Eggleston Foundation plans 1st exhibit. Will a museum follow?
In 2020, Memphis photographer William Eggleston’s vital place in the international art world is unquestionable. How to find a permanent place for Eggleston in Memphis’ civic and cultural firmament is where a question remains.
The Eggleston Foundation hopes to answer that.
The foundation — launched by Eggleston and his family — will present its first exhibit later this month at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens. Despite bearing his name, the Eggleston Foundation will be less about the man than the city he calls home.
“It’s unusual for a living artist to set up a foundation, and even more unusual that the focus is as much on showing other art as it on directly preserving his own work and legacy,” said Eggleston Foundation director Virginia Rutledge. “We hope the Eggleston Foundation will help anchor an even more robust contemporary art scene for Memphis. That is a legacy that truly lives.”
Rutledge is an art historian, intellectual property attorney and former curator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “We think the Eggleston Foundation can help tell a larger international audience a more complete story of Memphis,” said Rutledge, “and how it nurtures creativity — which includes letting people do their own thing. William Eggleston is a great example of that.”
‘An Eggleston identity’
In terms of sheer impact and international acclaim, William Eggleston is arguably the second-most important artist out of Memphis, behind only Elvis Presley. Like Presley, Eggleston shook up the art world in the 1970s with his revolutionary color photos, and his reputation and influence have grown exponentially in the decades since.
Born in 1939 in Memphis, Eggleston was the scion of a fading Faulknerian cotton clan from Sumner, Mississippi. His childhood was scarred by severe asthma, a condition that later miraculously lifted. The reprieve would mark his personality permanently; he became an unapologetic libertine with the courtly demeanor of a Southern gentleman. Eggleston had little interest in photography until a college classmate at Vanderbilt in the early ‘60s pushed him to purchase a camera; instantly, he was hooked.
A few years later came the epochal switch to color film and his eventual discovery of the dye-transfer printing process, both previously associated only with commercial photography and advertising. These were bold aesthetic choices that in Eggleston’s hands would ultimately reshape the very notion of what constituted fine art. Developing his style over a decade, Eggleston lived among Memphis’ artistic demimonde, taking mysterious, breathtakingly vivid photos of the everyday, the commonplace: rusted cars, empty lots, neon signs.
By the mid-’70s, the world had taken notice of his remarkable eye. In 1976, Eggleston’s first great champion, curator John Szarkowski, introduced his work with a show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, describing his photos as “perfect.”
“Perfectly banal ... perfectly boring, certainly,” came the riposte from critics of the day. Eggleston would have the final word, however.
Nearly 45 years later, his influence on the visual grammar of the times is not only profound, but inescapable. From advertising to fashion, contemporary photography to Hollywood films, Eggleston’s impact is felt equally in the worlds of high art and pop culture. His celebrity admirers are legion: from film directors like David Lynch and Sofia Coppola to musicians like David Byrne and the members of U2.
Since the early ‘90s, Eggleston — who still lives in Midtown — has seen his work managed by the Eggleston Trust, founded by his three children, William Jr., Winston and Andra, and sister, Stephanie Harrover.
The efforts of the trust to organize and manage Eggleston’s work have helped cement his reputation, with exhibits and retrospectives in the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums, including the Tate in London and the Whitney, the Met and MOMA in New York. The last major auction of Eggleston’s photos at Christie’s — a sale of 36 photos in 2012 — netted $5.9 million, far surpassing the $2.7 million preauction estimate, with a record-breaking $578,000 paid for a print of Eggleston’s classic image “The Tricycle.”
In Memphis, city patrons have been trying to find a way to give Eggleston’s international reputation and artistic legacy a permanent presence in the Bluff City.
In 2011, a local group announced a $15 million private project to build an Eggleston-centric art museum in Memphis. The effort, funded by a group of anonymous Memphis philanthropists, was headed by lawyer Mark Crosby, who helped launch the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.
The planned museum project called for a 15,000-square-foot facility that would house the offices of the Eggleston photo archive and a collection of public galleries featuring Eggleston’s work and that of other contemporary artists. Various Midtown sites — including Overton Park, Overton Square and the Crosstown neighborhood — were considered. Despite having strong financial backing and the political support of then Mayor A C Wharton, over the years the project lost internal momentum, with a variety of factors ultimately causing the idea to be scrapped — at least in that particular form.
However, Rutledge said the former museum initiative did help push the family toward establishing the Eggleston Foundation. “Without the interest and effort that went into that project, this one would not be happening,” she said. “It started an important conversation and cemented the realization that it would be good for Memphis to have a more visible public ‘Eggleston presence’ here.”
Is an Eggleston museum in the works?
To help establish that “Eggleston identity” in Memphis, the artist’s family formed the Eggleston Foundation as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit late last year (an advisory board composed of prominent Memphians and international art world figures is still being finalized).
Rutledge, who was soon brought on as director, sees the foundation’s mission as threefold.
The first order of business for the nonprofit is to preserve and study Eggleston’s work. “There is an archive that requires care. Also, we are organized to be able to help historians, scholars and other arts organizations with research and even loans of artwork,” Rutledge said. “We want to make sure that Eggleston’s work is well represented in all its great and sometimes unexpected variety, so that more people can continue to discover it and find what may be relevant to them.”
Most significantly for Memphians, the Eggleston Foundation will be focused on bringing art, artists, exhibits and events to various local institutions and museums. The foundation’s programming kicks off later this month with a show at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.
“We have approached a lot of people already just to introduce ourselves and let them know we’re interested in partnering,” Rutledge said. “This is how the exhibition at the Dixon came into being, because (Dixon director) Kevin Sharp saw a possible opening in his schedule of programming and offered to work with us. We look forward to bringing more contemporary art programming to Memphis that may be a little different. Eggleston’s reputation naturally helps us do that.”
The show — set for the Dixon’s Residence Gallery — is reflective of the foundation’s fluid and inventive programming approach.
The show will use one of the Dixon’s permanent pieces, a 1910 painting by American impressionist artist William Merritt Chase — depicting a domestic scene of a woman and a bouquet of flowers — as a jumping-off point. The show will then pull in similarly themed (flowers, women) photos by Eggleston. “We thought it would be interesting to mix it up a little bit by bringing in Bill Eggleston’s images of flowers and women,” Rutledge said.
The exhibit will be tied together by the cutting-edge digital work of Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Steinkamp. “Just as Eggleston is one of the pioneers of color photography, a couple of generations later, Jennifer is a pioneer in computer animation. Landscape, still life and floral motifs figure prominently in the work of both artists,” Rutledge said. “So we’ve brought their work into visual conversation, two artists looking at similar subjects but with totally different aesthetics.”
The show, titled “William Eggleston and Jennifer Steinkamp: At Home at the Dixon,” will open Jan. 26 and run through March 22. Rutledge confirmed the foundation has additional 2020 programming plans that will be announced in the coming months.
Beyond that, Rutledge suggested that the foundation is considering a wide range of bigger, long-term goals. It’s logical to assume that one possible project will be to establish a permanent home devoted to Eggleston’s work and legacy.
“People have continued to ask if there is going to be a museum,” Rutledge said. “That is something that we are looking at very seriously, based on all the input we’re getting not just from Memphis, but all over the world.”
Rutledge added that the Eggleston Foundation is “interested in exploring some innovative ideas about nonprofit operations.”
“My goal as director includes considerations of sustainability — our mission is in part to model and help provide what a creative community needs to thrive,” she said. “We are planning something modest in terms of physical footprint but that we believe can have an impact locally, and nationally and internationally, as well.”