The gardens of the Dixon Art Gallery and Gardens in Memphis are stunning - beautifully designed and curated and shady and watery. They're attached to an art gallery with some in many ways unremarkable French Impressionists (which therefore are the more interesting for being hardly known), and a handful of much more striking late C19th US paintings - like a tiny oil on board Evening Illuminations at the Paris Exposition of 1889, by Charles Curran, with gas lighting to the left, electric lighting to the right.
The really strong part of it was a large visiting show from the American Folk Art Museum in NY, including Jessie Telfair's 1983 Freedom Quilt - but many, many things, too, that will find their way into my US Picturing Democracy course next semester.
And now I'm in Oxford, Mississippi, which seems a very vibrant college town, albeit, so far, very conspicuously white ... though that's first impressions; and staying in the University Inn - as is the South Dakota State Women's Volleyball team, who - who knew this? - are called the Jackrabbits.
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