When Andy Warhol reproduced a grainy photograph of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in a series of seven colored canvases in 1963, it was considered radical. But it opened the door for an examination of the relationship between high art and consumer culture, and called into question what was really important about paintings: the process of their creation or the end result. Warhol’s hybrids of the sacred and the profane might be the furthest thing from your mind when you see two recent paintings by Nashville-based artist Rocky Horton that are currently on view at David Lusk Gallery, but the artist’s focus on process continues the conversation that Warhol started, even as he reverses it.

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I won’t pretend to be able to parse every line and image of the paintings in Tyler Hildebrand’s current exhibition, “The Retirement Party,” but I will testify to their effectiveness as a delivery system for a full complement of paranoia, dread and existential crisis. The work will be on display at David Lusk Gallery in Memphis through July 29 and at David Lusk Gallery Nashville Aug. 1-26.

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One viewer might associate meticulousness in painting with the established traditions of high art, with the well- hewn craft of a dedicated artist. Think of the luxurious history of art acquisitions: Precious objects are slowly made, proudly bought, and carefully preserved.  

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SAN ANTONIO, TX.- The inspiration behind To See Is to Have: Navigating Today’s Art Ecosystem is to make private art public, and to share with every member of our community selections from the diverse collections of members of the McNay Contemporary Collectors Forum (MCCF). The artworks on view open doors to new worlds of discovery, and have been selected from the personal collections of the members of MCCF, who dedicate themselves to learning about, engaging with, and collecting contemporary art. By presenting a diverse group of objects not typically on public view, this exhibition reinforces the McNay’s commitment to providing life-changing experiences through engagement with the visual arts for all visitors. MCCF sponsors many programs, including trips to national and international destinations. In total, members of MCCF have traveled to more than 40 cities together. In each location, they visit artists, curators, art dealers, and fellow collectors in the spaces where those individuals live and interact with art, and they learn about the unique characteristics of various art communities.

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Greely Myatt is an experienced fine artist and sculptor and has been teaching art since 1980. He is currently the head of the art department at Memphis University. “Built from everyday household items, Greely Myatt’s sculptures hint at formal motifs by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Artschwager, and Jasper Johns. Working with comic-strip-style thought bubbles, Myatt reinterprets modes of communication in a manner that often references his Southern upbringing. He expresses an occasionally provocative narrative through the materiality of his structures, and he ultimately aims to elicit empathy within the viewer to forge a sense of community around a shared experience. Voids and negative space feature prominently in Myatt’s work. The Blind Leading the Blind, for example, is what the artist calls “air art,” here comprising two fans facing each other such that the air—not the space—between them becomes a part of the work. As such, Myatt uses air to represent the airing, or communication, of ideas.”

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There’s a good deal of world’s-end whimpering in the air these days. May I suggest that we begin with a bang — even if it’s merely to journey into the great outdoors? “Bang!” went my heart when I opened the photographer Jack Spencer’s powerful THIS LAND: An American Portrait (University of Texas Press, $45). There isn’t a garden in it — only the vestige of one, vines creeping up the side of a boarded-up cottage in Xenia, Ill., a sign of irrepressible life.

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The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art is pleased to announce American Genre: Contemporary Painting curated by artist, writer, and curator Michelle Grabner. Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Two exhibitions on display at local commercial galleries indicate that the concept of abstract art is vibrant and alluring in Memphis. “Bluff Poem,” a show by Don Estes at David Lusk Gallery, closing May 19, and “Ephemera,” a large group of works by Lisa Weiss at L Ross Gallery, through May 27, share a monochromatic stone-and-earth colored palette while differing in intent and execution. As the titles of their exhibitions imply, Estes’ mixed media on panel paintings partake of the solidity and temporal power of the river bluffs that were their inspiration, while Weiss’ acrylic and mixed media works, on panel or paper, embody the mutability of thought and materiality, the impermanence of the shapes of things. We could say that Estes deals with the emphatically seen, while Weiss plays with the dramatically unseen.

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Great art of any kind—written, photographed, painted, sung—is great not least because it is at once temporal and transcendent. When something particular (a page, an image, a song) suggests something universal, then we know that we are in the presence not of the ephemeral or of the manufactured but of true art—the work of a master’s hands that not only engages us in the moment (though it does that) but also alters everything else we see, for the honest artist does not merely entertain. He informs and ultimately transforms. Such is the art of Mississippi native Jack Spencer.

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In these images from his new book, This Land: An American Portrait, Jack Spencer has given us a great gift. Like Steinbeck or Kerouac—or Huck Finn, which is perhaps the closer analogy—Spencer decided to “light out for the territory” in 2003 to create a series of images of an America in search of its footing in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11 (the bloodiest day on American soil since Antietam) and on the cusp of the Iraq War.

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