From Overtown to Orange Mound

Water becomes a space for Black healing in Calida Rawles’ paintings, on view this spring at the Brooks.

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We need joy as we need air. 

We need love as we need water. 

We need each other as we need the earth we share. 

— Maya Angelou

Our experience with water is intimate. It’s in us; it is us. It goes through us. It touches our skin, covers our bodies in the tub, in the pool, in the rain. It hydrates, refreshes, floods, drowns. We need it; we fear it; we thirst for it.

It ripples throughout Memphis history. The flooding waters of the Mississippi River drove those first Memphians to settle atop the Fourth Chickasaw Bluff. Stagnant water from rain cisterns and shallow wells bred mosquitos that brought about the yellow fever epidemic, losing the city its charter in 1878. The epidemic, in turn, led Memphians, searching for a reliable water source in the name of sanitation and health, to discover the Memphis sands aquifer, the sole source of Memphis’ water today. This century, residents in South Memphis would have to fight to protect our aquifer — against the proposed construction of the Byhalia crude-oil pipeline and against the continued threats of contamination from Tennessee Valley Authority’s Allen Fossil Plant.

With all its complexities, water is now at the forefront of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, “Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides,” on display March 19th through September 7th. The California-based artist’s exhibit of 10 paintings and a three-channel video explores water’s dualities, specifically as a space for Black healing, resilience, and joy.

“She asked me if I could do something that really engaged the community,” Rawles says. “I kept wondering — before she even asked me about the show — about the people living in Miami, where AP African-American studies wasn’t allowed to be taught. I was wondering how people of the African-American community feel about their history not being considered valuable enough to be taught in school. I never saw anyone ask them those questions.”

So Rawles took to researching historical Black neighborhoods in the city. “The fascinating thing about it to me was that I’ve been to Miami many times, but I used to only go to the strip. I never thought, ‘Where’s the Black neighborhood?’”

Her research led her to Overtown, which Rawles says was once like “a second Harlem.” Founded in 1896 for and by African Americans, the neighborhood thrived as an entertainment district during the early- to mid-twentieth century in the Jim Crow era. “It had a thriving community of 300 businesses, and everyone used to go there,” Rawles says.

But in the late 1950s, with the passage of Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway Act, the construction of two major freeways displaced thousands of Overtown residents, or “Towners,” through eminent domain. In the aftermath, Rawles says, “They lost their homes, and they lost their businesses, and they had no way to [recover]. The job market just fell.”

The highways essentially decimated the neighborhood, the population dropping and blight taking over what once was a desirable and vibrant community of Black Miami’s professional class, in the name of “progress.” Today, though, many say Overtown is experiencing a renaissance, as advocates and community members try to rebuild and reinvigorate what once was, but its scars are not forgotten even as hope endures.

“[The Highway Act] targeted communities of color, where they put highways, and these neighborhoods were systematically destroyed,” Rawles says. “It was created as part of systematic racism, and it impacted a lot of communities around the country. I just didn’t think that was being shown, even to people in Miami. I knew it was a larger story. It’s a national kind of conversation, but it spoke to a community that when it’s on the news, it’s only depicted one way.”

And so, Rawles dedicated her first solo museum exhibit to painting the people of Overtown in her signature way — in bodies of water — but for these paintings, they would be in Overtown’s Gibson Pool and the nearby Virginia Key Beach.

Rawles began painting Black people’s bodies in water after she started swimming for exercise at the gym pool. “It happened to be the master swim class at Loyola [Marymount] University,” she says of her first class. “I jumped in that pool, and I couldn’t even get halfway across. I was scared I was going to drown. The coach gave me a board and said to just kick. I went back every day for a while, and then it became three days a week until I really became a swimmer. And I just wouldn’t stop.

“And it was so beautiful. I always wanted to be out in the water and see the pops of light, and I used to think in the water, ‘This is so pretty. I wish I could paint it.’ After I left the pool, it didn’t matter what was happening in my life, if I was really stressed or upset, when I left it didn’t seem so big and I wasn’t so upset. Then it clicked at some point: What if I pull this into my practice? What if I talk about difficult things or divisive issues, but it looks pretty? What if I could create something and it can make people feel better? I started researching water.”

In her research, Rawles asked questions about Black people’s relationships with water. She probed the stereotype about Black people not knowing how to swim. “Where’d that come from?” she says. “Oh, because you couldn’t have pools; there was segregation at the pool. This is a place you don’t see us, and I don’t see myself, and you think we don’t belong.”

The exhibit will include an interactive gallery where the Brooks will highlight Memphis’ own Black swim

history.

This history and these stereotypes had rippling effects. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning death rates for Black people under 30 are 1.5 times higher than for white people, and 70 percent of Black Americans cannot swim, compared to 31 percent for white Americans, according to a study by USA Swimming and the University of Memphis.

“I thought that could be an undercurrent to all of the work,” Rawles says. “When you put a Black body in that water, you’re dispelling something — without even talking about a subject. And then if I paint the figures comfortably and with agency, if people think, ‘I could feel comfortable like that,’ ‘I don’t have to be afraid of the water,’ or maybe ‘I should learn to swim,’ I thought I could do that, too.”

More than anything, finding water as a muse excited her. Her painting style has always veered toward hyperrealism. “I can’t control it,” she says. “For a long time, I didn’t like that I was a realistic painter. I think that’s why it took me a very long time to create my voice. But when I found the water and started using figures in water, it’s like I can still use my style and then create abstraction at the same time, so it felt like I’m even more interested in me.”

Rawles’ paintings allow Black bodies to take up space, her canvases large in size, but more importantly they allow them to take up space in water, as historically charged as it is. For this exhibit, she’s taken her subjects, young and old, to Gibson Pool, a product of segregation, and Virginia Key Beach, once designated as a Black beach. In this way, she’s also able to probe the transatlantic slave trade. Her subjects float, their bodies bending the will of the water, balanced and relaxed in waters haunted by the past.

“I met a lot of people from the Overtown Community Center,” Rawles says. “I wanted to depict different people that grew up, knew, and loved Overtown.”

In selecting each subject, she went through an interview process, getting to know them and their stories before photographing them in the water. “It’s very intimate,” Rawles says of the photoshoots that she uses for reference, “because a lot of people, what I want them to do, I may have to hold them in the water. They have to be comfortable with me touching them and talking to them, so it gets us comfortable with each other when I say, ‘Let me hear your story.’”

For a long time, I didn’t like that I was a realistic painter. I think that’s why it took me a very long time to create my voice. But when I found the water and started creating figures in water, it’s like I can still use my style and create abstraction at the same time, and so I felt I was even more interested in me.”

For one of these stories, she recalls Ms. Rolle, an older woman. “She was so excited telling me about the times when she used to go [to Virginia Key Beach] as a young girl. Everyone would go there on the weekend and certain holidays. And she just lit up. And so, even though we’d done other pictures at the pool, I said, ‘I’m going to take you to the beach.’ Even though I wasn’t planning it, I wanted to take her because she had such a memory of it.”

When Rawles went to pick her up, she says, a group of men living in Rolle’s apartment complex greeted her. “They were like, ‘What do you want with her?’ They just wanted to make sure she was safe. ‘Are you going to feed her lunch? She needs to drink water. I don’t want her drinking any soda.’ And all these different things. And if you just drove by and created stereotypes of these men sitting on chairs outside of a building, you wouldn’t realize just how connected everyone is and what a great community there is with love and protection. … I don’t think some neighborhoods have that.”

By the time Rolle and Rawles got to the beach, the artist says, “She was just so happy to see the beach and she hadn’t been there in a long time.” Rolle put her feet in the water and kept her hands in her lap, and that was the image Rawles painted in a diptych, The Parts That Make You Whole, an hourglass shape forming between the two images when placed together.

“It made me think of time and how it slips by you so fast,” Rawles says. “I remember feeling I really wanted to do [Rolle] well.”

In fact, she says, “I wanted to make Overtown proud. That’s not how I usually work; it’d be a subject or how I feel or a response to news or just what I want to paint. You want to paint from your heart and hope [viewers] get it because you don’t want the viewer to influence what you create.”

But this was different. More was at stake. She got to know these people, and she spent hours, weeks painting them. “There’s something that happened here,” she says, “that I wanted to give more visibility to and have viewers actually meet people from that community.”

That meant showing fully visible faces and pulling back on her abstraction. “I wanted you to see them as fully human,” Rawles says. “If the community has been kind of demonized and stereotyped, I didn’t want to give visuals of that. I wanted to show people that you can put a face to a community.”

By the time the exhibit opened in Miami in June 2024, Rolle was in hospice. She has since passed, but her voice and videos of her experience with Rawles can be heard and seen in the three-channel video that will be shown as part of the exhibit. Made in collaboration with Laura Brownson, We Gonna Swim features interviews with the exhibition’s subjects and archival footage from Overtown.

Through all her portraits of Overtowners, Rawles says, “I’m really talking about various communities. I want to inspire people to learn more about communities and not feel like if you look at them right now you know the whole history.”

While “Away with the Tides” is in Memphis, Rose Smith, the Brooks’ assistant curator of photography, hopes viewers can connect Miami’s Overtown with Memphis’ Orange Mound. “Miami’s Overtown neighborhood mirrors Memphis’ Orange Mound community,” she says, pointing out how both neighborhoods were founded for and by African Americans in similar time periods. “We want to talk about the ways in which these communities reflect each other, although the Black community in Memphis didn’t experience a highway obstruction. But certainly, there are other things that we can glean and show parallels between these two communities.”

The exhibit will include an interactive gallery where the Brooks will highlight Memphis’ own Black swim history, for which Smith dug into the archives, searching through photos and newspaper clippings at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. “You’ll see photos of Black Memphians swimming back in the ’40s and ’50s before the desegregation laws were established,” they say.

While searching for these photographs, Smith says they were struck by the joy she saw in the images. “You see different swimming competitions in these communities,” they say. “I have a specific image in mind of five or six young men who are posing with a trophy. They’re posing with their swimwear. They just won, perhaps, a competition and that image struck me, and I think it ties into what [Rawles] surfaces in her work. We want this exhibition to engender joy, rest, meditation and healing within our Memphis community. We also want to advocate for water accessibility, equity, and safety for our community.”

For Smith, part of that means making sure the gallery space is accessible to the community — as far out as Orange Mound and beyond. “We’re doing that through marketing and promoting the exhibition, and then also programming, bringing in local artists to do gallery talks. … We’re working with a few local organizations to teach people how to swim, and we would love to host something in the summer where we’re able to use this exhibition to advocate for swim lessons.”

One piece of programming that especially excites Smith is Memphis filmmaker Zaire Love’s screening of the documentary Slice. As described by Chris McCoy in his Memphis Flyer article about the film, which earned Indie Memphis awards for Best Documentary Short and Best Narrative Short, “Slice is about a uniquely Memphis sport. Think of it as the aquatic equivalent of jookin.’”

In the film, narrator and subject Derrico “Rico” Golden, a “pro slicer,” says, “I’ve been loving water since I was young, but water is way more to me. It’s my place of peace. Everybody that knows me, knows that wherever I go, I’m trying to find some water. It’s freedom in the water. I challenge myself in the water. I get creative in the water. I showcase that swag in the water.”

It’s that type of agency that Rawles hopes her viewers get out of her paintings, though she knows that won’t always be the case. “Because it’s what their relationship [to water] is,” she says. “People that don’t know how to swim, that are very afraid, often look at my paintings and go, ‘Oh my god, it looks like you’re about to drown.’ Then other people are like, ‘Oh my god, this feels so good.’ Or I’ve had people write to me that they lost a person from trauma and these paintings help them; they felt therapeutic. Or, ‘I’ve never seen myself, a Black person, in water before.’”

Any experience, to Rawles, is valid and profound. She says, “I think it’s about communities. I think it’s about people.”

She also hopes her paintings allow viewers to examine their relationships with the subjects, to go beyond their first judgments. “You can’t look at someone and know their experience at all, and we do judge so quickly from a quick appearance or right now,” she says. “You’re looking at them at this moment, at this time, through your lens, with your limited experience and knowledge of it. And I think that’s something we all have to do better with.”

“Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides” is on display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art from March 19th through September 7th.