The Art of Living

David Lusk and Carissa Hussong’s art-filled home is a Memphis treasure.

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He owns and runs an art gallery; she leads a pioneering art museum. We were curious about the art and design choices the two have made in the home they share — and we weren’t disappointed.

David Lusk has run his eponymous art gallery for almost three decades. After starting in Memphis in 1995, selling the work of local and regional artists to an ever-expanding list of clients, he expanded to Nashville, where his reach has grown.

Carissa Hussong is executive director of the Metal Museum, one of only a handful of museums in the world which focus on metalsmithing. Under her watch, this Memphis institution has expanded its programming and visibility. They are currently embarked on their biggest expansion of all — taking over Rust Hall, the former Memphis College of Art building in Overton Park. When complete, the renovated facility will feature greatly expanded gallery space and more accessibility to the community. The $25 million project is on pace to open in 2025.

“It’s a great building. It has really good bones,” Hussong says. “It’ll be really nice to see all of those spaces opened up again, because they covered windows and cut up all of these rooms. If you’d ever been in the ground floor of the building, it was kind of crazy, just a maze of spaces.”

After years of planning and fundraising, renovation work has begun in earnest. “They just started [asbestos] abatement,” Hussong says, “so really, you won’t see much happening on the outside until November, when they start taking down the additions.”

Lusk was raised in Missouri and moved to Memphis to attend Rhodes College; he has lived here ever since. Hussong grew up in Honolulu. “My father went to the university. He got his Ph.D. there, and then stayed,” she says. “My mother’s a harpist.”

She says her interest in art was stimulated by her grandmother. “She collected abstract expressionism and it was a pretty important collection in Seattle.”

The couple met in Seattle in the early 1990s. “I was actually interning — that was my first year at Art Fair Seattle. He was exhibiting with Lisa Kurts Gallery. And then the following year, we started dating,” says Hussong.

Upstairs in their Midtown home is a painting by artist Mary Sims depicting a radiant Hussong in her wedding dress. On the ground is an old-fashioned diving helmet with an air hose reaching up and out of the frame. The effect is a little disorienting: Hussong seems to be getting married at the bottom of the sea. That’s just one of the many moments of serendipity and wonder to be found in their art-filled home.

A Classic Beauty

After they married, Lusk and Hussong lived in a cozy starter house. “We were in Central Gardens before and needed a bigger house than we had there,” says Lusk.

When they were contemplating expanding their family, they started to think about what kind of place they would want to live with their children. “We had been at Thanksgiving dinner, and I said to my sister-in-law that I wanted a four-bedroom house with a guest house, and just kind of laughed it off, thinking we would never be able to find it or afford it,” Hussong recalls. “But here we are.”

After much deliberation, they settled on a 1912 vintage Arts and Crafts house in a quiet corner of Midtown. “It’s a solid neighborhood,” says Lusk. “It’s diverse, and that certainly appealed to both of us when we were looking for neighborhoods.”

The home was in good shape. “The interior woodwork had not been messed up or ever painted, so that was good. The outside had been tuckpointed. Somebody took good care of it in the ’80s. And then we added new lighting and more cosmetic things.”

They finished part of the attic and made it into a bedroom, but the biggest change in the main house was to the kitchen. “The kitchen was three separate little areas. It hadn’t been touched since the ’50s,” says Lusk.

The new owners tore down the walls to create a more modern, practical space. “We moved it all around. It had been a service kitchen. It was a different kind of practicality from the 1920s,” says Hussong.

The backyard was dominated by a long concrete slab — someone who lived here in the past had been a fan of shuffleboard. They removed the concrete and planted grass and moss between paving stones. The biggest improvement they made to the property was to the carriage house, which had been a bare-bones affair. “It didn’t even have stairs!” says Hussong.

“The guest house had two rooms,” says Lusk. “It didn’t have water when we got the house, so we added a bathroom up there, and a kitchen.”

The couple have found the guest house to be an invaluable addition, especially while the couples’ two daughters, Grayson and Phoebe, were still living at home. It allowed the family to have guests for an extended period without feeling crowded. “We’ve had artists stay there for weeks, and we barely see them. So that works nicely.”

“It’s perfect for us when we have a bunch of relatives and artists in town all the time, but not all under the same roof,” says Lusk.

Over the years, as their daughters grew up and then moved out on their own, the couple continued to tweak the space to their liking. “We’d flip these rooms, so the dining room became the living room for a while,” says Lusk.

The couple furnished the home themselves, with a little help. “We have a lot of design friends,” says Lusk, most notably Grace Megel, whom the couple singled out for her help making everything fit just right.

Hussong believes the home’s flowing spaces and well-designed traffic areas helped bring the overall aesthetic into focus. “One thing I would say about this house: I think it’s really worked having a blend of old family pieces, and also contemporary pieces. It’s felt very natural and comfortable, being able to combine all of those things, which I don’t think works in every house.”

But the thing that really sets Lusk and Hussong’s home apart is, of course, the art.

For Art’s Sake

Over the living room fireplace is a painting by Tad Lauritzen Wright called The Philosophy of Beauty. It is not a portrait or landscape, as you might expect from the title. Instead, it is a giant grid with letters in each square, in the familiar style of a word-finder puzzle. Gaze at it for a moment and words and phrases start to jump out at you: “Hot as a two-dollar pistol,” “God’s handwriting,” “Store complexion.”

“When you look at it, you’re playing the game,” says Lusk. “That’s always been the crux of Tad’s practice for almost 30 years: That people would spend a little more time with it than perhaps an abstract painting.”

Lusk and Hussong’s art collection, which fills their home’s ample wall space, is vast and varied. It encompasses sculpture, painting, abstraction, and realism. There’s an early piece from Memphis minimalist Terri Jones, consisting of a glass jar mounted on a wall. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary vessel, but when you look at the shadow cast by the ceiling-mounted spotlight, a single word appears: “remember.”

Lighting, Lusk says, is a crucial consideration when hanging art in your home. Accent lights for wall-mounted paintings should be at an angle, not just beaming straight down from the ceiling. “It should be at least 30 inches away from the wall,” says Lusk. “A lot of times they can’t do that, or the fixtures are way too close to the wall, so it does light it, but it doesn’t flood it.”

The effect of changing lighting conditions on a hanging painting is dramatically illustrated by a large portrait by Paul Stephen Benjamin hanging in the stairwell. When it’s well-lit, the exquisitely rendered dark-skinned figure stares back at the viewer. But dim the light, Hussong says, “and he just disappears.”

The late Mary Sims was a special favorite of the couple. Based in Eureka Springs, she favored huge canvases stuffed with full-length human figures in strange and startling poses. Hussong says the artist would persuade her friends to dress up in costumes which looked like they had been grabbed randomly from a thrift store, and use the photographs for inspiration.

Ship of Fools, the giant Sims painting in the living room, is a riot of color and form. It dates from the late 1970s. Upstairs is another Sims work, similarly sizable, which was inspired by the biblical story of David and Bathsheba. While Lusk and Hussong regularly rotate pieces in their home, the massive Sims paintings stay anchored. And the paintings are not the only memory they have of their painter friend. Two vinyl chairs in the living room came from Sims’ Eureka Springs kitchen.

Another large canvas is easily mistaken for an altered photograph. It depicts a Victorian house with a distinctive circular balcony railing that once stood on Vance Avenue in Midtown. The center of the image is in sharp, lifelike focus, while the edges drip like spilled paint.

“Jared Small had painted that house several times,” says Hussong. “Then one day, I was driving by and it was on fire. It went really quickly. Right after I drove by, I called Jared to tell him that it was burning. He painted this afterwards. It’s sort of a memory of the house.”

The collection’s metal artwork shows the full subtlety and variation possible with the medium. Blink and you’ll miss some of the sculpture, such as the airplane-like form hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen, crafted by blacksmith Elizabeth Brim. “It’s an inflated piece,” says Hussong. “So it’s almost like you would sew a pillow. You weld all the edges together and leave a hole. Then you heat it up and blow hot air into it, and it’ll puff up.”

Nearby is a fun piece resembling a light-up smiley face. “That’s by Everett Hoffman. It was in a recent exhibition [at the Metal Museum. He’s an up-and-coming, hot metalsmith right now.”

In the foyer on a glass table is a kinetic sculpture by Brent Kington. “He’s considered one of the key figures in bringing blacksmithing to contemporary art,” says Hussong.

Farther up the stairs is one of the home’s most striking pieces, resembling a tree, bisected vertically to expose the wood grain — except it’s made entirely of polished metal. The artist, Kim Cridler, was master metalsmith at the Metal Museum two years ago. Hussong recalls a reception held here at home where the assembled metalworkers gathered on the staircase landing to ooh and ahh at the gleaming tree.

An Artistic Legacy

Memphis has always made a place for eccentrics, artists, and eccentric artists. This particular home has hosted many of the most talented people to pass through the Bluff City. “Covid sort of curbed some of the dinners and parties that we had more frequently before. But we still sit in our living room with guests,” says Hussong.

Much of the home’s art are reminders of past exhibitions, or, like the six-foot light-up mermaid in the backyard, thank-you gifts. “That was from Starry Nights, their first iteration,” says Lusk. “I did a favor for MIFA and they gave me that.”

The couple’s love for Memphis’ unique culture remains undimmed. “You know, all the cool people just accidentally find their way here,” says Lusk.

“Yep,” says Hussong. “And they remain.”