In the summer of 2019, my friend and fellow Memphis artist, Chuck Johnson, had a gallery talk at LRoss Gallery. It was a packed house for an amazing show. Chuck started the talk with his childhood and from time to time would refer to this well-worn spiral notebook and I turned to my friend Tad and said: “we are never getting out of here.”
But! I was totally wrong. Chuck had it down. During that one-hour talk the artist covered nearly his entire life’s work: from participating in the famous Sanitation Workers March with Dr. King in the late 1960s as a teenager to his travels around the globe and ending with maturing of his artistic practice since moving back to Memphis following the attack on the Pentagon. When the talk was done, I looked around the room hoping to see someone with a video or audio recorder and thought: “aw man, no one recorded that. What a terrible loss!” As a result Chuck was the first to be interviewed.
This archive is informed by my summer in 2013 spent with amazing faculty at the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies where I learned the importance of primary source historical documents as well as an incredible love for, and understanding of, the value of approachable conversations between two deeply engaged individuals in podcasts like Longform, On Being, Making Gay History, and the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.
This collection of ongoing interviews with artists and others involved in the visual arts culture of Memphis is a series of (mostly) unedited conversations conducted at the Memphis Listening Lab at the Crosstown Concourse.
In 2003 I, along with my then-partner Julie Meiman, started an alternative exhibition space called Material. The name came from the term Maria Montessori used to describe the objects in the classroom that were used to help facilitate visual and tactile learning for children.
We liked that idea of calling the space Material. It was a small space in our home where artists could have their first show. There we experienced community in a way that is different from the sense we get when we teach or show our own work. The space became an important outward-facing component to my life in the arts. Memphis Material is an extension of that need for community.
As a middle-aged artist who has been active in the city’s vibrant community for decades, I want to help preserve the history of this place I call home. Selfishly, I also love hearing people’s stories.
A native of Tennessee, Hamlett Dobbins spent most of his life in Memphis. He received his BFA from the University of Memphis and his MFA from the University of Iowa. Dobbins has taught at University of Mississippi, Memphis College of Art, University of Iowa, University of Memphis, and at Rhodes College. He ran an alternative exhibition space called Material and worked as a curator at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts as well as Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. In 2000 he received fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. He has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and ArtsMemphis. He has shown his work throughout the region and nationally.
In 2013 he was awarded the Rome Prize and spent eleven months as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He now teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, in Tennessee where he lives with his family and four cats.
