Floyd Newsum: House of Grace

Floyd Newsum was fond of saying: “You can delay my success, but you cannot determine it,” a variation of the well-known maxim, “success delayed is not success denied.” Newsum’s career exemplified this idea, having only achieved widespread recognition for his art relatively late in his life. The artist was well known in the art scene in Houston where he had lived and worked as a professor of art at the University of Houston-Downtown for 48 years. Newsum was also one of the founders of Project Row Houses, a work of social art created from a group of shotgun cottages located in Houston’s historically Black Third Ward that includes curated “art houses” serving as artists’ studios and exhibition spaces, residences for young single mothers, spaces for entrepreneurial businesses, and venues for events. Despite his fame in Houston, the artist viewed Floyd Newsum: House of Grace—the first major exhibition of his art in Memphis—as a homecoming. The show was an opportunity for him to demonstrate his talent and to give back to the communities where he was born, raised, and educated, first at Hamilton Elementary and Hamilton Junior and Senior High Schools, and at the Memphis Academy of Arts (later Memphis College of Art) where he was a member of the class of 1973.

Floyd Newsum: House of Grace features large paintings on paper and maquettes for public sculptures that represent the artist’s interest in social practice. The works in this exhibition were made between 2002 and 2024, a period of intense artistic flowering for Newsum marked by a shift in his style towards greater abstraction. His densely layered images include paintings in oil and acrylic with collaged photo transparencies and embedded three-dimensional objects including plastic forks, doll-house-sized wooden ladders, and the remnants of artistic materials such as partially used pastels or their paper labels.

Newsum was relentlessly positive as a person and as an artist. Visually, he articulated his optimistic and upbeat attitude through fabulous pulsating color combinations and a deeply personal, whimsical, and recurring vocabulary of images that produced expressive meditations on African American history, ancestors, spirituality, and, above all, freedom, faith, joy, and hope. His unexpected and untimely death on August 14, 2024, deepens the poignancy of this exhibition, and makes it all the more necessary for the Dixon Gallery and Gardens to celebrate Newsum’s art and life in his hometown.

An accompanying catalogue featuring an essay by Dixon Assistant Curator Ellen Daugherty will be available for purchase at Park and Cherry. Dixon members get 10% off!