photograph courtesy special collections, university of memphis libraries
Born in 1900 in Jackson, Mississippi, Maysie Dimond came to Memphis when her husband, Alfred, took a job with the Navy Yard here. A naturally skilled artist, she attended the Memphis Academy of Arts. Her works first made the news when it was announced that a painting (above) she made of the community of Dyess, Arkansas — a government “resettlement project” for impoverished farmers, whose most famous resident was a young Johnny Cash — would be presented to Eleanor Roosevelt.
In 1940, Memphis received a federal grant to add murals inside Ellis Auditorium, and Dimond got the job. It was quite a project: ten murals stretching more than 150 feet along the north wall of the building. The work took her 18 months, and when the painting — rather blandly titled Memphis in Murals — was unveiled on November 14, 1942, a reporter called it “four hundred years of Memphis history, written in gay colors and spirited symbols, in a great mural nine feet high and half a block long.”
They remained visible for only a decade. In the 1950s, during an ill-conceived renovation project, Dimond’s murals were covered up with slabs of pink granite. Because they were painted directly onto the plaster, the works couldn’t be saved when Ellis Auditorium was demolished to make way for the complex that is now the Renasant Convention Center.
