Starry, Starry, Winter Garden

For the museum's inaugural Winter Art Garden, artist Greely Myatt uses found objects, including scrap metal, neon, and discarded signage, to create Starry, Starry–an illuminated starscape on the museum's plaza. Myatt is known for testing the boundaries of sculpture by playing with line, light, and flat forms, turning everyday materials into works of art.

From his repository of locally-collected objects, Myatt creates surprising and playful approaches to simple domestic and urban materials. His investigations of similar forms evolve over time–what began as a five-fingered glove turned into a five-petal flower and, finally, into a five-pointed star.

Myatt fills the plaza with clusters of stars. The largest, Big Star, spans twenty-four feet and casts colorful light across nearby surfaces. Inspired by the constellations in the night sky, Myatt suspends Sirius (Dog Star and Pup) in the southeastern corner of the plaza. At the tables are reflective bouquets, StarSprays, echoing frozen sparklers. Next to Wheeler Williams’s sculpture Fall (1961) and atop the bases of where Wheeler’s Spring and Summer statues once stood, is Myatt’s Starfall, a star fragment. Together, these whimsical works form a constellation of Myatt’s own creation.

Starry, Starry, Winter Garden is sponsored by Burch Porter Johnson

All exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are underwritten by the MBMA Exhibition Fund.

Major annual support is provided by Kay Clark and Maggie and Milton Lovell, with generous annual funding from Anonymous, Gloria and Kenneth Boyland, Holly and Paul T. Combs, Deborah and Bob Craddock, Eleanor and William Halliday, Debi and Galen Havner, Sally Hergenrader, James R. Humphreys, Jay and Kristen Keegan, the Doris S. and Hubert Kiersky Charitable Remainder Trust, Carl and Valerie Person, and Bill Townsend.