patent leather shoes, bronzed skin, the glare of sunlight on metal bumpers, and the brilliance of new car chrome.

An unusually lean and long 2-by-5-foot canvas accentuates the shape of a family sedan circa 1960s and crops the heads of two leggy teenagers, allowing viewers age 40 and over to become these youngsters and to reclaim the memory of a summer road trip complete with new shoes, new roadster, and Coppertone tans.

A shadow in the painting’s foreground suggests the silhouette of the mother/photographer who memorialized this scene for family archives. A photographer takes a picture that becomes the snapshot that becomes the work of art that depicts the photographer taking the snapshot that becomes … ad infinitum … a family portrait that goes beyond nostalgia to play with our notions regarding creativity, memory, time, and reality.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through November 27th