Image: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is preparing a closing night for 'Legacy at the Table', a dinner series linked to 'Memphis College of Art, 1936–2020: An Enduring Legacy'. The final evening is set for September 23, 2026, and the museum says it will mark one of the last opportunities to experience the exhibition before it closes on September 27.
According to the museum’s announcement, the series was conceived as three intimate dinners by Karen Carrier to celebrate the artists, educators and makers who shaped Memphis’s creative life across eight decades of Memphis College of Art. The closing dinner is titled 'Creative Momentum: Memphis College of Art’s Contemporary Era', focusing on the school’s later decades and the ways experimentation, collaboration and creative risk-taking influenced a new generation of artists.
The dinner series runs alongside the exhibition, which is described as the featured exhibition of the 2026 Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art. The show brings together 90 works by 90 artists, presenting a broad survey of MCA’s legacy through the people and places connected to the school. In the museum’s words, that legacy “lives through people: artists who are still creating today, teachers who shaped generations of students, and the communities they helped build.”
The SimpleTix listing for the event says 'Legacy at the Table: Celebrating Memphis Art with Karen Carrier' runs from May 20 through September 23, 2026, at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 1934 Poplar Avenue in Memphis. For the September 23 dinner, the museum lists a seated family-style meal, a welcome drink, specially paired wines and after-hours exhibition access. A VIP option, limited to 20 guests, adds a pre-dinner champagne toast and a private exhibition tour with an artist and curator.
The menu for the final dinner was also published with the event details, underscoring the culinary component of the series. The museum describes the evening as drawing from the people and places that shaped Carrier’s work, and says the menu takes its theme from the history of Memphis College of Art, the school where Carrier, like generations of Memphis artists, began her training.
The museum’s announcement places the dinner within a larger moment of transition for the institution. It notes that the September 23 program falls during the museum’s closing week in Overton Park, ahead of its move to a new downtown home. The announcement says the museum will be closed for two months and will open downtown on December 6.
Support for 'Legacy at the Table' is credited to Mahaffey Event & Tent Rentals. The exhibition itself is presented by Raymond James, with supporting sponsorship from the Henry Luce Foundation, Grinder Taber Grinder and Formanek Foundation, and is part of the 2026 Tennessee Triennial, a statewide initiative that Memphis Brooks Museum of Art says it joins alongside the Frist Art Museum, the Knoxville Museum of Art and the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga.
