Memphis Regional Update June 2025
Spring art season is mysterious and delirious in the Bluff City
Published June 2nd 2025
By Joe Nolan
Joel Parsons Beauty for Ashes, Uppers for Downers (after Rubens’ Descent from the Cross), 2025 Ink, gouache, urethane, enamel, and acrylic on synthetic vellum, artists frame with mirrors - Photo credit Chip Pankey
Memphis comes alive in the spring, before the swampy summer swelter and the big tourist season begin. The city’s warm-weather art calendar arrives with the storm season just before the Magnolias blossom and the long lines start to queue at Graceland. Memphis boasts storied Southern institutions like the Brooks Museum of Art, and showrooms like David Lusk Gallery are synonymous with contemporary art in Tennessee. The Bluff City is also home to a new gallery that’s focused on the region and supporting the local community. And Memphis also offers unique DIY creative spaces and projects that make for a one-of-a-kind art scene in this iconic Southern city.
Owen Westberg rocks, 2025 Oil on birch panel - image courtesy of Tops gallery
Tops Gallery
Tops Gallery will be 13-years-old in 2025, but its reputation as one of the most unique contemporary art spaces in the South remains mostly uncontested. Native Memphian Matt Ducklo is the photographer-turned-gallerist behind Tops. Ducklo spent a decade in New York before returning to his hometown in 2009. He opened Tops in October of 2012.
The gallery has never changed location, but it’s not exactly easy for a newbie to find. The address is a historic building at 400 South Front Street, but the gallery entrance is around the corner, along Huling Avenue. Ducklo added a fun neon sign above the gallery entrance, but you don’t necessarily notice it unlit in the daytime. Inside you’re confronted with a steep stairway that takes a hard left turn into darkness. You can’t really see what you’re walking into until you’re too far down for second guesses.
Visitors who make it to the bottom of the stairs find themselves in a surprisingly vast, open basement that’s mostly-neatly packed with rows of the building’s owner’s stored vintage ephemera. There are narrow pathways between the rows, and if visitors keep walking away from stairs into the distant blackness, passed the hoards of odd stuff, the intrepid art lovers find themselves at what looks like the entrance to a cave. You enter the gallery through a doorway in a concrete wall that was widened with a sledgehammer sometime since the building was erected in 1928. The gallery’s interior walls are exposed stone, and a massive coal chute carved in the gallery’s rear wall is an echo of Tops’ former life as a coal storage space. Nowadays the chute leads-up to a manhole cover at street level. When the cover’s removed the chute floods the space with natural light.
Tops shows lots of Southern artists, many with direct ties to Memphis. But Ducklo also maintains his connections in the Northeast, and he relishes the opportunity to introduce out-of-towners to Memphis’ artist community – and vice versa. Ducklo opened a show by Pittsburgh, PA-based painter Owen Westberg at the end of March. Thicket is an intimate exhibition of small impressionistic oil paintings on panels. Westberg’s, interiors, landscapes and still lifes combine tactile textures, blurred lines, suggested forms and implied narratives. His panels don’t make statements so much as capture rumors you might remember overhearing in a dream. And it’s the push-and-pull between the everyday and the mysterious that makes Westberg’s work so compelling. There are no people pictured in the artist’s scenes of familiar objects and unremarkable spaces. Westberg and his raw renderings leave room for viewers’ curious attentions to roam within his paintings’ raw wood frames. The result is a cozy show of small works in a one-of-a-kind space that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
rocks captures a collection of colorful soft-edged stones, running in rough rows across one of Westberg’s small wooden panels. It’s one of the works in the show that would read as a wholly abstract composition if not for the title and the greater context of the exhibition. The show’s nomenclature is as utilitarian as its aesthetics. Standout titles printed in italicized bursts of lowercase letters on a gallery handout include: interior, rocks and forest, grouping.
late winter pictures factory smokestacks beneath a cold, pale sky. The green grass in the foreground is depicted with dark smudges of olive and dripping rivulets of chartreuse.
abundance marries Westberg’s preoccupations with both still lifes and exteriors: A small building evoked with intersecting lines of gray/green and patches of white provides a backdrop for a brown basket brimming with green-colored apples highlighted with gold. All of Westberg’s structures, fruits, trees, and green lawns are summoned with minimal brushwork and detailing. The soft, fuzzy rendering of his scenes makes viewers look closer at the textures on his panels’ surfaces, and the shifting nuance between shades and tones. The artist’s bare basic painting also makes viewers ask “what,” “where,” and “who” questions, dreaming up narratives within these unpopulated scenes. Figurative paintings always imply narratives, but inspiring gallerygoers to imagine stories in scenes where no one is pictured is Westberg’s superpower.
Joel Parsons Dance the Revolution: Don’t Leave Me This Way, verse 1 (for Emma Goldman, after Thelma Houston), 2025 Stained glass - Photo credit Houston Cofield
Sheet Cake
Tops is turning thirteenth, but Sheet Cake gallery celebrates its second birthday this December after opening in Memphis’ Edge District in 2023. Founder and owner Lauren Kennedy brought loads of varied experiences from across the art industrial complex to her roles, along with a local reputation for both noted underground projects and city-wide public and community art organizing. She’s the founder of Southfork, an alternative art and conversation space which she ran out of her home until 2017. And she was also the executive director of the UrbanArt Commission where she managed $6 million in public art investments, and spearheaded the art program for Memphis International Airport’s B Concourse. Kennedy brings this same local-but-broad approach to her Sheet Cake space which is dedicated to showing work by Southern artists, and highlighting women, artists of color, and queer creators.
The gallery is expansive, and its storefront windows attract curious passersby on Monroe Avenue. Gallerygoers enter – and exit – passed a nifty gift shop brimming with small works and reproductions by artists associated with the gallery. There’s a divider in the middle of the room that can be open or shut to create separate spaces for separate shows or one large flowing space. This spring Joel Parsons’ Club Rapture and the Ecstasy Afters filled the gallery with sculpture, illuminated signage, 2D multimedia paintings, stained glass, sound installation, activist messaging and art historical references, celebrating the golden age of disco and eulogizing the dawn of the AIDS epidemic.
Dance the Revolution: Don’t Leave Me This Way, verse 1 (for Emma Goldman, after Thelma Houston) opens the show. It’s an installation of picket signs and protest banners haphazardly stacked in a corner of the gallery. They all have the homemade aesthetic of grassroots activism, but Parsons’ protest posters and picket propaganda are made of stained glass. The installation looks like the aftermath of the Christopher Street Liberation Day March on June 28, 1970 – the landmark gay rights protest that marked the one year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Or maybe it more closely resembles the remnants of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s (ACT UP) first protest on March 24, 1987, at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway. Thelma Houston’s titular disco epic landed in 1977. The messages and slogans on the signs and banners transform the song’s lyrics into revolutionary slogans (“Set Me Free,” “I Can’t Exist”) and eulogies for lost lovers (“I’ll Surely Miss Your Tender Kiss”). Dance the Revolution’ delivers the show’s themes of dancing in the face of a deadly disease and poetically places them in the context of gay dance club culture in the 1970s and 80s. The glass signs and banners, and Parsons’ red glass bricks and green glass molotov cocktail bottles, are charged with both the revolutionary rage and fragile vulnerability that informed the era.
Club Rapture put me in mind of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. That exhibition put a spotlight on activist art in an effort to celebrate identity and highlight the ravaging affects of AIDS on the creative community. The show polarized New York’s art establishment and inspired a generation of artists to engage with social practice art and politically charged projects. A display like Club Rapture might not have existed if art had taken a different turn 30 years ago, and Parsons’ echoing of the biennial’s themes is just one art historical reference/resonance in a display that revels in layers of historical narratives. Titles like Dance the Revolution: Don’t Leave Me This Way, verse 1 (for Emma Goldman, after Thelma Houston), and Beauty for Ashes, Uppers for Downers (after Rubens’ Descent from the Cross) point to this show’s ranging conversation about politics, art history and popular culture.
Beauty for Ashes, Uppers for Downers (after Rubens’ Descent from the Cross) is a multimedia painting mixing ink, gouache, urethane, enamel, and acrylic on synthetic vellum. Parsons includes an artist’s frame tiled with tiny mirrors like a spinning disco ball. The Rubens masterpiece name-checked in the title is the central panel of a triptych the artist created between 1612-1614. It depicts the moment Christ was taken down from the cross by his family, friends and apostles, a subject Rubens revisited numerous times during his career. Parsons transforms the figures in Rubens’ original into a roaring fire, incorporating a palette inspired by the colorful robes the Dutch master painted in the 17th century. Looking closely at the flames, discerning viewers will see figures suggested by Parsons’ spare line drawing. At Club Rapture a fallen divinity is also a dying disco queen. And a dance-fevered community in mourning are the saints gathering at the mercy seat.
John Shorb at Viaduct with his paper press - Photo by Joe Nolan
Viaduct
My visit to Sheet Cake was suggested by artist John Shorb. Shorb is a native Memphian who also lives and works in Brooklyn. Shorb’s been spending more time in his hometown lately, developing an industrial space into a center for paper artists and printmakers. We left Sheet Cake and I followed Shorb across Memphis to a neighborhood defined by the Poplar Street Viaduct. And, for now, Viaduct is the name Shorb is using to talk about his vision for an important new addition to the Volunteer State’s print-and-paper community.
Driving through the building’s front gate we were greeted by artist Dan Mandelbaum carving stone al fresco on Viaduct’s spacious loading dock. Mandelbaum’s trad-pop creations look like children’s toys from the Upper Paleolithic period, combining ancient techniques with an eye for contemporary aesthetics. His corner of the Viaduct loading dock was covered in a white blizzard of carving dust, but his finished stone and ceramic works were arranged in stately rows in a studio space inside the building. Mandelbaum generously talked me through his process, and I was grateful to preview some of the work he’ll show at ZieherSmith gallery in Nashville this fall.
The Viaduct complex is divided-up into various-sized rooms that have mostly been demoed and stripped down and cleaned out. The artist found a mess at the place, but now it feels more like a blank slate. In Shorb’s big vision, Viaduct includes an on-site residency program, classes, lectures, visiting artists and speakers. One of the rooms at Viaduct is already brimming with various forms of printing equipment. Another room is dominated by a 5000 pound paper press that can produce massive sheets of the stuff.
Shorb’s own studio is at the space. He shields his work from the light in a number of massive flat portfolios, laid out on a couple of big studio tables. Shorb’s colored-paper works read like abstract paintings. They’re actually single sheets of paper made from multicolored batches of cellulose paper pulp which are combined in swirling water and then dried on screens. The result is utterly painterly, but there’s nothing on the surface of the paper. The actual paper fiber is emerald and saffron and mint and mauve, and moving. Shorb’s a productive guy with big plans, but one glimpse of his exquisite paper paintings remind viewers that he’s an artist first.
Memphis is a city of haves and have-nots. The sons of city fathers and the children of enslaved people in a place where one king was crowned and another was killed. It’s a city of rich mystery and contradictions, informed by the dark twistings of the Mississippi, and enlivened by an idiosyncratic art scene that harmonizes the city’s extremes. It’s a scene that meets in underground rooms and creates fabulous displays in spaces named after frosted desserts. It’s a collection of creative characters, pursuing unique visions in a one-of-a-kind place. And its a welcoming community that’s building resources to grow and sustain the beautiful things, and the people who make them.
Tops Gallery will open an exhibition by painter, sculptor, culinary artist Sean Nash in June
Sheet Cake opened their Summer Break group show at the end of May. It runs through July 26
John Shorb is hoping to launch the first phase of his Viaduct program/space this fall
This Regional Update made possible by a Rabkin Travel Grant