Cooper Young Festival's best finds, from potpourri-scented crystals to crocheted axolotls
There aren’t many occasions that capture the spirit of Memphis quite like the Cooper Young Festival. The marquee event returned for its 35th year on Saturday, and once again, it was a spectacle.
Hundreds of vendors stood under tents, selling everything from flower crowns to wooden sunglasses to East African Shea butter. Thousands of Memphians roamed the streets, armed with pronto pups, funnel cakes, and beers. A man mixed cut-up strawberries and lemonade in a big white bucket, while not far off, a band leader sang and strummed a guitar, flanked by an accordion player and an electric violinist. A member of the famed Beale Street Flippers led a crowd in a countdown, as one of his partners prepared to flip over four brave volunteers who had agreed to stand hunched over in a line.
I could go on and on.
This year, more than 400 artisans from around the country came to display and sell their merchandise, and photographer Chris Day and I arrived intent on singling out the most interesting products at the festival. But when I bumped into a former colleague and told her our plan, she said it sounded like a difficult task. And she was right.
Because the rows of booths at Cooper Young Fest seemed endless, and there was no shortage of talented painters, sculptors, bakers, and other craftspersons worthy of attention. Selecting just a handful of vendors to talk to was like ordering only one thing off a restaurant menu full of enticing options.
But after much perusing, we settled on eight unique vendors from all walks of life whose products drew us to their tents. Here are some of the most interesting finds at this year’s Cooper Young Festival.
Metal Mania
Most people look at a pickax and see a pickax. But J.W. Burcham once looked at a pickax and said, “Well, that’s a sailboat.”
If you were to just read that line, you might think he's either delusional or extraordinarily confused.
But Burcham is actually the founder of Tupelo-based Metal Mania, a business that has him taking metal from a variety of products and turning it into statues. A machinist and tool maker by trade, it all started when he made his father-in-law a fish out of wrenches for his birthday.
Burcham enjoyed the process so much that he decided to keep doing it, and he’s developed a knack for taking seemingly run-of-the-mill items and using them to make something entirely different.
An old, beat-up lawnmower blade has become the wings of an airplane. The head of a hammer has become the bulk of a motorcycle. A sewing machine has been turned into a tractor.
“Sometimes it’s just whimsical trucks,” Burcham said of his work. “Other times, it turns out to be a true piece of art.”
Crochet Creations
I can’t even stitch up a slight tear in a pair of pants, so I was particularly impressed by the work of Saniya Young, a 17-year-old crochet artist and head of Crochet Creations. She was standing at her tent wearing a cream-colored outfit she had crocheted, and she was selling everything from crochet bags to crochet bucket hats to crochet sea turtles, whales, and dinosaurs. She was even selling crochet axolotls – critically endangered amphibians closely related to tiger salamanders.
She started crocheting a few years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic. She saw a girl crocheting cardigans on Tik Tok, and thought, “I can do that.”
“Then I did it, and I ended up being really good at it,” she said. “I can make all these different things.”
She can also make those things efficiently, finishing most products in just a few hours. And there was a burning question I simply had to ask: where did she learn about an animal as specific as the axolotl?
“Minecraft [the video game],” she said. “I [saw it] on Minecraft, and was like, “that is so cute!”
SeaTree Studios
Whether they’re drinking Coke, Pepsi, Coors, or something else entirely, people use aluminum cans left and right. And the mother-daughter team of Dee and Grace Moore is doing their best to make sure those cans don’t go to waste once they’re empty.
The two run SeaTree Studios, which sells the Whimcycle Design products – colorful ornaments made from aluminum cans. Grace Moore, who lives in Atlanta, is the owner. Dee, her mother and a resident of Collierville, assists her.
“She’s the brains, I’m the brawn,” Dee Moore said.
A portion of each sale goes to the nonprofit The Ocean Project, and all the ornaments are hand painted. If you flip them over, you’ll get a glimpse of their prior life as soft drink and beer containers. A sea turtle, for example, might be green on one side, and have the Pabst Blue Ribbon logo on the other.
At the festival, there were plenty of options to choose from, many of which were ornaments of coastal creatures. But what was Dee’s favorite?
“The octopus, because I’ve got four kids,” she said. “So, two arms for each kid.”
2 Dye 4
When we spoke to Russell Autin, he was sporting a ponytail, sunglasses, and half-sleeve shirt decorated with cactuses. He was also holding a ukulele. It was a fitting image for a man who sells tie-dye clothing – especially one who’s been doing it for so long.
Autin and his wife Lauren started selling tie-dye products out of a red Volkswagen van in New Orleans about four decades ago. As years passed, they raised a son – who took a different path and earned a doctorate in machine learning – and these days, the couple spends most of their time traveling and selling their merchandise at events like Cooper Young Fest.
The name of their business is 2 Dye 4, and after so much practice, they have a system down. As Russell Autin said, “she ties everything, I dye everything.” And shoppers at the tent weren’t short on options, because the Autins have tie-dyed just about every article of clothing.
Well, almost every article of clothing.
“We have everything,” he said. “Everything from hats to socks, everything in between. No underwear.”
Cynthia's Secret Garden
Don’t ever buy me a scented candle, because the odds of it ever being used are extremely slim. I mean no disrespect to the scented candle makers of the world; their products simply don’t interest me. A few years ago, someone bought me a scented candle for Christmas, and if I’m being frank, I can’t recall ever using it. Sorry.
I was, however, drawn to another type of scented product at the festival: scented potpourri crystals, offered by the business Cynthia’s Secret Garden.
The owner, Cynthia Johnson, blends the crystals with natural oils, pulling from the Caribbean recipes of her grandmother, who was from Clarendon, Jamaica. The crystals, Johnson explained, usually remain scented for two to three months, and they can be kept in things like dishes and sachet bags. At the festival, she was selling crystals with a variety of fragrances. One had a strawberry scent, another a tropical scent. One, called “Peaceful Home,” smelled of lavender and sage.
If my house is ever in need of some sort of pleasant aroma, I'll know where to turn.
Rested Soul Wood Burns
Over 20 years ago, Heath Augustine’s sister asked him to make her husband an illustration of a buffalo, through the process of wood burning. The project took him six months to complete, and once he was done, he gave the activity up. But when he broke his neck and couldn’t work, he got back into wood burning, and ultimately started the business Rested Soul Wood Burns.
The days of the six-month timespan now seem far off, because currently, the wood burning process takes him anywhere from one to three hours. Augustine draws an outline on wood, then busts out the wood burner – which looks similar to a pen – to trace it and fill it in with shades.
The tip of the wood burner can be swapped, depending on the size of the line or color of shade he needs. He offers a variety of art pieces for buyers.
Animals are popular, as are team logos and superheroes. He also does wood burning on guitars. Some of these were up for sale at the festival, along with wood illustrations of sports logos, and figures like Deadpool, Darth Maul, Groot, and Elvis.
But what’s one of Augustine’s favorite designs to do?
“I like skulls,” he said.
Genna Denise
Artist Genna Denise doesn’t sign the fronts of her paintings, she signs their back, so the buyers can hang them however they’d like and not worry whether the signature will be lopsided.
“A lot of people say, ‘she signed it this way,’ so it needs to be hung this way,’” she said.
This tracks with her approach as an abstract artist whose pieces can be hung vertically or horizontally, and still seem to be properly positioned.
“I love to do abstract work because it allows people to interpret the pieces the way they want,” she said. “If you own the piece and it’s in your home, it’s a part of you.”
Denise tends to use materials like rocks, modeling clays, and glass in her pieces, with the hope of bringing “your eyes off the canvas.” She’s been painting for a long time, too. She graduated from the former Memphis College of Art in 2002, and she’s been an artist for as long as she can remember.
“I’ve always been an artist,” she said. “It’s in my DNA.”
Chris Simmons
The inspiration for Chris Simmons’ work is the human form, and you don’t have to stare at his pieces for hours to realize this. At the festival, he was selling paintings of naked figures that were either alone or intimately close to each other. Many of them were also in elaborate positions, which makes sense, because Simmons is fascinated by the way “the body can bend and form and contort itself.”
He’s also interested in its imperfections.
As Simmons put it, “there’s no such thing as the perfect human body,” and he doesn’t want the figures in his pieces to look perfect, either. One of the main materials he uses is tar felt – which is also used to make roofs – and for some artists, it might not be ideal.
But that’s one of the reasons he uses it.
“The material is very unforgiving,” he said. “Once I make a scratch, it's there. If I accidentally cut off a finger, or my proportions aren't right, that's okay. Because they're not meant to be perfect… I look for the imperfections and make them stand out. I make them a little special.”
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis Cooper Young Festival 2023 best vendors
