When it comes to the business of contemporary fine art, Memphis has always been something of a one-gallery town. The mantle passed from Alice Bingham, who opened the city’s first-ever contemporary gallery in 1979, to Bingham’s protegé Lisa Kurts, who continued Bingham’s business in the early 1990s. From Kurts, the informal position was assumed by David Lusk, whose gallery opened in East Memphis in 1995 and has gained momentum over the past two decades. Lusk’s gallery, which this month relocated to a permanent home on Tillman Street in central Memphis, represents a mix of established Memphis artists and educators, such as painters Veda Reed and the late Ted Fairs, as well as mid-career and up-and-coming artists such as Tyler Hildebrand and Jared Small. The gallery is also known for hosting an annual “Art Under $1000” that introduces less-established artists to potential buyers.

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It's serendipitous that Kit Reuther and Huger Foote are showing work simultaneously at what we will now stop calling the new David Lusk Gallery, though the work looks handsome indeed in the recently opened pure white space.

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Ah, the ghostly, strange, and beautiful large scale {most are 48″x36″} paintings of German born, Seattle based artist Anne Siems. I wrote about her way back in 2012. Her work was lovely then, but it has evolved so beautifully.

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Lisa Toro wants you to forget what you’ve heard about Memphis. Unless it’s that Memphis is home to a deep, hallowed music legacy and first-rate barbecue. And no one knows better than Toro, co-owner of premiere Memphis coffee shop/retailer City & State, who has been living in the Tennessee city for over 20 years. What’s kept her there is the people, who, she says, are approachable and friendly—a Memphis point of pride. Okay, fine, the other things keeping her there involve food and music: the best juke box in the South, drive-thru beignets, and flowing Tennessee whiskey.

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More than most weeks, David Lusk is especially ready for Friday this week. Eight months after renovation work began, Lusk is ready to host a public celebration officially unveiling his longtime art gallery’s new home at 97 Tillman St. on Feb. 26.

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There was a lot to love in local galleries and institutions in 2015, so let's not delay and get right to my roster of the 10 Best Exhibitions. The list is ordered in backward chronology.

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If we measure the beginning of the holiday season by the first time we hear "The Little Drummer Boy" issuing from the speakers in a big box store, then we have been deep into Yuletide since before Thanksgiving. And Christmas is a week from today, and the shopping is not finished, and the traffic on Poplar between Oak Court Mall and Fayette County is manic, torturous and impassable.

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Quiet sensibility is spread all over this beautiful monograph by the Southern-born artist Huger Foote. It is rather easy to recognize a close kinship with an important Southern master, William Eggleston (they are very close friends), although Foote’s work appears more introspective and imaginative than Eggleston’s.

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Beth Foley and Veda Reed are painters who, at first glance, might seem to have little in common aside from the fact that they are both realists. But a closer look at Reed’s new series of night-sky paintings and Foley’s latest portrayals of ne’er-do-wells, both at the David Lusk Gallery, yields some unexpected commonalities. Despite wildly different subject matter, both artists manage to impart a tangible sense of the ominous nature of modern life, where unseen forces prowl just around the corner.

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It's easy to assert that abstract art and representational art exist in different spheres. After all, abstract art has no content, so to speak, and representational art is all content, or so it would seem. The truth is that every painting creates its relationship with content, the world in which it lives and in which we perceive and understand it. Abstraction and representation often are much closer in spirit than we might suspect, a proposition confirmed, I think, in the exhibitions "Oh Happy Day," by Beth Edwards, through Nov. 24 at DLG-TEMP, and "Layers: Work through the Decades," by Anton Weiss, through Nov. 28 at L Ross Gallery.

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