“It’s About the Process” : A Visit with Alexis Kraus
Alexis Kraus grew up in East Memphis, graduating from White Station High School. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 with an emphasis in printmaking. She has since moved back to Memphis, where she has worked with UrbanArt Commission. Since speaking with her, she has decided to attend University of Texas’ Graphic Design graduate program.
x: Did you start printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design?
AK: I started printmaking at RISD, and my emphasis for college was mostly drawing. I wasn’t sure in what direction I wanted to go until I started school. Printmaking is essentially drawing, so that’s just what I chose to do. Now I’m headed more in the direction of graphic design, but printmaking is really the granddaddy of graphic design.
x: What kind of printmaking do you do?
AK: I really did the full spectrum; a lot of the stuff that I focused on most recently was probably etching and intaglio. I also do a lot of lithography and monoprinting. Since coming back to Memphis I’ve just had to find presses that are available to work with.
x: What have you been doing since you graduated?
AK: Well, I’ve been working with UrbanArt Commission since last August and been really focusing more on design and trying to find ways to bring my art into design. I guess working with UrbanArt Commission is interesting because a lot of what they do is in-house design for murals and things like that. We get to work with a lot of artists; we actually just worked with Mark Nowell. A lot of what I’ve done specifically is on the branding side of UrbanArt, so I’ve gotten to help design t-shirts, brochures, and print material. That’s kind of been the direction they’ve let me go in.
x: Are you interested in public art?
AK: Yes! Part of me coming to UrbanArt initially was to learn about that process – how public art is implemented within the city. I knew a little bit about non-profits and public art before, but I really just wanted to learn about how that process takes place. It really is a process; it takes months and years of planning and committees and working with the city. It’s a lot of bureaucratic stuff that I never knew about before. I am interested in public art; more recently, I’ve done murals with them. Public art is interesting because you have more of an impact. It’s out of a gallery; it’s like design in that it’s not artwork for a gallery, but has an impact on the community.
x: Do you see any distinctions between Providence and here?
AK: Actually, yes. Providence and Memphis are very different cities, historically and just culturally. Providence is tiny with a lot of different neighborhoods and people coming together, and there’s a lot of that in Memphis with all of the different neighborhoods in midtown, like with the V&E Art Walk.
x: Is there a big art scene in Providence or do people leave after they graduate?
AK: Well, it’s also similar to Memphis in that the art scene is still up and coming, too. There’s a great community of artists living in Providence, and a lot of that has to do with the economy in Providence. There’s a lot of open spaces that are cheap, so artists are coming in and starting collectives. I can see that for the future here in Memphis.
x: Have you noticed anything different here since you’ve been back?
AK: I think the art scene is growing tremendously since I lived here before, especially on Broad Avenue. There really wasn’t much going on on Broad before I moved to Providence; it was really the South Main area. A lot of the galleries that were there in that part of Memphis have since moved, and a lot of them are not in Memphis anymore. The new galleries that are here, like Material, are taking place on Broad. There are a lot of new spaces. It’s interesting because Sears Crosstown is similar to a place in Providence called AS220, and the guy who started AS220 came to Memphis and lectured a year ago. It’s an experimental space with residencies, galleries, a music venue, a print shop, and a restaurant. I would love to see Sears Crosstown go in that direction. I love it here in Memphis because it can only grow; the art scene can really only grow.
x: Were there any projects you were particularly fond of at RISD?
AK: Yes, I really loved working with these two large pieces about memory and repetition. They’re really about printmaking. It’s an interesting process because I drew each plate from the same image, so there are 52 plates total per image. Both of them are images that I saw many times – obviously, the television is an object – but the project was about memory that’s repeated and how it becomes one memory, and that’s why I put them all together. I etched directly onto the copper plate with chemicals and went back in with etching needles. To make a print, you rub ink into the plate with your hand and then you print it, so that’s why the image is in reverse. I wanted them all to look a little different.
x: Did you start printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design?
AK: I started printmaking at RISD, and my emphasis for college was mostly drawing. I wasn’t sure in what direction I wanted to go until I started school. Printmaking is essentially drawing, so that’s just what I chose to do. Now I’m headed more in the direction of graphic design, but printmaking is really the granddaddy of graphic design.
x: What kind of printmaking do you do?
AK: I really did the full spectrum; a lot of the stuff that I focused on most recently was probably etching and intaglio. I also do a lot of lithography and monoprinting. Since coming back to Memphis I’ve just had to find presses that are available to work with.
x: What have you been doing since you graduated?
AK: Well, I’ve been working with UrbanArt Commission since last August and been really focusing more on design and trying to find ways to bring my art into design. I guess working with UrbanArt Commission is interesting because a lot of what they do is in-house design for murals and things like that. We get to work with a lot of artists; we actually just worked with Mark Nowell. A lot of what I’ve done specifically is on the branding side of UrbanArt, so I’ve gotten to help design t-shirts, brochures, and print material. That’s kind of been the direction they’ve let me go in.
x: Are you interested in public art?
AK: Yes! Part of me coming to UrbanArt initially was to learn about that process – how public art is implemented within the city. I knew a little bit about non-profits and public art before, but I really just wanted to learn about how that process takes place. It really is a process; it takes months and years of planning and committees and working with the city. It’s a lot of bureaucratic stuff that I never knew about before. I am interested in public art; more recently, I’ve done murals with them. Public art is interesting because you have more of an impact. It’s out of a gallery; it’s like design in that it’s not artwork for a gallery, but has an impact on the community.
x: Do you see any distinctions between Providence and here?
AK: Actually, yes. Providence and Memphis are very different cities, historically and just culturally. Providence is tiny with a lot of different neighborhoods and people coming together, and there’s a lot of that in Memphis with all of the different neighborhoods in midtown, like with the V&E Art Walk.
x: Is there a big art scene in Providence or do people leave after they graduate?
AK: Well, it’s also similar to Memphis in that the art scene is still up and coming, too. There’s a great community of artists living in Providence, and a lot of that has to do with the economy in Providence. There’s a lot of open spaces that are cheap, so artists are coming in and starting collectives. I can see that for the future here in Memphis.
x: Have you noticed anything different here since you’ve been back?
AK: I think the art scene is growing tremendously since I lived here before, especially on Broad Avenue. There really wasn’t much going on on Broad before I moved to Providence; it was really the South Main area. A lot of the galleries that were there in that part of Memphis have since moved, and a lot of them are not in Memphis anymore. The new galleries that are here, like Material, are taking place on Broad. There are a lot of new spaces. It’s interesting because Sears Crosstown is similar to a place in Providence called AS220, and the guy who started AS220 came to Memphis and lectured a year ago. It’s an experimental space with residencies, galleries, a music venue, a print shop, and a restaurant. I would love to see Sears Crosstown go in that direction. I love it here in Memphis because it can only grow; the art scene can really only grow.
x: Were there any projects you were particularly fond of at RISD?
AK: Yes, I really loved working with these two large pieces about memory and repetition. They’re really about printmaking. It’s an interesting process because I drew each plate from the same image, so there are 52 plates total per image. Both of them are images that I saw many times – obviously, the television is an object – but the project was about memory that’s repeated and how it becomes one memory, and that’s why I put them all together. I etched directly onto the copper plate with chemicals and went back in with etching needles. To make a print, you rub ink into the plate with your hand and then you print it, so that’s why the image is in reverse. I wanted them all to look a little different.
x: Can you tell us a little bit about your Lost portrait series?
AK: The Lost portraits are monoprints. Somebody had asked me to do a series of portraits from the Lost television show for them. After that, I started thinking about it and I was interested in how much of a phenomenon that was, and how the characters were so important, so I decided to do a series of my own. Instead of etching I just painted directly on the paint, and the ink was mixed with a little bit of oil so that it’s easier to keep. I printed it really, really lightly so that it wasn’t squashed. These are monoprints, so they don’t edition. It’s a more painterly type of printmaking.
AK: The Lost portraits are monoprints. Somebody had asked me to do a series of portraits from the Lost television show for them. After that, I started thinking about it and I was interested in how much of a phenomenon that was, and how the characters were so important, so I decided to do a series of my own. Instead of etching I just painted directly on the paint, and the ink was mixed with a little bit of oil so that it’s easier to keep. I printed it really, really lightly so that it wasn’t squashed. These are monoprints, so they don’t edition. It’s a more painterly type of printmaking.
x: What type of printmaking are you most drawn to?
AK: I would say intaglio and etching. That process to me is the most fun, but it also relates to my subject. I would say a lot of printmakers do it for the process. You have to be a planner; there’s also an intuitive element too, especially when you’re doing monoprints. Even if you’re etching, you test things out so you’ll kind of have an idea of how it will look, but you never really do until you pull the first print, so there’s kind of that mystery to it. You don’t know necessarily what you’re going to get. You always have an idea, but until you do pull the first print, you don’t know exactly.
AK: I would say intaglio and etching. That process to me is the most fun, but it also relates to my subject. I would say a lot of printmakers do it for the process. You have to be a planner; there’s also an intuitive element too, especially when you’re doing monoprints. Even if you’re etching, you test things out so you’ll kind of have an idea of how it will look, but you never really do until you pull the first print, so there’s kind of that mystery to it. You don’t know necessarily what you’re going to get. You always have an idea, but until you do pull the first print, you don’t know exactly.
“All Over the Place” : A Visit with Tad Lauritzen Wright
Living and working in midtown Memphis, Tad Lauritzen Wright is an artist who incorporates collage, text, and basic artistic techniques to create bold pieces that engage viewers. Through teaching and representation with the David Lusk Gallery, Wright is actively involved in the Memphis art community.
x: Could you tell us what you’re working on right now?
TW: Sure. What I’m doing right now is- well, let me give you just a little bit of background to go with this. My work is rooted in outsider art, naïve art, art of children… this kind of idea, and I’m heavily involved and interested in the idea of southern visionary art, but elevated outside of all that, somehow into a fine art perspective. For a long time artists have been inspired by these things but it’s something that’s really interesting to me: just kind of that natural ability for people to make images. I’ve been really involved in responding to a couple of articles that I’ve been reading and two of them are on the idea of provisional painting, one from 2009 and one from 2011 that are both in Art In America, and then something referring to a very similar style of painting which is under the guise of “new casualist.” All three of those articles revolve around abstract painting, and they all embrace the idea of failure, letting mistakes be exposed, an openness to riding materials, and just kind of allowing things go right or wrong in a work. So, what I’m doing right now is hanging onto that idea of southern visionary art in the work and I’m trying to approach and deal with this idea of new casualism at the same time. I’m trying to align myself with new casualist, but deal with the figure. It’s kind of a complicated relationship for me because I feel like that happened in figurative art maybe fifty or sixty years ago, so I’m trying to make that of now as much as anything else, and I suppose I’m trying to do that through color and manipulation of figure and form.
x: Do you ever have your daughter work with you?
TW: Oh, I do all the time now! She recently started making really interesting drawings. She’s three and a half now, and in the house I give her a lot of little canvasses to work on, and she is an art-making machine. She’s very inspiring with what she does— she’s just kind of all over the place. She has the fanciest art materials of any three year old I know, so she makes amazing pieces and sometimes I go back and work on top of them. I mean, what we’re looking at isn’t really stuff she’s been working on too but a lot of it is kind of inspired by what she’s doing. The little drawing up there under “camp fuck” is something that she made, and then somewhere there’s a painting directly related to that. I’m still not as good as her [laughs] and I mean that sincerely, and she will tell me that too, but I’m trying to be. I’ve always been really interested in that kind of freedom of gesture that somebody has when they don’t know what they’re doing.
This well known artist Donald Batchelor used to go into a bar and he would just pass around pieces of paper and have people make the drawings for him. Then, he would take them back to his studio, project them, and make paintings of some of them. I like this idea of the discarded and the non-art, and all of that transformed somehow to become art.
x: How does pop art relate to all that?
TW: For me it relates to color, certainly pop art comes in in that aspect. I’ve really never known what to do with pop art in my own work- I suppose it comes in just through general ideas of popular culture whether its media, music, or celebrities and things like that, but I’m not so much mocking pop art; once I start involving color and it starts to be bright and shiny it kind of evokes that in a way, but I don’t know that I’m really involved in the things that pop artists of the 60’s were.
x: What about collage artists of the 60’s?
TW: I teach a collage class as well and I think that Rauschenberg is one of those artists that’s really, you know, he’s like-I always talk about Pollock in this regard: nobody could ever sling paint on a canvas again because they would always think ‘Jackson Pollock.’ And I think that about Rauschenberg a lot- Rauschenberg put up one of those roadblocks in collage that was really difficult for people to get past. I think that it gets used in a lot of interesting ways, in regards to the new casualists that I was talking about earlier and what they’re doing with collage. Where it’s just kind of slap-dash and half-hazard and it’s ugly! I mean there is no doubt that what they’re doing is aesthetically displeasing, but I think that’s how you end up pushing something forward. I’m just like you guys, I’ve read 10,000 articles on art, and the idea that something, once it comes into being, is always rejected before it’s accepted and I think that’s where that is. There aren’t specific collage artists that I’m terribly inspired by: I link it into painting. I do think that I, more or less, became an artist because of Jean Dubuffet. When I was twenty years old and in college, I went on a family trip to a three floor exhibition of Dubuffet’s work in Washington, and it kind of changed my idea. I’m also really inspired by what Dubuffet writes; that’s not a constant pursuit anymore but it’s something I find interesting. I’m like a big sponge, I absorb a lot of the work of various people and then I find ways to process it. As you’re absorbing, you don’t always know if you’re losing your identity at the same time— that occurs to you later, unfortunately, but whenever I do realize I’m doing that, I end up tattooing those images onto myself. And so I’ve got, you know, [rolls sleeve up] there are some Warhol flowers at the bottom… and it just goes on. But it’s more to get rid of it than to honor it [laughs].
x: Could you tell us about some of your installation pieces?
TW: I’ve done quite a few. In Memphis, I’ve done a dumpster in Material. I had been in Berlin and Amsterdam for a month and, like normal people keep photos of their trip, I shot a bunch of photos on the trip, but then I came back and built this dumpster and covered it in graffiti images and little posters from what I’d seen. It projected red light from the bottom and had a long conversation with you in German, specifically because I couldn’t understand German, and it was just this world of weirdness talking to you. I involve installations and interactive pieces in a lot of shows: I’ve had shuffleboard tables, remote controlled cars driving around in oil paint allowing viewers to make drawings, and balloons filled with paint that people threw darts at and it made a painting underneath. I’ve made pieces where people threw darts at targets and won the target if they hit the bullseye, but the deal was that they’d have to give me their thumbprint and social security number for the piece. So there’s been a lot of interactive pieces to try and get people involved and that all kind of grows out of my interest in fluxus.
x: Does that relate to your fast sketches and that kind of technique?
TW: In someway maybe, in a performative sense. I think that the one-minute drawings come out of the single-line drawings, and the single-lines came into being right when I was out of grad school, and my work had slowed down. It was taking a couple weeks for something to get finished, and I just wanted something that was more immediate. I had a friend that I went to graduate school with that had made these gorgeous drawings, so I thought, well, I ought to make some drawings. And when I started making the drawings I took that very, very, very elementary exercise which happens a lot in my work—to take something very base-level and just try to push it until it breaks and becomes something beyond what it was originally. So, I would take those drawings and they became time-based: I would draw on them for twenty hours at a time. I was trying to push it and watch this thing just kind of unravel and develop. For the one minute drawings, what I decided to do was make a portrait for every minute of the day, so I drew 1440 of those, but I didn’t do it in 24 hours. I would have liked to, that would make the story better, but we can pretend. It just became something where I would draw 120 a day. 1440 proved itself to be a pretty big number.
x: So how long have you been in Memphis?
TW: I’ve been here twelve years.
x: Did you go to grad school here?
TW: Mhm, I did, I went to the College of Art here.
x: Why’d you hang around?
TW: Like I think with most people coming to Memphis, it seemed like it was going to be a short stop. My wife had just gotten out of grad school for museum studies as well, and she ended up with a job she really enjoyed at the Civil Rights Museum and, originally, that’s what kept us here. Memphis is one of those cities that’s really kind to artists, and we just kind of fell into it. I’ve had representation with David Lusk since I arrived in Memphis, I had it while I was in graduate school, and I had worked as an artist for a long time before I actually went to school too, so it just ended up being a place that was good for us.
x: Has being here impacted your work in any way?
TW: Yeah, I think so. I’ve been involved at different levels with the art community here over that twelve years and sometimes I’ve been very saturated. For the first two years after my daughter was born I’ve kind of knocked off of that, but I’m coming back into it a lot more. I’ve been coming back into it from a different place too, I mean, I’m semi-established in Memphis. I have a further reach within my own work than in Memphis, but I’m really interested in trying to create something for younger artists here. Especially since I teach them and talk to them, I see it as a really desperate situation. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with whatever bizarre blog that was where we got written up as one of the best eight art cities in the world, which I think we’re all very impressed by, but how do you actually get behind that and make that be? The way I see it, there’s not even one single exhibition situation that’s agreeable with young artists right now. So old people like me that are forty and are somewhere in the middle trying to push only end up getting better and more challenged by the younger people coming in. So that’s kind of where I’m at: thinking that that needs to be my major involvement in Memphis art in general. My stuff has done well here, but I’m able to move slightly-I’m almost to Tunica [laughs].
x: Could you tell us what you’re working on right now?
TW: Sure. What I’m doing right now is- well, let me give you just a little bit of background to go with this. My work is rooted in outsider art, naïve art, art of children… this kind of idea, and I’m heavily involved and interested in the idea of southern visionary art, but elevated outside of all that, somehow into a fine art perspective. For a long time artists have been inspired by these things but it’s something that’s really interesting to me: just kind of that natural ability for people to make images. I’ve been really involved in responding to a couple of articles that I’ve been reading and two of them are on the idea of provisional painting, one from 2009 and one from 2011 that are both in Art In America, and then something referring to a very similar style of painting which is under the guise of “new casualist.” All three of those articles revolve around abstract painting, and they all embrace the idea of failure, letting mistakes be exposed, an openness to riding materials, and just kind of allowing things go right or wrong in a work. So, what I’m doing right now is hanging onto that idea of southern visionary art in the work and I’m trying to approach and deal with this idea of new casualism at the same time. I’m trying to align myself with new casualist, but deal with the figure. It’s kind of a complicated relationship for me because I feel like that happened in figurative art maybe fifty or sixty years ago, so I’m trying to make that of now as much as anything else, and I suppose I’m trying to do that through color and manipulation of figure and form.
x: Do you ever have your daughter work with you?
TW: Oh, I do all the time now! She recently started making really interesting drawings. She’s three and a half now, and in the house I give her a lot of little canvasses to work on, and she is an art-making machine. She’s very inspiring with what she does— she’s just kind of all over the place. She has the fanciest art materials of any three year old I know, so she makes amazing pieces and sometimes I go back and work on top of them. I mean, what we’re looking at isn’t really stuff she’s been working on too but a lot of it is kind of inspired by what she’s doing. The little drawing up there under “camp fuck” is something that she made, and then somewhere there’s a painting directly related to that. I’m still not as good as her [laughs] and I mean that sincerely, and she will tell me that too, but I’m trying to be. I’ve always been really interested in that kind of freedom of gesture that somebody has when they don’t know what they’re doing.
This well known artist Donald Batchelor used to go into a bar and he would just pass around pieces of paper and have people make the drawings for him. Then, he would take them back to his studio, project them, and make paintings of some of them. I like this idea of the discarded and the non-art, and all of that transformed somehow to become art.
x: How does pop art relate to all that?
TW: For me it relates to color, certainly pop art comes in in that aspect. I’ve really never known what to do with pop art in my own work- I suppose it comes in just through general ideas of popular culture whether its media, music, or celebrities and things like that, but I’m not so much mocking pop art; once I start involving color and it starts to be bright and shiny it kind of evokes that in a way, but I don’t know that I’m really involved in the things that pop artists of the 60’s were.
x: What about collage artists of the 60’s?
TW: I teach a collage class as well and I think that Rauschenberg is one of those artists that’s really, you know, he’s like-I always talk about Pollock in this regard: nobody could ever sling paint on a canvas again because they would always think ‘Jackson Pollock.’ And I think that about Rauschenberg a lot- Rauschenberg put up one of those roadblocks in collage that was really difficult for people to get past. I think that it gets used in a lot of interesting ways, in regards to the new casualists that I was talking about earlier and what they’re doing with collage. Where it’s just kind of slap-dash and half-hazard and it’s ugly! I mean there is no doubt that what they’re doing is aesthetically displeasing, but I think that’s how you end up pushing something forward. I’m just like you guys, I’ve read 10,000 articles on art, and the idea that something, once it comes into being, is always rejected before it’s accepted and I think that’s where that is. There aren’t specific collage artists that I’m terribly inspired by: I link it into painting. I do think that I, more or less, became an artist because of Jean Dubuffet. When I was twenty years old and in college, I went on a family trip to a three floor exhibition of Dubuffet’s work in Washington, and it kind of changed my idea. I’m also really inspired by what Dubuffet writes; that’s not a constant pursuit anymore but it’s something I find interesting. I’m like a big sponge, I absorb a lot of the work of various people and then I find ways to process it. As you’re absorbing, you don’t always know if you’re losing your identity at the same time— that occurs to you later, unfortunately, but whenever I do realize I’m doing that, I end up tattooing those images onto myself. And so I’ve got, you know, [rolls sleeve up] there are some Warhol flowers at the bottom… and it just goes on. But it’s more to get rid of it than to honor it [laughs].
x: Could you tell us about some of your installation pieces?
TW: I’ve done quite a few. In Memphis, I’ve done a dumpster in Material. I had been in Berlin and Amsterdam for a month and, like normal people keep photos of their trip, I shot a bunch of photos on the trip, but then I came back and built this dumpster and covered it in graffiti images and little posters from what I’d seen. It projected red light from the bottom and had a long conversation with you in German, specifically because I couldn’t understand German, and it was just this world of weirdness talking to you. I involve installations and interactive pieces in a lot of shows: I’ve had shuffleboard tables, remote controlled cars driving around in oil paint allowing viewers to make drawings, and balloons filled with paint that people threw darts at and it made a painting underneath. I’ve made pieces where people threw darts at targets and won the target if they hit the bullseye, but the deal was that they’d have to give me their thumbprint and social security number for the piece. So there’s been a lot of interactive pieces to try and get people involved and that all kind of grows out of my interest in fluxus.
x: Does that relate to your fast sketches and that kind of technique?
TW: In someway maybe, in a performative sense. I think that the one-minute drawings come out of the single-line drawings, and the single-lines came into being right when I was out of grad school, and my work had slowed down. It was taking a couple weeks for something to get finished, and I just wanted something that was more immediate. I had a friend that I went to graduate school with that had made these gorgeous drawings, so I thought, well, I ought to make some drawings. And when I started making the drawings I took that very, very, very elementary exercise which happens a lot in my work—to take something very base-level and just try to push it until it breaks and becomes something beyond what it was originally. So, I would take those drawings and they became time-based: I would draw on them for twenty hours at a time. I was trying to push it and watch this thing just kind of unravel and develop. For the one minute drawings, what I decided to do was make a portrait for every minute of the day, so I drew 1440 of those, but I didn’t do it in 24 hours. I would have liked to, that would make the story better, but we can pretend. It just became something where I would draw 120 a day. 1440 proved itself to be a pretty big number.
x: So how long have you been in Memphis?
TW: I’ve been here twelve years.
x: Did you go to grad school here?
TW: Mhm, I did, I went to the College of Art here.
x: Why’d you hang around?
TW: Like I think with most people coming to Memphis, it seemed like it was going to be a short stop. My wife had just gotten out of grad school for museum studies as well, and she ended up with a job she really enjoyed at the Civil Rights Museum and, originally, that’s what kept us here. Memphis is one of those cities that’s really kind to artists, and we just kind of fell into it. I’ve had representation with David Lusk since I arrived in Memphis, I had it while I was in graduate school, and I had worked as an artist for a long time before I actually went to school too, so it just ended up being a place that was good for us.
x: Has being here impacted your work in any way?
TW: Yeah, I think so. I’ve been involved at different levels with the art community here over that twelve years and sometimes I’ve been very saturated. For the first two years after my daughter was born I’ve kind of knocked off of that, but I’m coming back into it a lot more. I’ve been coming back into it from a different place too, I mean, I’m semi-established in Memphis. I have a further reach within my own work than in Memphis, but I’m really interested in trying to create something for younger artists here. Especially since I teach them and talk to them, I see it as a really desperate situation. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with whatever bizarre blog that was where we got written up as one of the best eight art cities in the world, which I think we’re all very impressed by, but how do you actually get behind that and make that be? The way I see it, there’s not even one single exhibition situation that’s agreeable with young artists right now. So old people like me that are forty and are somewhere in the middle trying to push only end up getting better and more challenged by the younger people coming in. So that’s kind of where I’m at: thinking that that needs to be my major involvement in Memphis art in general. My stuff has done well here, but I’m able to move slightly-I’m almost to Tunica [laughs].
“Health, Family, Art” : A Visit with Mark Nowell
Mark Nowell is a sculptor living and working in Memphis. He has created public sculptures in Memphis, such as SHAZAM, 2005, on the corner on Monroe and Madison. BLUFF Magazine, his Memphis art publication, received worldwide recognition, but is no longer in print. He has been such an inspiration to Axis that we asked him for an interview.
x: How has Memphis grown since you first came here?
MN: Baby steps, little baby steps. It’s not a lot of brick and mortar, but it’s had a lot of stuff happen to it. Baby steps—but they’re foundational, and the foundations have gotten more stable. And, I must say, I’ve been successful here. I’ve made it work for me. It’s a little bit of a big-fish-in-a-small-pond syndrome. I mean, it’s never gonna be Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. It’s funny, I thought it would be when I was a kid. I came up here to go to art school, drove up here for the first time in my little Toyota Celica, and I really thought I was driving to Los Angeles or something. You know, Rolling Stones sang about Memphis, you heard Rock ‘n’ Roll songs singing “Memphis! New York! Memphis! Tokyo!” Well, I drove straight through it. I was looking for downtown, and I took 240 all the way to Frazier or something, and had to turn around and go back. It’s a state of mind, my friend, not a place.
x: Has Memphis impacted you or your art?
MN: Unfortunately, it has. [laughs] I’ve done 4 public art commissions here, and they are different from doing what you want. Public art used to be, if you wanted a big Claus Oldenburg, you got a Claus Oldenburg. You got a sculpture oftheir artwork. Now it’s shifted to “we don’t care who you are, we want a big bunny rabbit with a little bow-tie!” [laughs] No, it’s not that bad, I love public art commissions— I love public art! Memphis is cool and it’s what it is, a small city in the South. If you can get into the whole, ‘Elvis ate here’ kind of thing, you’re okay.
x: Tell us a little about your studio space.
MN: I wanted a building that was in mint condition, perfect with heat and air conditioning and skylights, and gigantic cranes. I saved money up, looked around, found something that would fit my price range. Unfortunately it had to be a fixer-upper. I’m not into the old charm. You hear “oh, look at the old building, it’s so charming”— no, it’s not! It’s a termite-infested, rotten, old health-hazard! But I like the train, I like the concrete, I like the trees, I’m grateful. The building is easily 100 years old. Originally, it was a building supply warehouse. The train tracks used to run right up next to the building, it was built for the train tracks. All these doors match the same sizes as the boxcar trains’, and the doors slide back so they could roll things on and off the train. Over the years it was a machine shop, salvage yard… just junk, and then sometime in the early 2000s it was a theatre. The Radical Fairies, they were called, a group, I believe, out of San Francisco. Then the Rozelle Artists kids came and set up here for a couple of years. They had shows and parties, they were cool. I have one studio space available, but I don’t plan on expanding. That’s what this stuff taught me: Health, Family, Art. Fashion design? Nope! Oh but I could make beautiful jewelry—Nope! … Motorcycles? I could make a cool chopper—Nope, nope, nope! Sculpture. Be serious.
x: Where do you find inspiration in the city?
MN: My portfolio is a full spectrum in that some stuff is inspired by Memphis a lot, and some stuff isn’t inspired by it at all. Some of it’s like, I’m on Mars or something, pretending that things are like David Bowie from 1972 with his Major Tom.
x: What about a public space inspires you for a sculpture?
MN: That it has outside space. Sculpture is always going to be a collaboration. Painting is more akin to poetry and sculpture is more akin to architecture: it collaborates with air, the sun, the sky, and the rest of the universe rather than the ceiling. Sculpture is meant to be part of nature. It gets tricky sometimes because the architects have egos just as big as mine, and they wanna have some sort of play in size and place. Public Art, I’ve always considered that a collaboration. I make light of the fact that they want bunny rabbits, but I think its only fair that they have a role— how the piece is lit and what its made of and whether its accessible to children, there are so many factors to consider. The design aspect of it, it’s a collaboration with what the Greyhounds want, what the architects want, what the children want… You just have to know that from the beginning. Don’t design some angst heavy metal plane crash for the new library, even if that what’s going through your mind…
But I still do engage in commercial stuff, I have a whole separate portfolio for the non-sculpture stuff. I had a really hard time with it from a therapeutic, psychological standpoint. But from a logical standpoint, it helped me a lot to have two tangibly different portfolios. One is, ‘here’s what’s consistent from 1979 to 2012, here’s this theme that’s my fine art that I built first and foremost from my own initiative. And then here’s a portfolio that says I’ll do whatever you want. But it helped me have a better attitude about it. Somebody says “we want a coffee table” and I say, “don’t make me… I’m a sculptor! ” But you’re broke! Just make the damn coffee table and enjoy it! [laughs]
But I am really grateful that over the last few years I’ve just continued to streamline being an artist. Since I was a little kid, that’s what I wanted. Both of my parents were artists, they went to the Memphis Academy of the Arts, that’s what they called it back then, and they lived in a big, old house in Victorian Village where I grew up. Since I was a little kid that’s what I knew I wanted to do. I had no idea that it would be such a pain in the ass to get to a point where you could just make art. But it was cool to get a scholarship to the school they went to.
When I was in public school in the 70s, there wasn’t an arts program really to speak of, they didn’t see me as an artist, they saw me as a welder. So when I transferred to high school they put me in “vo-tech,” vocational-technical, a program where all your electives were consolidated into the separate half of the school day and you learned carpentry, auto-body, welding, stuff like that. I kept trying to tell them I was supposed to be a rich and famous artist, but they didn’t believe me.
x: Did your parents support your decision to be an artist?
MN: They did but there was a reluctance because they knew what a struggle it is.
x: Would you support your kids being artists?
MN: I have a thirteen year old, and we pretty much have raised him to find himself and do whatever he wants to do. I think it’s important that people find themselves more than anything else. They’re gonna be kids for a little while, but they’re gonna be adults for a long time.
x: When’s the last time that you got in trouble for doodling?
MN: Isn’t that what we’re doing now? [points at the doodle questionnaire] I’m supposed be in there working on a sculpture! [laughs] That’s funny, I used to get in trouble all the time for doodling… that’s followed me around my whole life. I don’t exploit it as much, but I have thousands of these intricate little doodles. Whenever I’m just sitting, bored, I doodle. I’ve been doing it for so long that they just stack up. I wonder how many I’ve got, I counted them last summer and it was something like 3,000. A friend of mine looks at them every now and then and one day he was like, “this is what people that are insane do, you know that right? There are people in the hospital that just sit and write the same thing over and over again, draw things over and over again… Just to let you know ahead of time, don’t be surprised if you get an all-expenses paid trip over there to Lakeside.” But I am of the belief that it keeps me from going crazy.
Visit his website.
x: How has Memphis grown since you first came here?
MN: Baby steps, little baby steps. It’s not a lot of brick and mortar, but it’s had a lot of stuff happen to it. Baby steps—but they’re foundational, and the foundations have gotten more stable. And, I must say, I’ve been successful here. I’ve made it work for me. It’s a little bit of a big-fish-in-a-small-pond syndrome. I mean, it’s never gonna be Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. It’s funny, I thought it would be when I was a kid. I came up here to go to art school, drove up here for the first time in my little Toyota Celica, and I really thought I was driving to Los Angeles or something. You know, Rolling Stones sang about Memphis, you heard Rock ‘n’ Roll songs singing “Memphis! New York! Memphis! Tokyo!” Well, I drove straight through it. I was looking for downtown, and I took 240 all the way to Frazier or something, and had to turn around and go back. It’s a state of mind, my friend, not a place.
x: Has Memphis impacted you or your art?
MN: Unfortunately, it has. [laughs] I’ve done 4 public art commissions here, and they are different from doing what you want. Public art used to be, if you wanted a big Claus Oldenburg, you got a Claus Oldenburg. You got a sculpture oftheir artwork. Now it’s shifted to “we don’t care who you are, we want a big bunny rabbit with a little bow-tie!” [laughs] No, it’s not that bad, I love public art commissions— I love public art! Memphis is cool and it’s what it is, a small city in the South. If you can get into the whole, ‘Elvis ate here’ kind of thing, you’re okay.
x: Tell us a little about your studio space.
MN: I wanted a building that was in mint condition, perfect with heat and air conditioning and skylights, and gigantic cranes. I saved money up, looked around, found something that would fit my price range. Unfortunately it had to be a fixer-upper. I’m not into the old charm. You hear “oh, look at the old building, it’s so charming”— no, it’s not! It’s a termite-infested, rotten, old health-hazard! But I like the train, I like the concrete, I like the trees, I’m grateful. The building is easily 100 years old. Originally, it was a building supply warehouse. The train tracks used to run right up next to the building, it was built for the train tracks. All these doors match the same sizes as the boxcar trains’, and the doors slide back so they could roll things on and off the train. Over the years it was a machine shop, salvage yard… just junk, and then sometime in the early 2000s it was a theatre. The Radical Fairies, they were called, a group, I believe, out of San Francisco. Then the Rozelle Artists kids came and set up here for a couple of years. They had shows and parties, they were cool. I have one studio space available, but I don’t plan on expanding. That’s what this stuff taught me: Health, Family, Art. Fashion design? Nope! Oh but I could make beautiful jewelry—Nope! … Motorcycles? I could make a cool chopper—Nope, nope, nope! Sculpture. Be serious.
x: Where do you find inspiration in the city?
MN: My portfolio is a full spectrum in that some stuff is inspired by Memphis a lot, and some stuff isn’t inspired by it at all. Some of it’s like, I’m on Mars or something, pretending that things are like David Bowie from 1972 with his Major Tom.
x: What about a public space inspires you for a sculpture?
MN: That it has outside space. Sculpture is always going to be a collaboration. Painting is more akin to poetry and sculpture is more akin to architecture: it collaborates with air, the sun, the sky, and the rest of the universe rather than the ceiling. Sculpture is meant to be part of nature. It gets tricky sometimes because the architects have egos just as big as mine, and they wanna have some sort of play in size and place. Public Art, I’ve always considered that a collaboration. I make light of the fact that they want bunny rabbits, but I think its only fair that they have a role— how the piece is lit and what its made of and whether its accessible to children, there are so many factors to consider. The design aspect of it, it’s a collaboration with what the Greyhounds want, what the architects want, what the children want… You just have to know that from the beginning. Don’t design some angst heavy metal plane crash for the new library, even if that what’s going through your mind…
But I still do engage in commercial stuff, I have a whole separate portfolio for the non-sculpture stuff. I had a really hard time with it from a therapeutic, psychological standpoint. But from a logical standpoint, it helped me a lot to have two tangibly different portfolios. One is, ‘here’s what’s consistent from 1979 to 2012, here’s this theme that’s my fine art that I built first and foremost from my own initiative. And then here’s a portfolio that says I’ll do whatever you want. But it helped me have a better attitude about it. Somebody says “we want a coffee table” and I say, “don’t make me… I’m a sculptor! ” But you’re broke! Just make the damn coffee table and enjoy it! [laughs]
But I am really grateful that over the last few years I’ve just continued to streamline being an artist. Since I was a little kid, that’s what I wanted. Both of my parents were artists, they went to the Memphis Academy of the Arts, that’s what they called it back then, and they lived in a big, old house in Victorian Village where I grew up. Since I was a little kid that’s what I knew I wanted to do. I had no idea that it would be such a pain in the ass to get to a point where you could just make art. But it was cool to get a scholarship to the school they went to.
When I was in public school in the 70s, there wasn’t an arts program really to speak of, they didn’t see me as an artist, they saw me as a welder. So when I transferred to high school they put me in “vo-tech,” vocational-technical, a program where all your electives were consolidated into the separate half of the school day and you learned carpentry, auto-body, welding, stuff like that. I kept trying to tell them I was supposed to be a rich and famous artist, but they didn’t believe me.
x: Did your parents support your decision to be an artist?
MN: They did but there was a reluctance because they knew what a struggle it is.
x: Would you support your kids being artists?
MN: I have a thirteen year old, and we pretty much have raised him to find himself and do whatever he wants to do. I think it’s important that people find themselves more than anything else. They’re gonna be kids for a little while, but they’re gonna be adults for a long time.
x: When’s the last time that you got in trouble for doodling?
MN: Isn’t that what we’re doing now? [points at the doodle questionnaire] I’m supposed be in there working on a sculpture! [laughs] That’s funny, I used to get in trouble all the time for doodling… that’s followed me around my whole life. I don’t exploit it as much, but I have thousands of these intricate little doodles. Whenever I’m just sitting, bored, I doodle. I’ve been doing it for so long that they just stack up. I wonder how many I’ve got, I counted them last summer and it was something like 3,000. A friend of mine looks at them every now and then and one day he was like, “this is what people that are insane do, you know that right? There are people in the hospital that just sit and write the same thing over and over again, draw things over and over again… Just to let you know ahead of time, don’t be surprised if you get an all-expenses paid trip over there to Lakeside.” But I am of the belief that it keeps me from going crazy.
Visit his website.