By Wiley Henry
MEMPHIS, TN — When Kimberly Horton met Jerome Fulton at the 2022 King Biscuit Festival in Helena, Ark., in October, she was bowled over by the depth and intensity of his artwork.
She had to tell Andrew Ross, director of the Blues Hall of Fame Museum in Downtown Memphis, which “exposes, educates, and entertains visitors with all that is blues culture.”
“I got the two of them together so he could curate an exhibit at our museum,” said Horton, president/CEO of The Blues Foundation, which has operated the museum since it opened in 2015.
“When she came back, she said, ‘We got our artist,’” Ross said.
Horton was swept away by one of Fulton’s pieces at the festival. “I talked about that piece,” she said.
Ross went on to curate an exhibit for Fulton entitled “Crossroads 2 Memphis.” It is a multi-media compilation of deep Southern culture and blues music, including ancient Egyptian and Nubian cultures.
Family, friends, art enthusiasts, and the curious strolled into the museum on opening night, June 30. They took note of the “blues” in two- and three-dimensional forms while bluesman Mick Kolassa sang and played guitar.
The music complemented Fulton’s artwork and provided some respite from the sweltering heat. “Crossroads 2 Memphis” will hang for six months and closes the end of December.
“I want to show a level of creativity that is different from a Southern perspective,” Fulton said. He has traveled the country and the world exhibiting his artwork at festivals, markets, conventions, and at other venues.
“Crossroads 2 Memphis” is Fulton’s first full-scale art exhibit. The months-long exhibit exposes him to art appreciators and blues lovers alike.
“He’s also the first Memphian and the first African-American artist, I believe, who has been with us on site here,” Horton said. “Most of the art that we have here has a direct correlation with the blues.”
“We’ve had great art in the past,” Ross added. “But there is so much going on in the pieces. It’s tangible. It gets at that connection between Memphis and the Delta in powerful ways.”
Fulton describes his artwork as folklore. It’s a retelling of stories with historical significance. Like the syncopated rhythm of blues music, the artist is not pigeonholed to how he creates art.
He’s comfortable with creating cotton fields, shacks, or any other subject matter in watercolors, acrylics, tinfoil, metal, aged wood, window frames, burlap, and more. He said much of his artwork is derived from found material.
One such piece is an antique rocking chair. It would be a simple rocker if Fulton hadn’t embellished it with images from Egyptian culture, such as obelisks and the Eye of Horus (The Third Eye).
He also adorned the rocker with shacks, cotton fields, and guitars, bringing it up to the age of modernity.
“I also used these things called the four entities, or the four seasons,” said Fulton, a 1976 graduate of the Memphis College of Art. “So, on each chair, I put nations of music, which is jazz, blues, country and gospel.”
He titled the piece “The Cotton Rocker.” The concept came from the tomb of Ramesses III during his dynasty, he said.
“There are names under the chair itself that date from 1885 to 1965,” said Fulton, adding, “I’m incorporating everything to tell the story.”
Other works on exhibit are just as intriguing, such as “Feeling His Music,” a multi-media piece painted on rusty corrugated tin of a bow-tied blues player strumming his guitar with another set of hands stroking a keyboard.
“Crossroads 2 Memphis,” the exhibit’s namesake, utilizes a pleated wooden window with images of guitars, a cotton field, a pyramid, and The Third Eye. The image of a person is also fused into the background.
“Every time I look at the pieces, I see something new,” Ross said.
For more information, contact The Blues Foundation at (901) 527-2583.
