It’s pretty unusual for a living artist to have his or her own museum. But that honor is going to William Eggleston, known as the father of color photography as an art form.
Eggleston, 71, is lucky to be from Memphis, which is home to a museum for Elvis and to Stax, a museum for American soul music. Two years ago, a group of local philanthropists decided that giving Eggleston a museum would be good not only for him but also for the city. Together, members of the group have pledged more than $5 million to start the ball rolling.
Eggleston has promised to transfer his full oeuvre to the museum, which will include offices for the archive’s staff. In return for housing the work, and helping to conserve and digitize them, the museum will “have access and display rights” to all of the “approximately 60,000 imaged and 1,000s of prints, including rights in and to vintage dye transfer prints” in the artist’s collection, according to Mark Crosby, the museum’s planning director. (That’s an untitled work from 1975 at left.)
Planners expect to build in the Midtown area of Memphis, but they have not finalized the site.
They expect to spend about $10 million on the building, and are raising an additional $5 million for an endowment. They expect donors to include foundations as well as individuals, and perhaps state and local governments.
Eggleston’s “story” was recapped in a press release from the group:
The myth of Eggleston often begins with his arrival in New York in the 1970s carrying a shoebox of his own photographs. As the story goes, he showed them to John Szarkowski, the head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who looked at them and said they were “perfect.” Szarkowski hosted Eggleston’s one-man 1976 show, “William Eggleston’s Guide.” When the show opened, critics panned it. The New York Times critic wrote, “Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.”
Now more than thirty years later, Eggleston is widely admired in the art world, and his work seems to win him affection as well as admiration. He is widely known as a colorful character as well as a groundbreaking artist. A retrospective exhibition opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008 and has toured Europe and the US, finishing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this past fall. His fans routinely line up around the corner to ask the artist to sign books. The New York Times wrote in 2008 that Eggleston is “one of our finest living photographers.”
There’s a bit more information and background in an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, published last week.
If there’s a moral to this story — aside from pursuing your vision no matter what critics say, it may be “be lucky where you hail from.” Eggleston is still a presence in Memphis.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Eggleston museum organizers