Garry Brown was headed home in July 2023 when he spotted a for-sale sign in the front yard of a brick house on State Street in Jackson. He pulled into a small parking lot between the side of the house and Carter’s Jewelers and circled around to the front of the house. As he walked up onto the white wooden steps, his eyes rested on the red brick of the house and the rocking chairs on the front porch. He had a good feeling about this one. The retired computer scientist pulled out his phone and called realtor Don Potts, who was selling the house.
“Hello?” Potts answered.
“Hey, Don. I see this house for sale. Can you come show it to me?” Brown asked.
“Sure, I’ll be right over,” the realtor confirmed.
In less than 30 minutes, Potts arrived, greeted Brown, and unlocked the front door. The two stepped inside, where the realtor began telling Brown the history of the house house’s history as they walked from room to room. Alexander Virden built the house in 1849, making it one of the oldest houses in Hinds County, Potts explained. World War II Brig. Gen. John W. Patton Jr. purchased the home in 1934, at which point it became known as the Virden-Patton House.
The doorknobs, latches, and features about the house screamed 1800s, Brown noted. Stepping into the backyard felt like teleporting 177 years in the past, he thought. Virgina Patton, John’s daughter, lived in the house until she passed in April 2022.
Exiting the home, Brown promised to follow up with Potts later in the week. He knew he wanted the property, but he also wanted a partner to go in on the purchase with him. In the days following, Brown made some phone calls to organizations he knew.
He reached out to both the 100 Black Men and his Greek organization Kappa Alpha Psi, listing all the benefits of the property: great price point, location, high visibility, historical property, tax credits. Neither would bite. Convinced he wanted to do something with the home, the only choice left to him was to fully front the money himself after all.
“Once I came into the house and saw the structure of the house and how sound it was, I knew that I still wanted to get it,” Brown told the Mississippi Free Press.
The family had an estate sale, and Garry bought the house on Jan. 12, 2024, making him the third party to own the property, after the Virdens and Pattons. The house had been registered to the National Register of Historic Places since 1983, making it a landmark. Now, Garry Brown had plans to turn it into an art museum for local Black artists.
Brown got the idea from garage sales he hosted at home every Friday and Saturday to get rid of a bunch of stuff he had around his house. He had a huge art collection, and some of his pieces would sell. So, he came up with the idea to do an art museum at the Patton House where artists could display and sell their works. After networking with some local artists and telling them about his idea, they encouraged his vision and expressed their full support.
“I felt like I couldn’t turn my back on them because I told them what I wanted to do, and here they are, bringing all the art here, so we started doing art shows,” he said. “The first big show we had was called Black August in 2024. Black August is this thing where they give respect to our ancestors who sacrificed for a greater cause for Black people.”
The annual month-long observance honors Black political prisoners, freedom fighters and the long history of Black resistance against violence, oppression and systemic racism. The Black Guerilla Family initiated it at the San Quentin State Prison in California in 1979.
Brown’s art show bearing the same name found success in Jackson and allowed the gallery owner to meet some good people and artists with whom he still works today.
“I try to keep the price point right with the art,” Brown said. “Most galleries do like a 50-50 split on the art, but I do a 30-70 split. That way artists get more money for their work, and I felt like that would be a draw to have the artists bring me their work. I got the top African American artists in the state hands-down in here, in one location.”
‘I Never Doodled’
Christy Meshel’s summer childhood days in Canton were filled with barbecues, Fourth of July celebrations at the Canton Square, sermons at Mount Zion Baptist Church, and playing outside with friends. She was a ’90s baby who spent time outside because the internet was in its early stages and hadn’t become ubiquitously available yet. The middle child of three kids, she had and still has a very close-knit family, she said.
Meshel attended school in the Madison County School District, where her mother kept her busy with various extracurricular activities such as tap dancing, gymnastics, choir and ballet.
“My upbringing was full of love that you don’t understand until you get a lot older, full of the interracial trauma of America, and I would also say full of soul,” Meshel told the Mississippi Free Press. “I also didn’t understand what Mississippi was grooming me for. … We did everything. I did not know that that was going to prepare for this particular half of my life.”
Since third grade, she knew she wanted to become a lawyer and she set out to do so. After graduating from Madison Central High School, she attended Mississippi State University and then the University of Mississippi School of Law. Once she completed her law degree, she passed the Mississippi bar and relocated to Dallas, Texas, to become an immigration lawyer.
In 2016, after a stressful integrity call at her job, she turned to art to give her peace and calm. She began by drawing objects in her home, starting with a mandala flower. Her roommate complimented her work. Meshel found it amusing: Art was the one activity Christy’s mother didn’t put her into as a child, so she never realized she had talent for it.
“ I never doodled,” she said, reflecting on her life up to that point. “I wrote. When other people were doodling, I was writing poetry because that’s my real secret talent that I really don’t express very much.”
Turning toward art as a career path never occurred to Meshel, who continued to use the medium as a source of therapy, going as far to credit art for saving her life, as she was facing severe burnout from running her immigration law firm.
“I have had my own firm for 10 years in Dallas. I didn’t know the perils of that, especially as a Black woman,” Meshel explained. “People are quick to dismiss you, and they’re very quick to if they don’t see you in action. Dealing with that on top of dealing with your employees, dealing with the climate that changed immediately, (was a lot to manage).”
Since courts were closed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Meshel had the opportunity to take a break from legal work and instead poured herself into her art while attending therapy, which helped shift some things for her.
Though she loved law, she realized she didn’t want to pursue it as a career anymore. She decided to pivot and apply to art residencies. She had no portfolio to show them. She had three paintings whose photos she liked, so she decided to pair photos of those artworks with her three applications. “If I don’t get in, who cares? I’ll figure something out,” she thought.
All three residencies accepted her applications. Swiftly, she sold her house and the majority of her belongings, reduced her law firm to just a one-woman business and flew to Costa Rica to complete her first residency, which lasted one month. While she didn’t paint, the experience gave her the chance to create red clay and use natural resources as pigments in her art. She returned to America before quickly jetting off to another residency in Napoli, Italy, for three months.
“I went to Portugal, Berlin, all these places, learning, understanding, consuming, but also like being able to regurgitate. I had no idea people were in love with Mississippi. Honestly, one thing that shocked me traveling the world is that people love Mississippi,” Meshel said. “People love our voice. People love the way we talk. People love the way we walk. People love the way we think. People love the way we look.”
The experience was so transformative that she decided to move to Barcelona, Spain. She applied for a work visa and officially moved to Barcelona in 2023, where she hit the ground running. Through some networking, Meshel connected with Soho House Barcelona, who paid for her first artist exhibition and eventually asked her to stay on as a member. In 2024, she presented her first exhibition, “The Body Keeps the Score,” which pays homage to how therapy and art changed her life. The title was inspired by a book she read with the same title.
“(After reading the book), I was like, ‘Oh my God, I finally understand what’s happening to my body when I’m experiencing trauma.’ I went through something very traumatic when I was a kid that I completely forgot. I was reminded when I was 30, so that’s what started this journey,” she explained. “I realized how the mind and the body actually works from a physical level, and I wanted to pay homage to that in my work.”
Meshel calls herself an abstract painter who uses lots of color in her work due to her love for color theory. She’s not the most colorful person personality-wise, she claimed, but she doesn’t express her shyness in her work, instead wanting her art to be in-your-face, vivid and eye-catching.
“I love that God created the grass green and the sky blue and that everything is so intentional; I love that the Earth is brown,” Meshel said. “Color makes you feel.”
‘A Chef’s Kiss’
In November 2025, Randall Morgan reached out to Christy Meshel about an opportunity with the Arts Center of Mississippi. Itching to come home and present her first exhibition in America, Meshel flew to Mississippi and showed one of her older art pieces to the center. Leaders at the center loved her art so much that they asked her to do an exhibition in May 2026.
She hired an art manager and returned to Spain to create the pieces that would become part of her “But, Where Are You From, From?” exhibition, which took inspiration from the people she met who wanted to know her ancestral roots, not accepting her answer when she says she is from Mississippi.
“It was a beautiful event. My family is really who came out and rocked it. I opened donations so that the community could help me fund the event because the art center doesn’t get a lot of funding,” the Canton native said. “People didn’t surprise me because I understood my Mississippi people, but it did knock me a little bit off my feet because it was such an outpour of love. To come back home to that love was insane.”
After sitting with the success and support of her May show, Meshel reunited with Randall Morgan, who mentioned a new gallery that opened up on State Street, suspecting she would love it for its authenticity. Where an artist allows their work to be seen is important, and Meshel was interested in having someone who has no idea of her life, her origins or her work sell her art.
“So we went, checked out (the Patton House),” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “… Garry is the quintessential networker. Garry can talk to you about anything. He’s gonna make you feel comfortable. He’s also gonna make you feel seen.”
Meshel was able to collaborate with Meridian, Mississippi, artist Brejenn Allen for a joint exhibition, “Back Home Down South,” that ran at the Patton House from June 14 to July 14, 2026. The exhibit explored memory, migration, belonging and the pull of home, along with what it means to return home. The two artists met through Meshel’s best friend, who found Allen’s work on social media.
“It’s crazy that the works that were created before ‘Where You From, From?’ … translated so well into ‘Back Home Down South’ with another artist who has the same aesthetic,” Meshel said. “It was beautiful cause I didn’t plan that. … And then to have it at the Patton House and Gallery, to be there in that moment, it was chef’s kiss.”
‘Capture the Time’
Through the Patton House, Garry Brown focuses on housing the work of Black artists. Though he is open to working with non-Black artists, he wants to give Black artists opportunities because they don’t get as many options as white artists. Jackson is a majority-Black city, yet he wasn’t seeing that fact reflected in many of the galleries around the city he had been frequenting. With recent pushes from Washington, D.C., from some leaders to minimize Black history and limit Black voices, among other things, Brown feels like it is more important than ever to push progressive art.
“Some of the art in my place would never go up in the galleries around here, and that’s art that I think people should see because art is always gonna tell us some type of story,” he said. “So when you decide to hide these stories that the art in my gallery’s telling, you’re not telling the true story of these different artists.”
Bro. Shambe Jones’ “Picking Parts,” displayed at the Patton House, depicts slaves and Nissan employees in red shirts picking cotton in front of a car dealership. The artist worked for Nissan until they fired him for advocating for a union. Employees were getting hurt on the job, which the artist outlines in the sky with incident reports of workplace accidents.
“ In this painting, he has Black people, white people, managers, and he has all the infractions in (the sky) of people getting crushed and stuff,” Brown described. “(He’s) basically saying without a union, we’re all slaves. Even though you’re a manager or you’re white or whatever, we’re all picking freaking cotton.”
Samuel McCain’s “The Movement One” shows Black people pulling the skirt back of the Statue of Liberty to reveal a swastika, the Ku Klux Klan and the White House as fire burns in the background. In the top-right corner of the painting, justice is for sale. The symbolism removes the veil and plainly illustrates America’s continued racism. McCain’s companion piece, “The Movement Two,” depicts the Black Panthers and other groups who fought for equal rights in the United States.
Brown said he’s seen many white couples come in and ultimately turn right back around at what they see, particularly the men. Brown said he believes their hasty exit is because they can’t handle the truths depicted in the artworks. Meanwhile, these paintings are tame compared to the images Black people have to consume on a regular basis, he said.
“America’s really good about programming us and making us think what’s not real is real,” he reflected. “But the beauty of art is that an artist is always gonna capture what they’re feeling. It’s always gonna capture the time, what’s going on. … And I don’t have any limitations on my art here.”
The Patton House has also embraced the music community in Jackson, letting local artists and bands play there. Artists thank him all the time for being a safe space for their art, which humbles him and fills him with appreciation. His goal, Brown said, is to continuously increase the value of the artists he works with.
‘It’s For Us’
Brejenn Allen and her family moved to Kemper County in East Central Mississippi from Gary, Indiana, when she was 11 years old. Although Brejenn’s dad was from Magnolia, getting adjusted to small-town living proved difficult for Allen. Many people were suspicious of them and wondered why they’d move to Mississippi out of all places. Her parents, however, did a good job of making sure she and her two younger siblings were happy, despite limited funds.
“Even when we were struggling, I didn’t know it,” Allen told the Mississippi Free Press. “I knew we weren’t rich, but my parents always made it fun. Even when we were living in the trailer with holes in the floor and no power, it was like, ‘OK, let’s play a camping game. We’re gonna be camping for the next couple days.’ So my parents always made it to where it was fun and a learning experience.”
Art was always an outlet for Allen, who used the walls of her parents’ house as her childhood canvas. They always encouraged her to be creative, so she continued to paint throughout her K-12 years. She spent two years at the East Mississippi Community College before transferring to the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Chicago is like Mississippi in that it’s family- and community-oriented, but it’s more developed. … It just has a little southern vibe to it, but you wouldn’t really get it unless you’re from the South,” she said.
She planned to stay in Chicago, but the pandemic shut her apartments down, forcing her to return home to Mississippi. At the time, she was depressed about having to leave the city she’d come to love with no art supplies, leaving her without an outlet to express herself during a tumultuous time. The small town of Porterville, Mississippi, had no art-supply stores. The nearest retailer was a Walmart, 30 miles away in Meridian.
One day, she received a call from one of her former EMCC professors who informed her that they were cleaning out the art studio, throwing away plenty of art supplies.
“So I went dumpster diving, and I got everything I could find,” Allen said. “The only thing I didn’t get was brushes, so I did a bunch of paintings with my fingers. I used oil paint, and I thinned it with gasoline because I didn’t have any linseed oil. I was really angry anyway, so gasoline’s just fuel. So I have these gasoline finger paintings from my depressed phase.”
Once she had the means of expressing those feelings on canvas, Allen felt much better, she said. Toward the end of 2021, she reconnected with her community and began fellowshipping with other artists in Meridian. She landed a job in marketing and graphic design and learned all she could before transitioning into a full-time artist.
“I worked for Brainstorm Creative Group under Donna Owen, and she was the nicest boss I ever had,” Allen said. “But when I first started working with her, I gave her my plans. I let her know upfront, ‘I don’t wanna do this forever. I wanna be an artist.’ And she made sure she taught me everything she knew.”
Allen’s boss taught her lessons on marketing, sales and design, bookkeeping and setting up a website. In 2024, she became pregnant and couldn’t juggle art, marketing and motherhood, so she quit Brainstorm and became a full-time artist. Motherhood changed everything for Allen, who developed a new drive that she didn’t have before having her son, Blaze, she said.
Brejenn Allen’s art showcases everyday life and people, showing the simplicity and beauty in southern living. She focuses on this subject matter, she said, because people often overlook it. Artists take their experiences to give audiences new perspectives through creative works, and that’s what Allen wants her art to do.
In her painting “Boots on the Ground,” an ode to line dancing, two pairs of cowboy boots step to music. “Where Y’all Be Fishing At?” pays homage to Mississippi fisherman and Allen’s days at the bank when she would visit home after traveling abroad or visiting from Chicago. Both were on display this year at the Patton House.
“ People really like to talk down about Mississippi,” she said. “Whenever I go somewhere else, people (ask), ‘What y’all be doing there? Do y’all have roads?’ I really had somebody ask me if we have roads or ‘Do y’all be barefoot? … When you go to other places and you say you from Mississippi, they think we some kind of third-world country or something.”
Allen likes to add texture to her work so that the art better reaches out to the viewer no matter where it sits within a space. She wants to create art that makes Mississippians feel represented and understood. She paints in a language that Mississippians understand. It’s fine if others relate, but they should know it wasn’t made with them in mind.
“So the Speedy Cash, the Dollar General, like, that’s stuff that Mississippi people understand,” Allen said. “They understand we got loan places everywhere. They understand we got Dollar Generals in the middle of the field. … I like that. It’s for us.”
‘Unleash Their Creativity’
With the state of the world, Christy Meshel said she feels that having stable places like the Patton House where people can commune, especially the Black community, is crucial. What Garry Brown is doing is an example of the community making a statement and claiming what was already theirs.
“I find it a blessing. I find it necessary,” Meshel said.
The Patton House is a cool place to see artwork and network with other talented people that Brejenn could potentially work with down the line. Every time she visits the gallery, she meets talented and creative people, Brejenn Allen stated.
“I love that. And then, Garry is so open and receptive to ideas and events and educational programming and I think that’s really important. … That’s really important because Black people need spaces to unleash their creativity,” the longtime Meridian resident said.
Brejenn Allen has recently received two art fellowships and has plans to create a trailride photography and painting series—all of it to honor and highlight the beauty and culture of Black Mississippians.
“I would love my Mississippi people to look at my work and say, ‘Oh, I wanna see what she is seeing. I wanna go there, too, ’cause I wanna see what she’s looking at. She said she can do it, I’m about to go try it, too,’” the artist said.
Meshel, meanwhile, is planning a new exhibit called “Rich Aunties and Mississippi Queens,” where she wants to play around with sculpture. Spain is known for its ceramics, and Meshel wants to create some feminine heads using that method now that her Jackson exhibit has concluded.
Brown has poured a lot of his own personal funds into the Patton House space. It puts a strain on him, but he refuses to give up. He has plans to ask people for donations and set up a nonprofit portion of the business so that he can get extra funding, especially since the Patton House is a historical landmark.
The gallery’s owner plans to implement more programs and events into the space that can get the community involved, both for adults and for younger Mississippians, starting with having a 10th-grade visual-artist intern at the gallery for the summer.
“Whatever the community of Jackson looks like, I think this should reflect that,” Brown said. “They really know that this is a community space. I’ve even seen some stuff where people say, ‘Make sure we protect this space and protect Garry.’”
To learn more about the Patton House (512 N. State St., Jackson) or to plan a visit, follow their Facebook page for the gallery’s hours and for information on current and upcoming exhibits. To keep up with Christy Meshel’s work, visit www.chrismeshel.com. To learn more about Brejenn Allen, visit brejennallen.com.
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