City Of Memphis Unveils I AM A MAN Plaza: A Tribute To MLK & The 1968 Sanitation Workers' Strike

Sculpture, text and landscape come together to form an important new American Civil Rights memorial. The I AM A MAN Plaza, designed by Cliff Garten, is a large-scale experiential public sculpture commissioned to pay tribute to the members of the pivotal 1968 Sanitation Workersโ€™ Strike and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Garten and his studio led a design team with Memphis-based landscape architect John Jackson of JPA, Inc. for the 54,000-square-foot memorial plaza. As part of Gartenโ€™s plan, spoken word artist Steven Fox held an open dialogue with the greater Memphis community, who through a series of public workshops organized by the UrbanArt Commission, selected pertinent historical text and created an original contemporary text which is etched into the marble gates to the plazaโ€™s entry.  The texts combine as a meditation on Americaโ€™s struggle and progress with racism and class inequity since the sanitation workers and Dr. Martin Luther King took their historic stand in Memphis. Present at the ribbon cutting were Reverend James Lawson, Cliff Garten, Congressman Steven Cohen, Bill Lucy, Elmore Nickleberry and many of the original sanitation workers who went on strike 50 years ago. Elmore Nickleberry has been a sanitation worker in the city of Memphis for 63 consecutive years. photographs by Lisa Buser

Read Our Interview Of Lauren Halsey On The Occasion Of Her Funkadelic Installation At MOCA Los Angeles →

Lauren Halseyโ€™s dream-world is cosmic, funky, carpeted, and technicolored; an atemporal, fantastical, and hyperreal vision of black liberation which she conjures via site-specific installations that celebrate her childhood home. Click here to read more.

Autre Rewind: Read Our Interview Of The Haas Brothers On The Occasion Of Their Collaboration With Barneys New York

In partnership with creative director Matthew Mazzucca and Barneysโ€™ team, the Haas Brothers created an imaginative universe that offers an interpretation of the Earth through the ages, with some of the Haasโ€™ recurring characters coexisting across eras ranging from the planetโ€™s beginning to the far distant future. Through animation and sculpture, four of these epochs will be depicted in Barneysโ€™ Madison Avenue window displays, illustrating four phases of time: Primordial, Utopia, Millennium, and a vision of the future thatโ€™s been titled Mushroom Singularity. Each will see appearances by Haas characters like Rainbow Bagginsโ€”a rainbow-striped zebraโ€”Rhinona Wyder, and more. The Madison Avenue windows, as well as interpretations at flagship locations across the country. Click here to read our 2015 interview of the Haas Brothers.

A Glimpse Inside The William Eggleston Artistic Trust In Memphis, Tennessee

The Eggleston Trust is the holiest of places when it comes to the life's work of legendary photographer William Eggleston. It is the nerve center where his son, Winston Eggleston, manages his father's negatives, commission requests, old cameras, ephemera and more. Before our interview of Eggleston at his home down the road, your first stop is this dim, slightly cramped office where you'll find everything from a camera stolen from a cafe table in Paris and found years later in a pawn shop in Tokyo, to a safe full of the thousands of original negatives containing William Eggleston's most famous images. Click here to purchase our Summer issue with an exclusive interview of William Eggleston and photographs from our visit. photographs by Oliver Kupper and Bil Brown