A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time

Think about how you experience time. Are there moments that slow down and stretch? Or do they happen as quickly as the blink of an eye? The Southern turn of phrase, “a month of Sundays,” suggests a prolonged period of time. The exhibition A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time explores the concept of time through modern and contemporary works of art in a wide range of media including craft, video, painting, drawing, and sculpture by nearly fifty artists. Organized into five sections, Slow Time, For the Duration, Aging and Decay, Marking Time, and A Sense of Pause, the works of art in the exhibition demonstrate and expand upon the way we mark and experience time in our lives and in the environment.

George Segal’s life-sized sculpture Woman on A Bench, 1997, portrays a tired figure waiting for a bus or taking a moment to rest, and Richard Yarde’s painting, The Stoop, 1969-1970, depicts several men sitting on a stoop, relaxing and passing time together. Other artworks demonstrate how we measure time, such as Mimi Smith’s drawing December 14, 1978, The Eleven O’Clock News, 1979, where the artist transcribed an evening news broadcast marking the activities of the day. Photographer William Ferris tracks the ageing process on the human body in his portraits of authors Alex Haley and Alice Walker taken years apart, and a rocking chair by artist and designer George Nakashima represents a desire to sit, slow down, and rest. These works of art and the others included in A Month of Sundays set a fresh new cadence of slow looking. They offer unique surprises, broaden our thinking about time, and encourage us to rebel against our fast-paced world.

Curated by AMFA Curator, Dr. Jennifer Jankauskas, A Month of Sundays: Art and the Persistence of Time is organized by the Mid-South Cohort, an art-sharing collaboration among the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts; Birmingham Museum of Art; Fisk University Galleries; and Mississippi Museum of Art.

The Mid-South Cohort presents a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.