artwork courtesy of baird callicott
The publication of Art & Soul was conceived as a project to showcase the observations and calligraphy of acclaimed Memphis artist Burton Callicott as well as meditations by Burton Carley, former longtime minister of the First Unitarian Church of Memphis, or Church of the River.
The two friends had only modest ambitions, perhaps a chapbook that could be distributed to members of the church congregation. But that was not to be its destiny, in large part due to Callicott’s son, Baird Callicott, who realized that the project could go much further and live on many more levels.
artwork courtesy of baird callicott
Benediction 2 (1972) is a reflection of Burton Callicott’s daily practice of meditation.
The volume, Baird felt, should have numerous examples of the elder Callicott’s artworks as well as his poetry and calligraphy, all combined with Carley’s meditations. The result is a gorgeous collection of extraordinary artworks, beautifully lettered poems, and thoughtful contemplations from both Burtons. It’s a further tribute to the quality of the book that noted Memphis photographer Murray Riss signed on as image editor for the volume, and Jeff McMillen designed it.
The elder Callicott and Carley are each an essential part of the history and culture of Memphis. And the pairing is perfectly natural as Callicott was a member of the church (since the early 1930s, long before it moved to the riverbluffs in 1965) and the two Burtons found an instant connection when Carley came to lead the church in 1983. Both shared an abiding spirituality and deep curiosity about religion, philosophy, humanity, and life.
The two talked some two decades ago of collaborating on a literary work, but Callicott’s death in 2003 seemed to put that dream to rest.
“Burton Callicott’s inner and outer life were in harmony. His thinking, feeling, and behaving were congruent.” — Burton Carley
In 2015, however, Baird retired from teaching and Carley retired from his position at the Church of the River. They met and the project was rekindled.
Baird made sure the book included plenty of his father’s biographical information, showing his long life in, and impact on, Memphis. After art school, young Burton worked for his impresario stepfather, who was in good favor with Boss E.H. Crump. Callicott worked on floats and displays for the Cotton Carnival parades and whatever else his stepdad needed. He would meet and marry Evelyne Baird during the Great Depression.
Callicott signed on with the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, and in 1933 he painted the murals (still visible) in the foyer of the original Pink Palace Museum. By 1937, he was among the founding faculty of the Memphis Academy of Arts, where he taught until his retirement in 1973. (During World War II he worked as a draftsman doing highly detailed “exploded drawings,” such as an illustration pictured in the book for a B-29 pressurized gunner’s cabin sub-assembly.)
When he retired, he was well enough regarded that he could live on the sales of his artworks, and to this day it’s a mark of distinction to have a Callicott in one’s collection. If an original is not in your price range, you can still get a rainbow license plate designed by the artist in 2000 to benefit the Tennessee Arts Commission.
artwork courtesy of baird callicott
It was only late in his life, as painting became more difficult for him, that he started his earnest writing of poetry, rendering many of them in calligraphy. The calligraphy, Baird says, came from two sources. “Dad had gotten a couple of blank books and just started doing these bits of random calligraphy quotations that he ran across that were memorable or were inspiring some of his own thoughts. Over many, many years, he just kept filling these pages.”
They present a wide variety of emotions and observations, but one that evokes his artistic sensibility is expressed in No. 10:
How still and peaceful
is the horizontal:
of distant tree lines
beyond flat Delta fields,
of striped western skies
at sundown;
gently laying the diagonals
of my unquiet mind.
When Baird revived the book project, he had plenty of time to reflect on his father.
“What I like to say about my father is that he was the same person in his home to his family, that everyone else saw,” he says. “He was super nice and self-sacrificing and always maintained a good sense of humor. And he just was a wonderful father.”
artwork courtesy of baird callicott
Falling Circles (1984), looking east from the Burton Callicott’s back yard.
Baird grew up in the 1940s and 1950s and recalls spending much time at the original Memphis Academy of Arts building, located then in the James Lee House in Victorian Village. “I used to accompany him, especially to Saturday school,” he says, “and just enjoyed running around those old Victorian buildings with the smell of paint and in the carriage house, where the pottery was.”
The son of the celebrated artist never had any interest or skill when it came to graphic or three-dimensional art. “But I did inherit from my dad a strong impulse to creativity,” Baird says, “which has manifested in my case in what’s somewhat unusual, a genre of academic writing.”
Baird graduated from high school in 1959, the year the Academy of Arts moved from Victorian Village into the new Roy Harrover-designed building in Overton Park. But his choice of school was just across North Parkway at Southwestern at Memphis, now Rhodes College. He earned his B.A. in 1963 and went to Syracuse to get his Ph.D.
artwork courtesy of baird callicott
Callicott, in his meditations and calligraphy, would focus on the senses, here reflecting on nature’s sounds.
Baird came back to Memphis to write his dissertation (too cold up north), and figured he’d try to see what was happening at Memphis State University. It was a time when the baby boomers were all about going to college and schools were expanding to meet the need. “I walked over to introduce myself to the chair of the philosophy department,” he says, “just in hopes of getting on his mailing list so that I could attend lectures and colloquia and things like that. And I walked home with a half-time job. They were taking people off the street to teach.”
The university had recently been integrated but had only a few Black instructors. The Black Students Association asked him to be their faculty advisor and, he says, “We were in the middle of the civil rights movement and the sanitation workers strike. So I was working with the local Southern Christian Leadership group here in Memphis coordinating campus demonstrations with them and with Martin Luther King’s visit. And I was sticking out like a sore thumb.”
And then he got busted. The police searched his house and found marijuana. Although the warrant was invalid and the case would be thrown out, Baird says, “I got a polite letter from Cecil Humphreys, who was president of the university, saying that my services were no longer needed.”
Burton Callicott, on hearing the news, declared that it was providential, that it was his son’s destiny. And as it happened, the young scholar got his next job at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which happened to put him at the cutting edge of the newly burgeoning environmental movement.
“
artwork courtesy of baird callicott
Emblem: Union of Selves (1994) was Callicott’s fourth-to-last oil painting, described as being less readable than most of his other metaphysical abstractions.
I helped to found a new field in philosophy called environmental philosophy and ethics,” he says. “The specialty of this little branch campus was natural resources. They had forestry and wildlife management and all of the things having to do with the emerging environmental movement. I thought, well, now with all of the things that are going on [in the Sixties], the human relationship with the natural world has not been a subject of close, philosophical attention.”
Baird taught in Wisconsin for 26 years and then joined the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas. He has written numerous books and articles on the philosophy of conservation and environmental ethics. When he retired in 2015 and came back to Memphis, he knew he’d be curating his father’s legacy, but didn’t know that the Art & Soul project would become the ambitious undertaking it turned out to be.
Over the years, Baird had visited Memphis and had met Carley. The minister conducted the services when Baird’s mother died in 2001 and when his father died in 2003.
Enter Dr. Tom Gettelfinger. The retired ophthalmologist was a member of the Church of the River and happened to live near Baird Downtown. Gettelfinger and Carley were having lunch at a restaurant in Midtown when Baird walked in.
“Tom reintroduced us,” Carley says, “and something in our conversation sparked this memory of the project that Baird’s father and I had conjured. Baird asked what I thought of restarting this project and I said, sure.”
They worked on it a bit for a couple of years and then it got under way in earnest. “I went to my study,” says Baird, “and wrote my responses to sometimes the poems and sometimes the paintings.”
artwork courtesy of baird callicott
Emanation and Descent (1995) is another variation on Callicott’s metaphysical themes.
Baird got in touch with his friend Cecil Humphreys Jr. — the son of the university president who had fired him years before, as it happened — because Humphreys had done a book titled Memphis Studios: A Visual Tour.
“I asked him how he got it done,” Baird says. “So I pretty much followed his lead. He had raised money for his book and I had envisioned raising money for mine, but I’m just absolutely awful at asking people for money, so I figured I’d fund this out of my own pocket.” He did get some contributions, and with his own frugal lifestyle, he was able to come up with enough money to fund the project.
The book reveals as much about the artist as the minister. “What I loved about Burton was he was a person of integrity,” Carley says. “And what I mean by that, his inner and outer life were in harmony. His thinking, feeling, and behaving were congruent.
“And perhaps a special quality I love the most about Burton was his humility with all of his talents and his thoughtfulness and intellect,” he continues. “He’s touched so many people’s lives either through his art or talking about his way of looking at the world and how his art expressed that to the mutations of light. You could never get him to brag anything about himself — he never thought of himself in those terms. He always seemed surprised and glad that someone was interested in learning something from him. When I wrote him and asked about putting our meditations and prayers and his little poems together, a typical reply was something like, ‘I’d be happy to have my little poems put with your magnificent prayers.’
“It’s just the way he was. He was a great man. My fondness for him has only grown these past few years. And I loved Baird making possible working on this book because I got to reinvest myself in him. It was enduring. It wasn’t a passing thing. It’s for real.”
Art & Soul is for sale at Burke’s Book Store and Novel.
