Henry L. Jones is hunched over, unfurling a 9-foot canvas on the floor.
“I’m going to hang it like a banner,” he says, unrolling it. “I’ll show you.”
The painting will hang on the back wall of the gallery inside the Parthenon, opposite an equally massive piece by painter Omari Booker. Where Booker thrives in realism, Jones leans into more abstract art.
“And this is another one of my pieces here,” Jones says, walking across the room. “It’s dedicated to Monroe Street.”
He stops in front of a red, yellow and purple painting and remembers a summer in the 1980s. He was doing an internship at Fisk University, and stayed with Rev. Temore Willis at his house on Monroe Street.
“This white section here is like his head in profile,” Jones says. “But then I’ve connected it to create this seed, because constantly he would say, ‘You’re the seeds for the community.’”
He drags his hands across the canvas, portions of which were done with his gib technique where he uses his fingers to create imprints and patterns.
He compares the branching lines on the canvas to the way Willis reached out into the community to help his neighbors.
Willis started a group called the Monroe Street Volunteers that would fix up houses to help neighbors stay in place and keep them from selling to developers.
“We went in that area to people’s homes that needed repair,” Jones says. “Most of them elderly. They were getting notices that their homes were in disrepair, and we renovated them for free.”
Since Willis’ death, his own home on Monroe Street has fallen into disrepair.
Jones said it was heartbreaking to see that once-great house fall victim to what Willis had helped others avoid. He gathered pieces from the rubble for his artwork — wood, nails, chunks of marble.
“I just filled up buckets of stuff, because they brought back memories,” he says. “And I said, oh, this is the trash pile. They’re going to get rid of this. I’m an artist. I’m going to transform some of these.”
He says he wants people to see the found objects from Monroe Street and remember that the start of gentrification and development was rooted long ago.
