June 24 – September 11, 2022
Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis
While digital art has existed since the 1960s, it has experienced increasingly mainstream interest in recent years. Due in part to our shift toward virtual environments during the Covid-19 pandemic, this rise in interest from artists to collectors has also been fueled by the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Featuring works by Kenneth Wayne Alexander II, Karl Erickson, Coe Lapossy, Sarai Payne, and Anthony Sims, Another Dimension provides a glimpse into the emerging digital art scene in Memphis. This exhibition explores the ways in which digital mediums open up a new range of possibilities for artists, from creating virtual environments to reaching new, global audiences, and how artists can create alternative physical and psychological spaces in the digital realm.
Over the past twenty years, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has showcased digital art. In 2002, the museum commissioned video art pioneer Nam June Paik to create his towering work Vide-O-Belisk. Paik’s early adoption of analog video and the use of television sets as art objects in the early 1960s prefigured the utilization of digital media and tools by artists two decades later and even the way we continue to engage with digital technologies today. In 2015, the Brooks hosted the dynamic exhibition The Art of the Video Game organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which traversed the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium. Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis builds on this legacy.
Exhibition Programs
Artists’ Talk: Art in the Digital Age
What does it mean to be an artist in our hyper-digitized world? Join exhibition artists Karl Erickson, Coe Lapossy, and Sarai Payne as they discuss how and why they engage with the digital.
Free and Open to the Public
NFTs: Beyond Boom or Bust
Join exhibition artists Kenneth Wayne Alexander II and Anthony Sims, and Tam Gryn, Fine Arts Director at the digital asset platform Rally.io, as they discuss their journeys into the world of digital art and NFTs.
Free with museum admission
Artists' Talk: Art in the Digital Age
What does it mean to be an artist in our hyper-digitized world? Join exhibition artists Karl Erickson, Coe Lapossy, and Sarai Payne as they discuss how and why they engage with the digital. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition 'Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis.'
Free and Open to the Public
NFTs: Beyond Boom or Bust
From frenzied enthusiasm to vocal disdain, the response to the NFT (non-fungible token) boom in the art world and beyond has been loud and polarizing. Join exhibition artists Kenneth Wayne Alexander II and Anthony Sims, and Tam Gryn, curator and co-author of the newly published book How to Create and Sell NFTs - A Guide for All Artists, as they discuss their journeys into the world of digital art and NFTs. Once the dust settles, what is the potential of blockchain technology for artists and museums?
Free with Museum Admission
Artist
Curators
Artist
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Anthony Sims
Anthony Sims' bold, chaotic expressions resurrect Mississippi's delta blues, refined by street culture and American Hip-Hop. Born in Southaven, MS, and now based in Dallas, TX, Sims' work is known for having vivid background imagery, monstrous characters, warm-toned patches, and lines of poetry. By the age of 21, Anthony had two of his paintings accepted into the Meridian Museum of Art's permanent collection. Anthony has exhibited in Memphis, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Austin, and London with his works selling for five figures in both primary and secondary markets. In 2021, Anthony gained media headlines through the creation of animated NFTs with the most well-known animation and painting, Not Sure About Myself, I Am Certain, which sold for $99k in a primary sale. Sims makes raw, unfiltered figurative paintings that capture life from the eyes of bi-racial, Southern Americans who seek greater purpose and desire to overcome adversity regardless of their circumstances.
Sarai Payne
Sarai is a multidisciplinary artist from Memphis, TN. She’s an artist who specializes in digital collages, mix media, illustrations, and graphic design. She received her BFA from The University of Memphis. She enjoys using her skills to showcase her thoughts, emotions, fantasies, in various mediums. She likes to create works that often challenge the way the world views marginalized people in surrealist, dreamy ways that may make you get lost in the imagery. Sarai likes to use bold colors, butterflies, flowers because it’s her way of telling herself and others to keep blooming and soaring high despite the odds. She often likes to add intentional imperfections in her art to show that there will be mess ups along your journey, but to still keep going.
Sarai loves to use her art to highlight African Americans in retro, whimsical works that can highlights us in happier, positive moments instead of the trauma we often see African Americans go through. She prefers to create art that showcases the beauty of African Americans, the power of community, love in various forms, and things she mentally deals with but has yet to loudly acknowledge.
Karl Erickson
Karl Erickson lives in Memphis, Tennessee. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University. He was raised in the Detroit-area of Michigan. He makes videos and audio/visual-performances about language, transformative experiences, self-betterment and environmentalism. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues. He is particularly interested in how communication and kinship can be made across different entities, plants to humans, machines to animals.
Recent exhibitions include Are You Connect? at the Electronic Arts Gallery of Colorado State University, Time For Something Else with Laurie Nye at Day & Night Projects, Atlanta, We Could Be Transcendent Apes at Field Projects Gallery in New York City, 2020 Megalith' at The Wrong Biennial, and Screen2019: Climates at UMASS, Amherst, MA. Recent video screenings and performances were included in the Memphis Concrète Experimental Music Festival 2021, The Performing Media Festival at Indiana University South Bend, Adjusting the Lens: Experimental Film and Video Festival, at Unrequited Leisure, Nashville, TN, Indie Memphis Film Festival 2019 and 2020, and That One Film Festival in Muncie, IN. He has been an artist in residence at The Arctic Circle, Plyspace and Signal Culture.
Coe Lapossy
Coe Lapossy (b. 1980, Medina, OH) earned their M.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2013. In 2006, they earned their B.F.A. in Studio Art, Painting from Kent State University. Prior to joining the faculty at The University of Memphis, Coe served as a Lecturer at University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017-19. In addition they designed an Advanced Studio Seminar: Who Am I To Feel So Free? for the Five College Consortium. Coe has also been a visiting critic at Rhodes College, Smith College and Bennington College.
Anthony Sims
Anthony Sims' bold, chaotic expressions resurrect Mississippi's delta blues, refined by street culture and American Hip-Hop. Born in Southaven, MS, and now based in Dallas, TX, Sims' work is known for having vivid background imagery, monstrous characters, warm-toned patches, and lines of poetry. By the age of 21, Anthony had two of his paintings accepted into the Meridian Museum of Art's permanent collection. Anthony has exhibited in Memphis, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Austin, and London with his works selling for five figures in both primary and secondary markets. In 2021, Anthony gained media headlines through the creation of animated NFTs with the most well-known animation and painting, Not Sure About Myself, I Am Certain, which sold for $99k in a primary sale. Sims makes raw, unfiltered figurative paintings that capture life from the eyes of bi-racial, Southern Americans who seek greater purpose and desire to overcome adversity regardless of their circumstances.
Sarai Payne
Sarai is a multidisciplinary artist from Memphis, TN. She’s an artist who specializes in digital collages, mix media, illustrations, and graphic design. She received her BFA from The University of Memphis. She enjoys using her skills to showcase her thoughts, emotions, fantasies, in various mediums. She likes to create works that often challenge the way the world views marginalized people in surrealist, dreamy ways that may make you get lost in the imagery. Sarai likes to use bold colors, butterflies, flowers because it’s her way of telling herself and others to keep blooming and soaring high despite the odds. She often likes to add intentional imperfections in her art to show that there will be mess ups along your journey, but to still keep going.
Sarai loves to use her art to highlight African Americans in retro, whimsical works that can highlights us in happier, positive moments instead of the trauma we often see African Americans go through. She prefers to create art that showcases the beauty of African Americans, the power of community, love in various forms, and things she mentally deals with but has yet to loudly acknowledge.
Karl Erickson
Karl Erickson lives in Memphis, Tennessee. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University. He was raised in the Detroit-area of Michigan. He makes videos and audio/visual-performances about language, transformative experiences, self-betterment and environmentalism. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues. He is particularly interested in how communication and kinship can be made across different entities, plants to humans, machines to animals.
Recent exhibitions include Are You Connect? at the Electronic Arts Gallery of Colorado State University, Time For Something Else with Laurie Nye at Day & Night Projects, Atlanta, We Could Be Transcendent Apes at Field Projects Gallery in New York City, 2020 Megalith' at The Wrong Biennial, and Screen2019: Climates at UMASS, Amherst, MA. Recent video screenings and performances were included in the Memphis Concrète Experimental Music Festival 2021, The Performing Media Festival at Indiana University South Bend, Adjusting the Lens: Experimental Film and Video Festival, at Unrequited Leisure, Nashville, TN, Indie Memphis Film Festival 2019 and 2020, and That One Film Festival in Muncie, IN. He has been an artist in residence at The Arctic Circle, Plyspace and Signal Culture.
Coe Lapossy
Coe Lapossy (b. 1980, Medina, OH) earned their M.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2013. In 2006, they earned their B.F.A. in Studio Art, Painting from Kent State University. Prior to joining the faculty at The University of Memphis, Coe served as a Lecturer at University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017-19. In addition they designed an Advanced Studio Seminar: Who Am I To Feel So Free? for the Five College Consortium. Coe has also been a visiting critic at Rhodes College, Smith College and Bennington College.
Dr. Patricia Daigle
Patricia Lee Daigle is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. She previously served as Director of The Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Memphis and Curatorial Assistant in Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Daigle received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Dr. Patricia Daigle
Patricia Lee Daigle is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. She previously served as Director of The Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Memphis and Curatorial Assistant in Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Daigle received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Program Recordings
Artists' Talk: Art in the Digital Age
NFTs: Beyond Boom or Bust
Resources
The 901 Black American Portraits Soundtrack
Listen to a soundtrack of Memphis music that exemplifies Black Love, Power, and Joy. The 901 Black American Portraits Soundtrack celebrates the vibrant legacy and future of Black musicians in the city of Memphis. This playlist was curated by Jared “Jay B” Boyd, a Memphis-based multimedia artist, journalist, DJ, and on-air personality.
MCA Exhibition Questionnaire
Help us generate the fullest picture possible of the MCA experience.
Submitting a questionnaire, which includes a request for an image of an artwork, is essential to be considered for part of the exhibition.
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
The American art theorist Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) posed this question as the title of a pioneering article in 1971. This essay was considered one of the first major works of Feminist art history, it has become a set text for those who study art internationally, and it is influential in many other fields.