In 1989, Richard Carr took his first metalsmithing class at the Metal Museum. He’d always been interested in working with metals, he says, ever since he was a kid visiting his grandfather’s metal fabrication shop. At the time, though, he was working as a pipefitter and welder, traveling around the country building processing and fossil fuel plants, and he had come to Memphis to work on a project for the Navy.
“The Metal Museum was the first place I came across that actually provided a place where I could learn blacksmithing,” Carr says. Blacksmithing, he found, allowed him to be creative with the same materials he used during work hours. Soon, he was taking class after class, making pieces “only a mother could love,” he says. After a while, he began volunteering at the museum, his first project being to fabricate steel for the back of the Smithy, now the Metal Museum’s Repair Lab.
“By volunteering, I learned the trade, and then I was able to get into the public utility company as an industrial blacksmith,” Carr says. Still, he kept up his creative endeavors, looking to natural motifs and art nouveau and art deco architecture for inspiration. He forged organic shapes, a relief from the linear industrial monotony of his job. And his pieces got better and better — to the point where he could comfortably call them art, not something “only a mother could love.”
Carr also began to incorporate materials salvaged from sites throughout Memphis, such as steel from the old Ellis Auditorium, iron from Baptist Memorial Hospital, a bolt from the railroad that once ran the Green Line, and parts from the Zippin Pippin. “It sort of gives a piece a soul,” Carr says of the salvaged material’s history that brings the old in conversation with the new.
This summer, Carr is celebrating his first solo show at the Metal Museum, and he’s titled it “To See With New Eyes,” a nod to his love of repurposing materials. “The Japanese have a word for it,” he says. “Mitate. It means to repurpose or to see with new eyes.”
For the first time, Carr is also able to see the works spanning his career, side by side, most of them on loan from the pieces’ current owners. “There’s a lot of pieces that have gotten lost because they were sold,” he says. “I’d never kept track of them.” Over the years, Carr has gifted his art to the Metal Museum, MIFA, Hope House, The Child Advocacy Center, Playhouse on the Square, and Memphis Heritage, among others.
“It’s my way of giving back,” he says. “I’ve got a job that pays the bills. There’s a lot of people out there that are struggling to get customers. And when you’re working for a customer, you’re worried about what their likes are — I’ve never taken direction. I like to make what I want to make, and I guess that’s the fun part about what I do.”
“To See With New Eyes,” Metal Museum, On display through September 24.