Somewhere South of Violet, 2008

March 13–July 7, 2018

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 19, 2018, 6–8:00 p.m.

It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place.
—Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality

My studio in downtown Memphis is in an old medicine factory at the end of a dead-end street. Last in a row of empty warehouses, the building is an outpost of long-gone industry, surrounded by empty lots, crumbling edifices and thick copses of trees. The Mississippi River flows by less than a mile away, but leaves this area untouched by its progress.

I am drawn to the forgotten, to the mysterious traces of memory in our physical world. My work references objects and places that continue their slow transformation after someone turns away: rich, charged, vibrating places. Rooted on the edges of our world, these thin spaces are quietly pulsing with a kind of murmuring remembrance: the crumbling wall with flowering vines pushing through the cracks, the drape and sway of a fence that separates nothing from nothingness, the silhouette of folding and unfolding structures. Neglected and abandoned, these mysterious sites live on in an active collapse, their old stories settling into their foundations and becoming new ones as nature reclaims them for their own.

Starting with photographic documentation of these sites, I work through an intricate and laborious process of tracing, drawing and layering of gouache that puts the painting at a remove from the original photograph. Through this method, the image is abstracted and reduced to its essence, while the inherent ephemerality of the site is echoed in the material terrain of found paper. Out of decay and isolation a poetry of resilience and new growth is revealed. The works in Ruin is a Secret Oasis mine this liminal space—the region between the bloom and the decay—and pursue the sense of place these sites inspire. In them, beauty is resilience and an acknowledgement of the ravages of nature and time. Through this imagery I explore a landscape of change and the traces of experience that remain.

—Maysey Craddock

Exhibition made possible by support from the Jane Becker Heidelberg Endowment for the Arts.

Athenia, 2014

August 22–December 9, 2017

Reception: Thursday, September 14, 2017, 6–8:00 p.m.

part of the Annual Membership Party

The art in Unwritten Memoir is a survey of work created by Randy Hayes from 2004 to present. In that time, he began to live part-time, then full-time, in Mississippi. His art is also influenced by travel to Turkey and Japan during that same period. The art reflects his visual memory of three very different cultures and environments: Mississippi, Turkey, and Japan.

Recollections refers to a group of photographs and objects which have a specific connection to one another. This series, included in this exhibition, began about twenty years ago but has never been exhibited before. Also on exhibit is an associated series of small paintings of objects.

By Kent Rogowski

May 23—September 16, 2017

Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 6–8:00 p.m.

Part of Oxford Arts Crawl

Love=Love is a series of collages that were created using pieces of over 60 store bought puzzles. Although puzzle pieces are unique, and can only fit into one place within a puzzle, they are sometimes interchangeable within a brand. These puzzles were cut using the same die, but depict unrelated images.

Using only the flowers and skies from each of the puzzles, I created a series of entirely new compositions by recombining the puzzle pieces. These spectacular, fantastical and surreal landscapes sit in direct contrast to the banal and bucolic images of the original puzzles.

My First Sky, Shinnecock, no date

March 28—July 22, 2017

Reception: Tuesday, March 28, 2017, 6–8:00 p.m.

In the spring of 1896, twenty-year-old Kate Freeman Clark, originally from Holly Springs, Mississippi, enrolled in an oil-painting class offered by William Merritt Chase, one of America’s most well-known impressionists and the owner of the Chase School of Art. Clark studied with him over the next two decades and became a proficient painter in her own right. She produced hundreds of paintings in various genres and media, including pastoral landscapes in oil and watercolor, lyrically inspired scenes, and Munich school–influenced portraiture.

Kate Freeman Clark accumulated an impressive exhibition record showing at the Boston Art Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, the Carnegie Institute, the New York School of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Society of American Artists among others. She worked at a time when female artists often used a gender-ambiguous pseudonym to receive serious professional attention. Thus, when she began submitting her paintings to juried exhibitions, she often signed simply as “Freeman Clark.” Many of her canvases remain unsigned and almost all of them are undated.

Her painterly impressions of the Shinnecock Hills in upstate New York testify to a deep enjoyment of and immersion in the experience of plein air painting. Of this landscape she said, “This is the most ravishingly beautiful picturesque place I have ever been & I am having such a fascinating time that I feel as if I should like to spend a year here and explore every nook in this charming country.”

In 1923, Kate Freeman Clark stored her entire collection of paintings in bales at a warehouse in New York City and returned to her family homestead in Holly Springs, where she lived until her death in 1957. After her death, her canvases, many of them damaged from years of storage, were recovered, and a gallery in her memory was built in her hometown. Clark’s work stands as a testimony to her talent, pleasure, and mission in painting. As she said, “The artist’s mission [is] to open the eye of the unseeing to the beauties that are all about them.”

Out of her numerous paintings, only two are set in Mississippi. The astonishing uniqueness of the entirety of the Kate Freeman Clark art collection lies in its compendious scope. Art collector Howard Stebbins estimated that “the Clark group [is] perhaps the largest art collection in the world painted by a single artist.”

This exhibition pays tribute to a prodigious and prolific female artist from Mississippi. It seeks to reintroduce Kate Freeman Clark’s work to the history of American painting by drawing attention to the ongoing restoration of her career and her canvases.

SPONSORS:

Lester and Susan Fant III

Bank of Holly Springs, David B. Person, First State Bank, Tim and Lisa Liddy, Tyson Drugs Inc., and, Ellis Stubbs State Farm Insurance

Special thanks to: Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery and Walter Webb, Curator

January 10—April 29, 2017

Reception: Tuesday, January 31, 2017, 6–8:00 p.m.

James and Lucy Lo photographed the intricately painted and sculpted Mogao and Yulin Caves from 1943-44. Their images transcend the standards of documentary photography into pure artistry.

Sponsors: Photos courtesy of the Lo Archive and the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and exhibition made possible by a generous donation from The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation