Along with 20 inaugural exhibits, the new riverfront Memphis Art Museum will open on Dec. 6 with four commissioned works by local, national and international artists: murals, sculptures and installations intended to introduce the museum as a place "unmistakably rooted in Memphis and engaged in a global conversation," according to executive director Zoe Kahr.
Commissioned specifically for the site, the "extraordinary" works have "strong connections to Memphis, either through the artists’ ties to the city or through the ways the works engage with the region’s history, cultural legacy, or distinctive geography,” Kahr said in a Sept. 22 statement.
“Together, they capture what we hoped this new campus could make possible: a museum unmistakably rooted
in Memphis and engaged in a global conversation," she said. "These works mark the beginning of a new chapter, and they give a glimpse of the kind of museum we will be.”
Enhancing the museum at multiple literal levels, from the rooftop to the basement parking garage, the commissioned art essentially becomes part of the $222 million "cultural campus" of the museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, a Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss firm with an impressive résumé of major museum work.
The works include:
"Sharp Tongue; The Sky and the Heart Aflame" by Jordan Ann Craig, a Northern Cheyenne artist who lives and works in New Mexico. Influenced by the beadwork of Plains Indians artists and the nearby Mississippi River bluff, this colorful abstract mural will be installed in the rooftop garden, which museum organizers describe as "an art park in the sky."
"Impressions (bluffs, mounds, landing)," a woven textile and lenticular installation by Seoul-born, Los Angeles-based Yunhee Min. Incorporating designs Min collected from rubbings made at Cobblestone Landing, Chucalissa and other sites, Min's installation includes a 276-foot woven retractable curtain that can enclose the museum's theater and extend across the building's mezzanine, fronted by 66 feet of lenticular material, fixed to the second-floor Front Street windows, to give the curtain a weirdly variable look to passers-by. ("Lenticular" refers to a technique that gives printed images a 3-D-style illusion of depth and enables them to change in appearance when viewed from different angles.)
"Alma del Rio" (which means "soul of the river"), a mural by El Paso-born Carlos Rosales-Silva that is painted onto three interior walls of the parking structure beneath the main museum. Intended to evoke Memphis' past and present, the mural presents a stylized rendering of the Mississippi, with motifs that borrow the shapes of sassafras leaves, Isaac Hayes' desk at Stax, the roof-line of Rust Hall in Overton Park (now the Metal Museum), and other inspirations.
"A Memphis for You" by Memphis-based graphic designer Eso Tolson, whose art employs hand lettering and typography as a vehicle for social commentary. Born in East St. Louis, Illinois, this mural-style work — installed on the four sides of a large rooftop cube — is intended to celebrate "Memphis distinctive neighborhoods," according to a museum press release.
Funded with support from such cultural nonprofits as the VIA Art Fund, the E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Korea Foundation, the commissions expand the already announced slate of art that will be on display when the museum — with its 30,000 square feet of gallery space and 50,000-square-foot art garden — opens to the public on Dec. 6.
The centerpiece exhibit will be "Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907-1984," the first museum survey to focus on the renowned and originally Beale Street-based photography studio that captured Black social, domestic, cultural and professional life in Memphis for most of the 20th century.
Planned for a decade and under construction for three years, the $222-million Memphis Art Museum is the new home — with a new name — of the venerable Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Overton Park, which closes Sept. 27. According to boosters, the new museum is intended to reinvigorate Downtown, boost tourism and transform the city into a world-class destination for art exhibition, while also being a social destination: Stretching along Front Street, the museum will host a coffee shop, a community courtyard, an outdoor amphitheater and a John-Paul Gagliano-run "destination" restaurant, among other attraction.
In addition, it will offer free admission to Shelby County residents, "to invite the people of Memphis to visit as much and as often as possible," Kahr said.
John Beifuss is an entertainment writer at The Commercial Appeal. Contact him at john.beifuss@commercialappeal.com.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: 'Extraordinary' new artwork created for Memphis Art Museum
