Tag: Emily Neff

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News News Blog

Swiss Design Firm to Take on “Brooks on the Bluff”

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art introduced a world renowned design firm as the creative force behind “Brooks on the Bluff,” the future Downtown incarnation of the 103-year-old institution.

Herzog & de Meuron of Basel, Switzerland and New York, will collaborate with Memphis-based archimania, the architect of record. The design is expected to be unveiled early next year and the $105 million facility completed in four to five years.

Herzog & de Meuron has a formidable reputation, having won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for its renovation of London’s Tate Modern in 2000. It also did the striking Bird’s Nest Stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and several other notable projects.

Tuesday evening’s presentation was held at the site of the future museum at Union and Front, which now is a fire station and parking garage.

Deborah Craddock, president of the museum’s board, told the attendees that, “Relocating the Brooks to the Fourth Bluff and along the banks of the Mississippi river is a move that offers an unprecedented opportunity for the art museum to serve as the primary cultural anchor in downtown core of Memphis along a revitalized riverfront.”

She said several planning and engagement sessions have been held since plans for the museum’s move were announced in 2017. “Our goals as an institution perfectly aligned with those indicated in community responses to create a radically welcomed and inclusive art museum for all people,” Craddock says.

The term “radically welcomed” is also being used by Brooks executive director Emily Neff, which indicates a determination to get higher numbers of people through the doors of the museum. Memphis mayor Jim Strickland told the Memphis Flyer that the Brooks sees about 80,000 people a year now, but with the new facility, “We will easily get hundreds of thousands of people a year coming into this great museum.” He says, “The Brooks museum is a good museum; this is going to make it a really great museum. We need a new building, and building it here on the river bluff and building it here downtown is going to be incredible.”

Neff says that one of the appealing aspects of Herzog & de Meuron was that it doesn’t have a signature style. What they do, she says, “is informed by the site and the context of the site and the uniqueness of Memphis and the pride we take in our city and what the architect can say about our city. We thought they were the perfect match. And it helps that they have major experience in the cultural sector and in art museums.” She says that the selection of archimania means there will be an intimate knowledge of Memphis by two firms that are focused on design excellence and collaboration.

Two of the members of the team from the Swiss firm have a local connection. Project manager Philip Schmerbeck went to Germantown High School and got his architecture degree at Mississippi State University. Another team member, Jack Brough, is a graduate of Ridgeway High School.

Ascan Mergenthaler, senior partner and partner in charge, told the gathering, “there’s something about the people of Memphis, a very special spirit about them and we’re very impressed with that. We’re convinced that this building and this place will become the hotspot of Memphis, really like a focal point were people come not only to see art but also to come and just hang out and to enjoy the place, meet people and just make it a truly civic building.”

Mergenthaler says the site intrigued the design firm. “The Bluff, this very interesting nature form formed by the river and with the downtown, and then we have this beautiful slope on the left and the right which is also fantastic. It’s a challenge, but its also an opportunity to create something very specific for this place, so we will come up with something which is really firmly rooted in this and grounded in this, and can only be here and nowhere else in the world.”

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News News Blog

Brooks Leaders Confirm Interest in Riverfront Move

CREDIT: Google Maps

Google Maps

The site of a parking garage at Front and Monroe is being considered as a possible new location for the Brooks Museum of Art.

The Brooks Museum of Art board of directors voted more than a week ago to get approvals form city officials to move the museum from Overton Park to a site that now has “some structured parking along Front Street.”

Studio Gang

A revitalized Front and Monroe sans parking garage.

Sources told the Memphis Flyer recently that museum leaders were considering moving the Brooks to a site on Front between Monroe and Union, where now stands the headquarters of the Memphis Fire Services Division and a parking garage. However, museum leaders would not confirm nor deny the site’s consideration nor would they divulge any details at the time.

A Tuesday-morning note from Brooks board president Deborah Craddock and executive director Emily Ballew Neff said the board has been considering moving the museum from its 101-year home int he park for the last 18 months. The board voted to consider the Front Street site on Friday, Oct 6.
[pullquote-1]The riverfront, they said, became an option after city officials formed plan to develop the area and consultants suggested the parking garage at Front and Monroe be converted into a “cultural amenity.” But the deal is not yet done.

“Many further discussions with the city of Memphis will be required and we must still have complete and satisfactory answers to myriad questions about a potential new site for the Brooks Museum on the riverfront,” said the note from Craddock and Ballew Neff. “Nevertheless, we feel that this is a singular opportunity to be part of a true renaissance along the river, particularly with tremendous developments happening in The Pinch and Medical Districts, around the campus of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and throughout all of downtown.”

Earlier this year, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland formed a task force to look at new ways to develop the Memphis riverfront. Before that, the Riverfront Development Corp. hired Studio Gang, a Chicago-based consulting firm, to review the riverfront and deliver some ideas to the task force on ways to improve it.

The plan was packed with ideas. One of the top four “key starting points” was one to remove the parking garage and Fire Station No. 5 on Front between Union and Monroe. One page of the plan showed the possibility in infomercial-style before-and-after shots.  Studio Gang

[pullquote-2] Studio Gang

“Removing the parking garage at Monroe and Front and the fire station headquarters at Union and Front can open up an amazing Mississippi river vista and create space for an iconic new cultural anchor set in a green landscape,” the Studio Gang plan said. “This new amenity can include a restaurant with live music that open to the outdoors in good weather, spilling activity onto a surrounding sculpture garden that draws people to the edge of the bluff for framed views of the river.”
Brooks leaders took note of the idea.

“We agree that an active, architecturally significant, and thoughtfully programmed asset of this type could anchor a critical juncture of the riverfront and deeply enhance the  experience of all Memphians and its visitors,” said the leaders’ Tuesday letter.

Mayor Strickland will ask Memphis City Council members Tuesday if his administration can go back to the State Building Commission with an   updated Tourism Development Zone agreement for Downtown. The one in Studio Gang

 place now covers Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid, and The Pinch District. Strickland wants to extend the zone to cover the Memphis riverfront, the Cook Convention Center, and Mud Island.

Brooks officials said Tuesday that “will do whatever we can to be of assistance in his pursuit of this project, which will transform not only Downtown but our entire metropolitan region in remarkable ways.”

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Art Art Feature

Is Loving Local the Wrong Approach?

Way back in 2013, there used to be a snarky Tumblr called “Commercially Unappealing” whose author (or authors) critiqued the Memphis art scene from behind the veil of anonymity. Though it is now defunct, the blog used to occasionally make some sharp judgments, among them, the thought that “there should be a moratorium on including the words ‘Memphis’ or ‘Southern’ in exhibition titles here.”

The post was a response to a reader-submitted question that queried, “What is the longest span of time that has elapsed in Memphis without there being an art show ABOUT HOW IT IS IN MEMPHIS? When you go to a city like, say, Denver, do you want to see a bunch of self-referential shit?”

“Memphis,” the harried reader concluded, must “find comfort in its regionalism.”

Regionalism. Ah, yes. The condition under which contemporary art made anywhere but New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris must be qualified with some explanatory epithet. These qualifiers (he’s a Southern artist; that’s an Appalachian sculpture) serve a double purpose of both promoting a kind of exceptionalism (how folksy and real!) that protects the art from any actual contemporary critique and places it squarely beneath a kind of Mason-Dixon-y glass ceiling. Regionalism is the art world equivalent of introducing yourself as a “female writer” rather than just a “writer.” It’s a classic dilemma of people who have been treated as an underclass, who have had to craft their own narratives, failing an institutional embrace. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Southern arts are historically so identified not because they are lesser or greater, but because we offer something unique that is worth identifying at the outset.

It is good to acknowledge where you fit in history. But when — we female writers and Southern artists ask — does the label fail to serve?

In the case of Southern art, the answer is that we are overdue. Seventy years ago, there was ample reason for Memphis painters to identify first and foremost as “Memphis artists,” considering that they might rarely leave the tri-state area in their lifetimes, and most of what informed their art could be found in a 50-mile radius. Not so these days. We have Wi-Fi. Reddit exists. It’s not exactly breaking news that we live in a globalized world, a world from which so-called “regional” artists are inextricable.

So when you tell me that your art show is about “Southern arts,” I expect work with a narrowed gaze. It’s not that it is artistically wrong to paint cotton fields under a mottled blue sky. It’s just that there can no longer be any pretense that landscape painters in Memphis aren’t just as inspired by Instagram as they are by the Arkansas lowlands. It would be as telling to call your show “The Art of the South(ern Users of Google Image Search).”

Emily Ballew Neff, the new Brooks director, is all for opening up the conversation. Says Neff, “I’m a firm believer in cross-pollination, and Memphis has an ecosystem that I believe would benefit by greater exposure to international and national artists.” She maintains that a more international perspective, correctly executed, would “never be at the expense supporting our Memphis artists” but instead “will only elevate the art conversation in our city and lead to a more vibrant community artistically overall.”

Likewise, Urban Art Commission’s director Lauren Kennedy says, “I think there is a lot of room for Memphis to participate more broadly in the national arts scene. There are people making work, and big conversations are happening, but I don’t feel like we are as plugged into those conversations as we can be … I see that kind of interaction as an incredible growth opportunity for everybody.”

We can love our Memphis roots without limiting the reach of our arts. The best way to choose 901, as far as contemporary art is concerned, is to know that the sphere of creativity is not delimited by I-240.