Lakeisha Edwards
Executive Director, UrbanArt Commission
Drive through almost any Memphis neighborhood and the public art you pass was chosen by the people who live there. Lakeisha Edwards, Executive Director of the UrbanArt Commission, has spent her career making sure the city’s walls, parks, and corners tell Memphis’s own story in Memphis’s own voice. For her, soul is homegrown, and it is louder than any outsider.
As Executive Director of the UrbanArt Commission, Lakeisha Edwards calls her job “organized chaos.” She keeps a lot of moving parts in order “in a way that other people can follow,” so artists, neighbors, and the city can all see where to jump in. The result is everywhere you look in Memphis, even when you do not realize it.
UAC started in 1997, when a small group of artists pushed the city to invest in public art. One of its first projects, the Central Library, proved Memphis had the homegrown talent to do this work consistently. That success helped lead to the city’s percent-for-art ordinance, and since 2002 UAC has commissioned more than 320 works placed in neighborhoods across Memphis.
What makes that collection different is who chooses it. “UAC doesn’t make any decisions” about the final product, Lakeisha says. A selection committee of the community’s own stakeholders, the people who work, go to school, and raise kids in that space, makes the call. The Welcome to Orange Mound sign is a favorite example, “a historic space that had never had the proper signage finally received the acknowledgement they deserve.”
“Not only do we have our own language,” she says of Memphis artists, “but we can speak all the other languages as well.”
Most of what makes it happen stays out of view: the emails, the meetings, the showing up to keep public art in the budget, and the artists’ own late nights and missing colors that would make every price tag make sense.
There is plenty ahead. UAC turns 30 in 2027 with greeting cards and postcards of the collection, artist talks, a new strategic plan, and an “UnGala” on Mud Island, a fancy event in cookout-casual attire where “every picture is going to look like we crashed the party.” Lakeisha’s own dream is a shared studio that doubles as a tourist attraction, with storefronts where people can watch artists work.
Her advice to Memphis artists is to get outside your usual medium: studio artists should talk to fabricators about sculpture, graphic designers should talk to UAC about city projects. UAC offers fellowships and scholarships to help make that leap.
Follow the UrbanArt Commission at @urbanartmemphis and learn more about their work, fellowships, and how to get involved at uacmem.org.
