(and other outdoor art)
Can a child be taller than a six-story brick building and yet remain inconspicuous?
That, arguably, is the status of the towering 19th-century waif with the enormous brown eyes who has materialized, like a lost time traveler from a land of giants, on the west side of a former cotton warehouse at 62 E.H. Crump Boulevard.
Apparently calm even while being pecked by the rusty fire escape that zigzags down the side of what officially is known as the United Warehouse & Terminal Building, this Amazing Colossal Girl is a monumental photographic reproduction of French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s 43inch-high 1886 oil painting “Au pied de la falaise (At the Foot of the Cliff),” which resides in the permanent collection of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
In gigantic facsimile, the child faces the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, the Mississippi River span that is less than two miles from her 108-year-old masonry perch. This makes her something of a guardian of “the gateway to the city,” in the words of the building’s co-owner, Muffy Turley.
Yet although traffic along Crump is constant, this neoclassical refugee child is probably unknown to most Memphians, who generally have little reason to visit this district of hopeful empty warehouses south of Downtown.
That ought to change because this girl is worth meeting. She is “the largest mural I ever did, after 40 ‘monumentals’ everywhere in the world,” artist Julien de Casabianca told The Commercial Appeal, in an email interview from his home in Paris. “And honestly, it’s one of my favorites.”
However, “I feel always guilty when I leave from a wall where I pasted a child,” de Casabianca said in a recent interview with the website Brooklyn Street Art. “Because even though they are giants, I feel they are so fragile in this violent world and in this contemporary world.”
In fact, the Bouguereau child is one of close to two dozen “characters” that de Casabianca, 48, and a team of local collaborators have plucked from Brooks paintings and placed in 21 locations around the city, creating a sort of artistic scavenger hunt that ranges from Front Street to East Memphis, from Frayser to South Lauderdale, from Summer Avenue to Soulsville and beyond.
The effort represents the latest iteration of what the artist calls his “Outings Project,” a union of high art and street art in which figures from a museum’s collection are reproduced and pasted all over a city, as if they had wandered from their gallery homes on some sort of outing or field trip.
Other cities among the almost 50 that have hosted de Casabianca “Outings” in the project’s 14 years to date include Chicago, Tokyo, Moscow, Mumbai, Hanoi and Jacksonville, Florida.
As reproduced in their new environments, most of the “characters” are human-sized, no matter how small the original painting; in this way, they become neighborhood participants or witnesses.
A man pulled from a 1964 Carroll Cloar painting rests within a doorway just off South Lauderdale, beneath a defunct air-conditioning unit.
Pasted to the east wall of Café Ole, the girl from Winslow Homer’s 1879 “Reading by the Brook” sits with her back to the sidewalk, engrossed in a book and oblivious to the drinkers and diners and shoppers of her new CooperYoung neighborhood.
Another Cloar figure, an AfricanAmerican woman in glasses and a modest church dress, painted in 1971, is on a boarded-up window at 945 E. McLemore, in view of the Stax Academy Charter School.
“That worked perfectly, because it kinds of give an idea of an elder or a grandma, kind of keeping an eye on the neighborhood,” said Tonya Dyson, program manager at Memphis Slim Collaboratory, the arts space located in the former home of blues artist Memphis Slim.
Dyson — who chose the Cloar woman to be one of de Casabianca’s “characters” — was one of 15 volunteer community representatives recruited to collaborate with the artist on the choice of paintings and locations for Memphis. Typical of de Casabianca’s “Outings” projects, such input which makes this more of a true community effort than its predecessors in the “Brooks Outside” series.
“Brooks Outside” was conceived by Brooks director Emily Ballew Neff as a way to take museum-affiliated art outside the wall of the Brooks and into the community. The concept was launched with “RedBall,” a giant vinyl ball that essentially bounced from place to place around the city in 2016; another “Outside” eye-popper was “Intrude,” which consisted of huge illuminated rabbits that were inflated in Overton Park in 2017.
Kathy Dumlao, Brooks director of education and interpretation and local curator for “Outings,” said de Casabianca first came to Memphis in the first week of June, to meet with the 15 volunteers. The group toured museum’s galleries to identify “characters” who could be turned into murals, and also to suggest likely locations.
Meanwhile, Brooks representatives and others, including local film location scout Nicki Newburger, drove around town to find suitable spaces and to negotiate clearances from property owners.
Local artist Chip Pankey photographed the Brooks pieces that de Casabianca decided to use, and created what Dumlao called “super-super high-res” images. The human-sized or “life-sized” characters were printed on rolls of paper at the Memphis College of Art, but the three “monumentals” — including the Bouguereau girl; a quartet of young girls painted by Carroll Cloar; and the Medusa-slaying Greek hero, Perseus, painted by Luca Giordano in 1680 — were printed in Paris and brought back to Memphis by the artist on Sept. 20.
Riding in a big rented bus, de Casabianca, the community volunteers and others (joined at a few locations by massive cranes from Montgomery Martin Contractors) spent that weekend affixing the “characters” into place with the use of old-fashioned wheatpaste (you know, the stuff Moe slaps into Curly’s face when the Three Stooges are hanging wallpaper). There, the figures will remain, but perhaps not for long, as sun, rain and other factors scrub them from the walls and fade them from memory.
Some already show wear and tear. George Luks’ crone-like 1920 “The Fortune Teller,” cackling from the wall of a vacant lot near Crosstown Concourse, appears to have been partially scratched away by giant fingernails, her parrot companion reduced to a spray of leftover green feathers.
De Casabianca said he didn’t do much research before coming to Memphis. “Because I’m working with people from the place where I paste, with the community, they know more than all what I can learn in research,” he said, adding that his “characters” inhabit “an emotional landscape.”
Of course, some of these “characters” occupy spaces already decorated with vivid street art and imaginative graffiti. Borrowed from yet another Cloar painting, the pasted Beale Street trumpet player on the wall of the Gloco Iron Works is only the latest addition to a Lamar Avenue conga line of music great that from includes street-art portraits of “Black Moses” Isaac Hayes and Royal Studios mastermind Willie Mitchell.
De Casabianca revels in the association. “Classical art is not more ‘high art’ ... than street art,” he said. “It’s art from another period. That’s all.
“We are not disconnected from the past,” he said. “I’m included in the graffiti vocabulary — what I do, it’s authentic graffiti.”
Some people were sympathetic to the project’s mission. “They’re bringing the Brooks Museum out into the public,” said Gregory Lee Odom, 64, owner of Gloco Iron Works, who agreed to let a Cloar musician be pasted onto his business’s outer wall.
Others liked what they saw, but remained somewhat puzzled by the purpose.
“I didn’t really understand it,” said Sylvester Davis, 49, of Pickle Iron at 3177 Summer, where a massive reproduction of what Davis calls “some guy from Rome” now occupies a brick wall, his sword poised to decapitate the snaky head of an absent Medusa.
“But I admired the artist, the way he was putting it up,” Davis said, “like he was tinting a window or something.”