It’s not a common practice for artists because you are given this box that has a predetermined, intimate size. “It’s not a common way to present your work. “This project is experimental,” Park says. So in April of last year, in the midst of renovations, she displayed her cut-outs of disembodied eyes in the box hung in the front porch window, harkening to the idea of the Evil Eye as a form of protection from evil spirits. “The idea was art that you could experience without having to be in a crowded room,” she says. However, before she invited the first artist, Karimnia tested the concept of the Porch Window Gallery herself, earning a Bridging the Distance grant from the UrbanArt Commission which called for small-scale community-focused projects in response to the Covid pandemic. Karimnia invites an artist, who then invites the next, who then asks the next, the condition being that anyone an artist invites must be an artist they don’t know well. The Porch Window Gallery operates on a similar basis, she explains. “I was trying to get to know the Memphis art scene, and worked. “I still have friends from that very first ‘Unchained’ show,” Karimnia says.
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In the past, she organized the “Unchained” series of art exhibitions, where she invited artists she didn’t know well to participate in the first show and asked them to come back for the next one, creating a domino effect. “A lot of my work is community-based,” she says. When asked about the inspiration for the project, she shrugs with a grin, saying, “I just made it up.” At first, all she knew was that she wanted to use her new studio space to nurture community. But the Porch Window Gallery is Karimnia’s baby. Gonzalez comes to Memphis a couple times a year and stays at the Malvern place. She co-owns the house with Bolivia-based painter Keiko Gonzales, whom she has known since college - “100 years ago, it feels like,” she chuckles. Karimnia renovated and designed the house herself with the help of a contractor, taking it from a duplex in bad shape to the delightfully pink space she now calls the Studiohouse on Malvern.
Her tiny-beaded and felted landscapes in the style of vintage postcards hang on the wall.
The floor is tiled orange, pink, and white, and a pink minifridge sits in the corner. Inside, after walking under a sparkling pink disco ball hanging from beams, we sit at Karimnia’s red kitchen table that faces a tufted pink couch. People can come up on the porch, walk, bike, anything.” Best part is, you can’t miss the pink house. “When you drive by at night, it’s lighted you can see it from the road. “The nice thing is, it’s open 24 hours a day,” she says. While most people would be wary of strangers approaching their front porch, Karimnia, who is Crosstown Arts’ residency manager, welcomes anyone to take a gander through her window. Park’s “Echoes of Home: Exploring Memory and Belonging” invites passersby to look in the front porch window at the Studiohouse on Malvern. This, Karimnia says, is the Porch Window Gallery, and right now, through late summer, Yangbin Park’s “Echoes of Home: Exploring Memory and Belonging” is on display as the gallery’s first show, only a block or so away from Crosstown Concourse. A peek through the glass pane reveals a box, home to a small art exhibit filled with sheets of thick paper of muted tones hanging at various heights, carrying childlike drawings of things like buildings and cars. “That’s my color.”īesides its unusual pink hue, perhaps the most striking feature of the house is the window beside the front door. “Somewhere between coral and Barbie pink,” she says, her light pink pigtails resting above her shoulders. Owner Mary Jo Karimnia swatched maybe 20 shades of pink before landing on the right one for the siding of what she calls her studiohouse. Only one pink house stands on Malvern Street in Midtown. I did all the floors, painted all the interior.” “It’s a new interior, new exterior, new plumbing. Purchased in 2019, the Studiohouse on Malvern took two years to renovate.
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