A Grand Farewell

A new exhibition at the Brooks considers the robust life and enduring legacy of the Memphis College of Art.

by

Culture

There was no way that “Memphis College of Art, 1936-2020: An Enduring Legacy” could be a simple goodbye. The exhibition that opened February 25th at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is a proper sendoff to MCA, which closed in 2020 as the Covid pandemic enveloped the world. The school with its vibrant 84-year history just stopped, rather quietly, as the last of its students graduated.

While the exhibition puts an overdue spotlight on the end of one era, it also marks an important moment for another institution on the cusp of major change.

It marks the end of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Overton Park, the cultural institution’s home for more than a century. The museum — for so long a neighbor to MCA — will relocate later this year to a sleek new facility on a riverfront block downtown, leaving behind the building that has been its home since 1916 and changing its name to the Memphis Art Museum.

But the MCA Legacy exhibit goes beyond acknowledging the end of one institution and the new direction of another.

The exhibition itself is a work of art. There is significance on multiple levels, from the array of artists to the selection of individual artworks and their interconnections, to its location, to its timing, and to the relationship between the Brooks and the Memphis College of Art.

In 2022, Zoe Kahr accepted the job of executive director at the Brooks. In preparing for that position, she dove deeply into the art scene in Memphis. Her previous positions, in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, had her working closely with the local art communities, and she was eager to learn more about who and what defined the art scene in the Bluff City.

The Memphis College of Art was an institution that hadn’t caught her attention earlier, but when she dug in, she says, “I was shocked by how many artists I had already come into contact with during my career, and that there was this college in Memphis that clearly had this national and international importance in addition to its huge impact on the community.”

It was, she realized, an exhibition gold mine — a local story about an institution of global importance that closed in the middle of the pandemic. “There wasn’t time to celebrate its legacy in a way that I’m sure they would have done had the circumstances been different,” Kahr says.

MCA had gone away, and the Metal Museum is expanding into MCA’s former Overton Park campus. Not only that, the college’s longtime neighbor — the Brooks — had decided to leave the park for a new downtown location.

“So there is the symbolism of the college’s rebirth as it’s turning into the Metal Museum,” Kahr says, “and the Metal Museum taking the torch of being the provider of art in the park, which is something the Brooks has done since 1916.” It all came together in a way that made the idea of a major exhibition a natural choice.

Defining the Legacy

The challenge of putting together this important exhibition of Memphis art, culture, and history fell to Marina Pacini. She’s the former curator at the Brooks, and she’s who Kahr called on in 2023 to create the exhibition. It involved contacting a host of sources, including former faculty and students, galleries, and collections.

Pacini also put together the catalog, which not only documents the artworks, but details the rich history of MCA, the Brooks, and how they were intertwined from the beginning.

“I started with the history,” she says, “because you need to understand how the institution came about.” The complexity of the story and how the civic ambition of the city figured in to it meant that, despite the exhibition title, the tale began well before 1936. In fact, the pre-history alone is a worthy portrait of a growing city intent on establishing its culture.

Pacini says that the Memphis Art Association was founded in 1914 by members of the Nineteenth Century Club. Florence McIntyre was the dynamo behind the effort to improve access to arts and education in the city. The association was involved with the founding of the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery in 1916 and McIntyre served as its first director from 1916 to 1922.

“When she leaves, she decides that her next endeavor is going to be founding an art school, so she starts the Academy of Arts Free Art School in 1923, and it was housed in the Nineteenth Century Club at 1433 Union.”

That school was such a success, it ran out of room after two years. Rosa Lee offered her home at 690 Adams Avenue — now known as the James Lee House — and McIntyre acquired the property next door at 680 Adams. The new home was deeded to the city in 1929 and the municipal government, which was all in on boosting the city’s image, provided funding for maintenance and operations. The school became the James Lee Memorial Academy of the Arts.

McIntyre was busy studying how to make sure the school would succeed as a professional institution, not merely a place for hobbyists. In 1934, she hired George Oberteuffer, an American Impressionist who had spent 20 years studying and teaching in Paris.

“Everything goes along swimmingly until 1936,” Pacini says. “And there is a huge rupture. Oberteuffer and several of the faculty are very unhappy that McIntyre is really very controlling about how they manage the classes. And they end up walking out.”

Most of the students followed and Oberteuffer, the faculty, and students formed the Memphis Academy of Arts that opened at the Board of Education Building downtown. The city chose to fund the new organization and McIntyre continued with her own school, doing things her way. She was no longer with the new institution, but it wouldn’t have existed without her.

What would become the Memphis College of Art got its institutional start then, and in 1937 hired, among others, Burton Callicott and Dorothy Sturm as the faculty. Their careers were long, influential, and forever associated with the college. Ted Rust came along in 1949 and transformed the academy during his tenure through 1975.

In the 1950s, the buildings the school was using were in terrible shape, so architect Roy Harrover was brought in to design Rust Hall, the building that was completed in 1959 just steps away from the Brooks. There would be expansions and the institution would change its name to the Memphis College of Art in 1985, with the Overton Park campus as the center of art education in the city.

But in 2017, it became clear that the school was not financially sustainable. There were a host of reasons, some specific to the school and some a function of a changing economy. Officials decided it had to close, but made a point of seeing that the college graduated everyone who wanted to finish or helped them find another school to continue.

The final classes and the final graduation were held in 2020 during the height of the Covid pandemic. The ending was quiet. Yet the influence of the school’s faculty members and the contributions of its graduates continue worldwide.

Presenting the Legacy

For Pacini, the question was how to present the legacy of MCA in a way that showed the depth of its influence.

While there was no longer an institution to visit, she had access to materials from the college that were given to the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library as well as other digital resources. But key to her research were questionnaires she developed for former faculty and students.

“The MCA community remains deeply connected despite the school’s closing,” she says. “So when word got out, people shared it and we got somewhere close to 300 people to fill out the questionnaire.”

The responses were crucial, but Pacini was looking for a definitive way to present the legacy exhibition. She encountered two former MCA students who took part in an exhibition at Rhodes College, and they were discussing their influences.

“They were Tommy Kha and Angelo Williams,” she says, “and they kept bringing up how important Haley Morris-Cafiero was to both of them.” She was an associate professor of photography at MCA now living in the United Kingdom, who describes herself as a performer, artist, and provocateur. Pacini realized then what the exhibition would focus on. “It would be about mentorship and how important the faculty-student relationships were. So once that was in place, and working with the questionnaire, I was able to pull together groupings with a faculty member and one to four of their students.”

These were the faculty members who had a tremendous impact on their students’ artistic development. “It’s fabulous documentation of how significant the teaching was there,” Pacini says. “[The faculty] didn’t produce little clones of themselves. The graduates went on to work in all sorts of different media and styles and different subject matter. Ebet Roberts was a painter and started taking photographs to document her paintings, and then ends up becoming a premier musical photo journalist.” Roberts has documented rock’s stars and superstars for nearly 50 years (and was featured in a Memphis Magazine cover story in March 2024)

Dorothy Sturm, one of the early, influential faculty members, was an inspiration to Karen Carrier. Carrier earned her degree in painting but then went to culinary school in New York and today is one of the top restaurateurs in Memphis as well as an artist of note.

As Pacini says, “The range of areas that the graduates went off into is very impressive. They’re not all just painters and sculptors — there are graphic designers, musicians, museum preparators, chefs. They have done very creative things. And it’s not just in Memphis and Shelby County, but around the world. By the early Seventies, [MCA] stops being just students coming from Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Western Tennessee. It starts growing internationally, a testament to the excellence of the teaching that happened there.”

Another example is Carol DeForest, who told Pacini of Peter Sohngen, her ceramics teacher at the school. Sohngen realized that DeForest wasn’t going to be the kind of traditional ceramicist that he was, so he sent her to another more like-minded professor at the University of Memphis. It was another example of the impact of the professors who would guide but not dictate how students should learn.

That sensibility was described by Dolph Smith, a longtime faculty member and much admired artist whose whimsical world of “Tennarkippi” is populated by mixed-media works, paintings, handmade books, and sculptures. At age 92, he still works in his studio in Ripley, Tennessee.

“It was a joy, a blessing,” he says of MCA. “The college was a precious, unique happening. We each had our own devices that we explored and we welcomed each other. Every time I walked through the door I got lifted up. There were no rules. You’d go into your studio and you’d make something. And we’d put the work up in a show. I can’t imagine it being gone — I get choked up about it now.”

Smith even managed to get David Bowie to visit the school in 1973 when the performer was in town for his Aladdin Sane tour. “I had done something about him and he came by the college. We had a good visit and although I had to leave, the kids said he kept looking around the school and visiting. Can you imagine a student looking up and there’s David Bowie?”

That’s just one of the reasons why Smith feels that MCA was an amazing place. “You just fall in love with your students and hope for the best for them,” he says.” It’s so easy to be an art teacher because the students are so receptive.”

While the exhibition is centered on the MCA, it is very much about the school’s legacy. Its influence radiates within as well as beyond Memphis, not just from the artwork that has been shown globally by faculty and students, but in contributions from others outside of the arts and by people who didn’t even attend as students. As Pacini puts it, “I consider this exhibition co-curated between me and the people who filled out that questionnaire.”

The catalog goes into detail on various aspects of the school and its impact. Pacini commissioned four people to write short essays. One was filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, who didn’t attend MCA but went to the popular Saturday school for young people for years. For many of those youngsters, the Saturday experience at the college sparked interest in a variety of disciplines that manifested later in life.

Other essayists are James Little, who wrote about his time as a student, Adrian Duran on being a faculty member, and Adam Hawk on Horn Island, an annual pilgrimage of creatives organized by Robert Riseling who gladly roughed it in primitive conditions off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, and made art from the experience.

The Role of the Brooks

For the Brooks, hosting an exhibition that was already bursting with history, art, and culture also meant assigning it a special role in the timeline of the museum itself. It would mark endings as well as a beginning.

“It felt like the perfect way to close one chapter and open a new one,” Kahr says. “We could celebrate the specificity of place in the park and what that place has done for Memphis, for its artists, for the art scene, for its audiences as the museum is about to enter this new chapter.”

There was a practical aspect as well. As Kahr put it, “It’s a large exhibition and a complicated story. It needed a lot of space and we needed a large project that would allow us to pack our collection discreetly without anyone noticing.”

The Brooks is presenting the MCA exhibition in the galleries on the museum’s main level that have long been the home of works from, as Kahr says, Canaletto to contemporary. (The Grand Canal From the Campo San Via is a 1728 painting by Venetian artist Canaletto that’s in the museum’s permanent collection.)

This will allow the museum to pack for the move as well as plan for plenty of programming around the MCA exhibition through the final days.

There was something of a challenge as the Brooks was envisioning how to present works connected to the Memphis College of Art. Patricia Lee Daigle, chief curator at the Brooks, says that several MCA-related works already in the museum’s collection were being considered both for the MCA show as well as the inaugural exhibition downtown.

The decision was made to borrow some artwork from private collectors. It was, she says, “the idea of a closing of one chapter, but it’s not the closing of these artists’ works or our interest in them. It’s something that continues and that we’re excited to showcase when we move downtown as well in a different context outside of the context of the college.”

The 90 artists featured in the exhibition include: Mario Bacchelli, Brin Baucum, Dale Baucum, Kim Beck, Tootsie Bell, Peter Bowman, Cynthia Bringle, Bunny Burson, Fred Burton, Burton Callicott, Karen Carrier, Nancy Cheairs, Martha Christian, Funlola Coker, Michael Coppage, Jay Crum, Beth Dary, Maritza Dávila Irizarry, Alonzo Davis, Patrick DeGuira, Carol DeForest, Don DuMont, Henry Easterwood, Thorne Edwards, Biff Elrod, Ted Faiers, Annette Fournet, Lurlynn Franklin, Moko Fukuyama, Ahmad George, Betty Gilow, Luther Hampton, Rob Hart, Adam Hawk, Michael Hayes, Randy Hayes, Pinkney Herbert, Sharon Havelka, Kyle Holland, Amy Hutcheson, Gere Kavanaugh, J. D. Kelly, Tommy Kha, Tom Lee, Phillip Lewis, James Little, Susan Maakestad, Kate Madison, John McIntire, Emily Miller, Remy Miller, Carl E. Moore, Haley Morris-Cafiero, Joe Morzuch, Floyd Newsum, Michele Noiset, Laurie Nye, George Oberteuffer, Kong Wee Pang, Fidencio Fifield Perez, Ed Perry, Melinda Eckley Posey, Richard Prillaman, Ed Rainey, Veda Reed, Sheri Fleck Rieth, Robert Riseling, Murray Riss, Ebet Roberts, Marc Rouillard, Ted Rust, Jennifer Sargent, Jeanne Seagle, Elizabeth Sheehan, Vitus Shell, Martina Shenal, Allison Read Smith, Dolph Smith, Peter Sohngen, Dorothy Sturm, Cynthia Thompson, Carroll Todd, Martha Turner, Leandra Urrutia, George Wardlaw, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Sean Winfrey, Jill Wissmiller, Bill Womack, and Tad Lauritzen Wright.

“Memphis College of Art, 1936-2020: An Enduring Legacy,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Overton Park, through September 2026.