Editor’s Note: As part of our 50th anniversary, we asked writers to reflect on a half-century of Memphis history, but through a specific cultural lens. What follows is Abigail Morici’s overview of the local art scene, with a special focus on Brooks, Dixon, and the Metal Museum — whether it was on-screen or on-stage. You can find the entire package in our April 2026 print edition. Not a subscriber? Start one, and we'll send you a copy of the special issue.
When our magazine first hit newsstands in April 1976, a brand-new museum placed an advertisement in our pages, welcoming Memphians to the estate of the late Margaret and Hugo Dixon, who had bequeathed their home and 17 acres of gardens to the community. “The intention always was for it to be an art museum,” says Julie Pierotti, curator at what is now the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.
MARCH 1977
At the start, the collection held just over 30 pieces — 27 paintings, two paper works, and six sculptures, to be exact, with a focus on late nineteeth- and early-twentieth-century European art. “It wasn’t a huge collection,” Pierotti says, “but the Dixons knew it was special. They loved it dearly.”
At the time, Memphis had only one other art museum: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, founded in 1916 as a gift to the city from Bessie Vance Brooks in honor of her late husband. It remains the oldest and largest art museum in Tennessee.
By 1979, a third local art museum would join the Dixon and the Brooks: the Metal Museum, or as it was then called, the National Ornamental Metal Museum.
The three didn’t compete with one another, even as the arts scene ebbed and flowed, as galleries opened and closed, as artists moved in and back out. They, too, changed and continue to change, expanding their reach and access as much as they expand their collections. “Every kind of institution morphs over time,” says Patricia Daigle, today’s chief curator at the Brooks. “That should be expected and welcomed.”
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
MAY 2016
Ten years ago, Patricia Daigle moved to Memphis when her husband accepted a tenured position in the biology department at the University of Memphis. Fortunately, she came across a job description for a visiting professor and director of the Fogelman Gallery at the university. A few years later, Daigle started at the Brooks as associate curator of modern and contemporary art, before becoming chief curator in 2025.
In that time, a sliver of the over 100 years of the Brooks’ existence, she’s been able to acquaint herself with the Memphis arts community — and become a part of it. “It’s a very tight-knit community and I find people to be very supportive of one another,” she says. “One of the things that struck me was just how active many people are, and the diversity in terms of medium as well, whether it’s ceramics or painting or public art.”
The Brooks, Daigle says, has always sought to serve this community, though the way it has done so has evolved. This has meant expanded programming and new partnerships with nonprofits and makers. When Arrow Creative, a nonprofit founded in 2012 to make art more accessible, closed in 2024, the Brooks absorbed the majority of its programming. “There are really a variety of ways that we try to connect and support,” Daigle says.
NOVEMBER 1993
Once the Brooks makes its move to the riverfront — expected later this year — and takes on the new name of Memphis Art Museum, these opportunities, Daigle predicts, will grow. With 50 percent more gallery space downtown, the museum will not only have the chance to exhibit more of its permanent collection but also to reimagine it — “not just in terms of adding new things but also pointing to the power of interpretation,” she says. “With the new museum, we’re really looking forward to reinstalling our collection and telling new stories, involving community voices and using a collection that might be familiar.”
To mark the move, the museum has acquired 80 new works by local, national, and international contemporary Black artists through the museum’s Blackmon Perry Initiative. That initiative began as an effort for the Brooks to become a hub for Black art, first funding a fellowship in 2021 to prepare and grow curators of color, an underrepresented group in the museum world. The fellowship was the first position of the Brooks to be endowed in perpetuity.
“[The initiative] is a major step towards making sure we have a collection that best represents the Memphis community,” Daigle says. “We hope our collection continues to diversify, and in terms of historical works, too, make sure that we keep looking towards and understanding the past, seeing how those works can help us understand our present and our future as well.”
This applies to works by local artists, too — especially so. Memphis artists, Daigle says, have formed a considerable portion of the Brooks’ collection for decades. “It resonates not only with people who are from Memphis, but also situates Memphis and the creative work that’s being done here within a broader national and international context.”
The Dixon Gallery & Gardens
MAY 2011
Now the Martha R. Robinson curator at the Dixon, Julie Pierotti has worked at the Dixon for nearly 20 years — not including her time as an intern between her undergraduate and graduate studies. Fittingly, it was at the Dixon that Pierotti became inspired to embark on her career: A tour guide on a high school field trip mentioned the internship program after a young Pierotti showed interest in the porcelain collection. “It changed my life,” she says.
Her earliest impressions of the Dixon were that the museum was a sort of silo in the Memphis arts community. But once Kevin Sharp became director in 2007, that began to change.
In 2008, the museum introduced its Mallory and Wurtzburger series, which dedicated gallery space to regional contemporary artists. “We had never really shown Memphis artists until 2008,” Pierotti says. “Once we did, that was a real turning point; it’s been instrumental in connecting us to our own arts community, one that is so incredibly supportive of our homegrown talent.”
Even looking at its other gallery spaces, the Dixon has expanded in terms of its variety and diversity. In 2013, the museum acquired its first work by a Black artist: Gamin, a sculpture by Augusta Savage. “We’re very proud of our Augusta Savage,” Pierotti says. “But American art in general wasn’t a huge focus of collecting at the Dixon until the [most recent decade].”
After all, at the heart of the Dixon’s permanent collection is late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, but since 2013, the museum has added more works by Black artists to the collection to, as Pierotti says, “integrate their stories and demonstrate how Black American artists’ stories are part of the fabric of American art. We’re connecting those works of art to those by French Impressionists in our collection and show how these artists were in conversation with each other.”
In the past few years, the Dixon has presented its “Black Artists in America” series, a three-part survey from the Great Depression to September 11, 2001.
MARCH 1994
“The great thing about all three of those shows,” Pierotti says, “is that we have reinserted Memphis into the larger story of Black art history and shown how these really important artists were working in Memphis.”
Two of the shows have also traveled elsewhere and had internationally distributed catalogues, bringing this story of Memphis outside the city limits.
“In the last 15 years or so, we’ve tried hard to make sure that in a calendar year there’s something for everyone,” Pierotti says. “Museums have become more open, less stuffy, and more intent on educating the public on the artists on view in a way that meets the public where they are.”
Not even 20 years ago, the Dixon still had titles of works in French, without any information on the label about the artist. “It’s an easy fix,” Pierotti says. “So we of course translated the titles of the works in our collection and then tried to provide some interesting and accessible information.”
Though this urge for accessibility and inclusivity feels relatively new, at least in a broad scope, the Dixon has always sought to be a place of welcome. It was first a private home, after all, a place where Margaret and Hugo Dixon welcomed guests and hosted parties. “That mindset of ‘welcome to our home’ has carried through today,” Pierotti says. “We are grateful for everybody who steps foot on our property or who wants to see the works of art we have on our walls or see the flowers in our garden.
“And now that our admission is free [an initiative begun after the pandemic], it’s even more important, and we’re even more welcoming to our entire community. Whether you’re a first-time museum visitor or a seasoned gardener that comes all the time, our attitude is, ‘Welcome.’”
The Metal Museum
FEBRUARY 2005
As the Dixon was opening in 1976, the National Ornamental and Miscellaneous Metals Association (NOMMA) was looking to found an industry museum in Memphis. Three years later, the Metal Museum would open in the former, century-old Marine Hospital overlooking the Mississippi River, with a show called simply, “House Jewelry.”
For the first 30 years or so, founding director Jim “Wally” Wallace, himself a practicing blacksmith, made sure the Metal Museum survived. Wallace died in late 2025, but he is quoted as saying: “The Metal Museum was built on a whole lot of luck, some larceny, and a lot of dedicated people who gave an incredible amount of time, energy, money, and stuff. The museum’s roots were based on a can-do approach because we didn’t have any other options.”
And he added this: “You could say the early days of the museum were characterized by being miserably poor and learning how to get by with nothing.”
On the last day of 2007, Wallace retired and handed over the executive directorship to Carissa Hussong. Only 10 years before, Hussong had moved to Memphis, partially for love (she and her now-husband David Lusk had been dating long-distance) and partially for work (she took a job at the Dixon). Soon, though, in 1997, she founded the UrbanArt Commission, a nonprofit dedicated to funding public art.
“I was careful about not having lofty goals when I started [at the Metal Museum],” Hussong says. “The Metal Museum is a very special place, and it didn’t really need new goals — it just needed a little polishing and formality. Every program that exists today has its origins in the organization I inherited — even the need for a capital campaign.”
As the only institution of its kind in America, the museum’s core mission — “to celebrate and advance the art and craft of fine metalwork” — hasn’t changed. “What has evolved,” Hussong says, “is the scale and scope of how we pursue that mission. Over the years, the museum has grown from a small, specialized institution into an internationally recognized center for the field.”
Over time, the museum would introduce its apprenticeship program, launching and shaping the careers of many metal artists, some of whom have stayed in Memphis. In 2008, it introduced its Tributaries series, which features emerging metal artists.
“Many of the emerging to mid-career artists in our Tributaries series have gone on to have prominent exhibitions and commissions throughout the country,” Hussong says. “At the same time, we’ve continued to deepen our commitment to the local community by supporting artists, creating opportunities for learning, and making inclusivity a large part of our goal within our institution and the community. We’re still a specialized museum, but we’re also increasingly a cultural gathering place, one that can connect art, craft, and community in ways that feel very much rooted in this city.”
Now, the museum looks to grow its reach even further with more gallery space, more exhibitions, and more educational programming with its expansion to Overton Park, when it moves into the former Memphis College of Art campus. “We want the museum to be a place where art thrives, and new conversations continue to evolve.”
Moving Forward
Even as the future holds new possibilities, losses incurred by the visual arts in Memphis linger. Chief among them: the Memphis College of Art.
DECEMBER 2001
A nexus for arts education for nearly 85 years, the Memphis College of Art closed in 2020, unable to overcome declines in funding and enrollment. Yet its legacy remains. In March, the Brooks even presented “Memphis College of Art, 1936-2020: An Enduring Legacy” as a farewell exhibition and an homage to the school. (Jon W. Sparks covered the exhibit in detail in our March 2026 cover story.)
“Memphis has a strong culture of supporting living artists — and this is due in large part to MCA’s artists, both faculty and students,” Hussong says. “You can see the impact in private and corporate collections throughout Memphis. We often compare ourselves to Nashville, which despite having more wealth does not have the same commitment to supporting its visual artists.”
Still, arts education in Memphis hasn’t gone away entirely. Pierotti points to LeMoyne-Owen College as just one example. In the early-twentieth century, before MCA was open to Black students, LeMoyne-Owen attracted artists with national reputations to join its faculty.
And opportunities to engage with art continue to grow in the form of smaller venues, even as some, like the artist-run Plan B or the nonprofit contemporary arts space Delta Axis, fade away. Marshall Arts has been around since the ’90s, and so has Urevbu Contemporary, whose founder, Ephraim Urevbu, began Trolley Night on South Main in 2000, a tradition that continues. Last year, David Lusk Gallery celebrated 30 years, and Crosstown Arts, founded in 2010, has expanded into Crosstown Concourse. TOPS Gallery, which opened in 2012, continues to host shows in its main gallery and its satellite window gallery, while Jay Etkin runs his Cooper-Young gallery and the Flow Museum of Art and Culture.
In the past few years, Memphians have also seen the Edge District burst with new spaces, such as Sheet Cake Gallery (2023) and Ugly Art Co. (2024), while ShapeShifter Art School and Gallery opened in East Memphis last year.
“We love it,” Pierotti says. “The more the merrier, and I think all of the Memphis arts community is like that. It’s a whole ‘we’re all in this together’ mentality. It’s been fun and gratifying and warm to see it continue that way even after MCA closed.”
“I hope that we see continued, additional resources for artists here, spaces for making art, and support for arts education,” Daigle adds. “The arts allow people to reflect their realities in a way that not many things do, and when people feel stable in other aspects of their life, they’re able to have the room and space to create. There’s always movement and development and I think people are still figuring out what folks need and want in the community. But we mutually support one another, and we all share the same mission.”
