In this collection
Two square canvases hung as a pair. On the left a crowd stands under trees in the late afternoon: hats, shoulders, the backs of heads, a child held at the hip. On the right a congregation waits outside a white clapboard church, the figures reduced almost to marks, a bare tree cutting up through the foreground.
Both panels are signed lower right by Jerry alone. He also paints as one half of a duo, which makes a single signature worth noticing.
The work
Born in Memphis, he has taught art for more than a decade in Memphis and Dallas. The work centres on Black history and cultural identity, bridging past and present, and the Art in Embassies programme of the US State Department describes it as commemorating “historical and contemporary Black figures.”
Captures the character, life, and legacy of his subjects through an emotive, expressionist background and blending in scenes and objects, sometimes barely visible, throughout the canvas.
He builds in layers of acrylic and lets the drips fall where they fall. Churches, baptisms and Southern gatherings run through the subject matter, which is exactly what the two panels here are doing.
The twin
Jerry is the identical twin of the painter Terry Lynn. Born and still living just outside Memphis, the two work together often enough that Overdue Recognition Art Gallery, which carries them as a pair, says they “share the same canvas simultaneously” and that when a collaborative painting is finished “you can’t tell which artist created what part.”
Where the work sits
Carried now by E & S Gallery, Mackey Twins, Stella Jones, ZuCot here in Atlanta, and Red Door, per his own contact page. He showed with David Lusk Gallery in Memphis for years, and that is still the credit line on his State Department entry, but he is not on their roster today. His work has been shown in the Red Clay Survey at the Huntsville Museum of Art, and Memphis Blues and River Runs Deep have been placed through the State Department’s Art in Embassies programme.
His own biography also names private collectors. I have left those names off this page, because his biography is the only place they appear and none of the people named have said so themselves.
The hand
