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The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art Dixon Gallery and Gardens
Memphis, TN

Dixon Gallery and Gardens
4339 Park Avenue
Memphis, Tennessee 38117
Business Office: 901-761-5250

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Like Family
Through Jan 15, 2023
Interactive Gallery:

Organized by: Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Doris Lee (1904 – 1983) was one of the most recognized artists in the country during the 1930s and 40s. She was a painter, illustrator, and a commercial artist. She reinvented her styles through time, working with different media, making figurative and abstract paintings, prints, illustrating books, and creating pottery and fabric designs.

The immersive experience in this exhibition takes you inside Doris Lee’s painting, The Family Reunion, created in 1942 and displayed in the exhibition Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee.

Sit at the table with your friends, family, or other visitors. Start a conversation, meet new people, and enjoy the togetherness.

Rooted: An Expression of Women and Girls Refining Cultural Harmony
Through Jan 15, 2023
Interactive Gallery

Presented by: Girl 24

The photography experience Rooted was conceived by GIRL 24, a business mentoring initiative for girls and women, that teaches the importance of being good businesswomen, committing to a lifestyle of positive influence as Gifted, Ingenious, and Refined Leaders. The initiative seeks to initiate girls’ aspirations of entrepreneurship and business interest by preparing them for the mastery of their own Good brand.

The Rooted exhibition embraces the art of storytelling through the eyes of girls and women born from many different roots but sharing the same inner-warrior and courage to create multi-cultural harmony. For centuries, hair has been a sign of individual uniqueness and expression that impacts the world and removes racial barriers. In Spring 2022, Rooted unveiled a live runway-style art walk at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens that featured the work of 20 girls of different ages, their creative processes and their final “Mane of Art”, personally modeled during the event.

The photographs you see here are a glimpse of the experiences that Rooted offered to the participants and included workshops on empathy, self-esteem, and creativity.

To learn more about Rooted and girl24 visit www.erikacainco.com/girl-24

Emily Ozier: Marisol’s Dress
Through Jan 8, 2023
Mallory and Wurtzburger Galleries

Organized by: Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Meet the Artist Reception November 17, 5:30 – 7:30pm

Through a series of paintings based on her mother’s experience as a refugee fleeing Cuba in the 1950s, Emily Ozier’s triumphant Marisol’s Dress explores the resilience and ingenuity found within each of us. Ozier, also known as EMYO, is an artist based in Germantown, Tennessee. Her work is deeply influenced by her Cuban heritage, by her time spent studying painting in Italy, and by the works of modern artists such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and John Singer Sargent. Her sun-drenched canvases are full of curiosity, compassion, authenticity, and heart, and have gained her a coterie of admirers and collectors across the United States.

Ozier’s Mallory/Wurtzburger show this fall is Marisol’s Dress, a selection of paintings that illustrated her children’s book of the same name, which will be released in November. Her bright, expressionistic paintings chronicle the story of a young girl named Marisol as she leaves vibrant Havana in the 1950s for a new life in the unfamiliar United States, with only one doll and her favorite white dress. Emphasizing the power of creativity and courage in the face of challenging circumstances, Marisol’s Dress is both timely and timeless and charmingly accessible. While the paintings in Marisol’s Dress serve to illustrate a children’s book, the narrative the paintings and the story share will resonate with viewers of all ages.

Marisol’s Dress will be available for purchase at Park & Cherry.

Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee
Through Jan 15, 2023

Presented by: Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions

Organized by: Westmoreland Museum of American Art

Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee presents an important opportunity for rediscovering one of the most popular figurative artists in American art history. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Doris Lee (1905-1983) painted some of the most recognizable images in American art.

Doris Lee was born and raised in Aledo, Illinois. After spending the late 1920s traveling throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and South America, in 1931, she and her husband settled in Woodstock, New York, by that point one of America’s most vibrant art colonies. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she achieved a great deal of artistic success, exhibiting her work throughout the country and seeing her paintings acquired by significant public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was esteemed in equally high terms for her commercial work, producing fabric and ceramic designs, prints, and award-winning illustrations for books and publications including Life and Fortune magazines. Lee also was the only woman to receive a commission for a major public mural project through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project.

Lee’s most beloved works align with American Scene painting, which is characterized by a focus on scenes of the everyday life and locales of ordinary working-class America. Even within this movement, Lee’s personal combination of folk art and emerging modernism (both styles prevalent in Woodstock) made her stand out in her own time. However, in an era of gender inequality, her work was frequently dismissed by critics because of its strong decorative style and accessible narratives, even though it remained popular with audiences and museum curators. Navigating the post-World War II artistic climate, Lee responded to the rise of Abstract Expressionism with skill, agility, and her own sense of grace, developing a signature visual style. Unlike her contemporaries who turned toward doubt and the tragic for authenticity, Lee turned toward joy to set her “out-of-joint” world aright by creating work that embraces play, wonder, and empathy.

Despite the widespread acclaim she received in her lifetime, Lee is less well-known today. Her commitment to figuration and narrative – a constant throughout her oeuvre – was overshadowed by the major abstract movements of the mid-twentieth century. By taking a modernist approach, Lee’s body of work merges the reduction of abstraction with the appeal of the everyday and offers a coherent visual identity that successfully bridged various artistic “camps” of twentieth-century American art, truly depicting scenes of the simple pleasures of everyday life.

Simple Pleasures gives overdue recognition of Lee’s significant contributions to American art and brings together paintings, drawings, prints, and ephemera spanning her impressive forty-year career from public and private collections across the country. In exploring her life and work, the exhibition pays respect to her ability to conjure joy in life’s simple pleasures and erases the idea that her art was too unserious to take seriously.

Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee is organized and toured by The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA. Co-Curated by Barbara L. Jones and Melissa Wolfe.

Sponsored by:
Opus East Memphis | First Horizon Foundation

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