Jackson Free Press

This summer, a couple of Walker's Drive-In employees painted a mural on the iconic eatery's patio wall in Fondren. It replaced a pockmarked and aging piece The Projectors, a trio of artists who still live and work in Jackson, did a decade ago.

In case you haven't heard, folks dig Fondren. The oft-heralded oasis that the neighborhood has become adds another layer of gloss to Jackson's collective memory of the artists who helped spur that momentum forward—folks such as Josh Hailey, Ginger Williams-Cook, William Goodman and Jason "Twiggy" Lott.

People remember Williams-Cook, Goodman and Lott as muralists The Projectors. They were also The Dirty Lipsticks (no gloss necessary), a band they founded just for fun. They performed only for each other and friends in their loft studio spaces in the building.

"We never actually played any shows or really even any instruments," Goodman says. "But we played in front of the camera. I think the idea of being in a band was wonderful to think about."

With tongue-in-cheek monikers, the artists, then all in their early 20s, were literally making names for themselves. The renovation on the Fondren Corner building, which would become their hub, wasn't finished when Josh Hailey moved into a studio there in 2005 and joined the others, including artist Jason Marlow, who has since moved away to work in New York City and Austin, Texas.

"William lived right off the elevator, and some of the letters had been scraped off the sign, so it just said 'evato,'" Hailey says. "There were five of us, so we were like, 'That's our name for our art making.' Twiggy was a graphic designer dabbling in painting, Ginger and William were painters, Jason Marlow was a multimedia artist, and I was a photographer. We all got together and made a hotspot for collective art."

That mixed-use building was the nucleus of the neighborhood's creative vibe. Fondren Corner residents bartered and exchanged energy. "It was like New York," Williams-Cook says. "'Loft living—this is so cool!'"

Warm as those memories are, nostalgic like Technicolor (many of them were archived and time-stamped by Hailey's lens), these four are still at work creating art that is more layered, mature and compelling than ever.

"We're here still. We exist, and we're still doing things," Lott says.

But they aren't in their 20s anymore, Toto.

In this story, the canine companion is Minerva, Lott's neurotic and irresistible Chihuahua. Their youthful personas have waned; not discarded, just outgrown. But the radioactive energy these harbingers of Fondren's artistic vibe created during the mid 2000s—running down hallways, keeping watch over the neighborhood for break-ins from high atop the roof, collaborating at insane hours, and donning props and costumes (and yes, dirty lipstick) for impromptu photo shoots—has not disappeared. The elements of their creativity have realigned and reformed, through all the learning and life and travel of a decade.

"Probably from the outside, a lot of people looked at us as these rebellious, crazy artists, which we were in a lot of ways," Goodman says. "But it started feeling good, at least for myself, when people started taking us seriously. It wasn't just some game."

Ginger Williams-Cook is now married and a mother of a little girl named Eloise. Goodman has grown and advanced in his art making. Lott has a dedicated studio space and workshop where he paints, assembles, builds furniture and creates full time. And Hailey, a self-described wanderluster, is on the highways in his van (heading toward Amherst, Mass., when we spoke) on the tail end of a two-year documentary project, Photamerica, in which he has interviewed countless subjects from all walks and explored the folds and complexities of the nation.

The presence of Williams-Cook's daughter, Eloise, is one of the most drastic life changes for any of the four (although Lott's paternal instincts showed as little Minerva sat on his lap and licked at his chin). "I'm incredibly focused and driven now," she says.

Even as we talked, her husband, Justin Cook, was back home taking care of Eloise, who is now about a year and a half old, making sure she didn't try to eat a paintbrush like she did during her first art session. "I want to be authentic when I tell Eloise she can be anything she wants to be," Williams-Cook says. "I want her to see art as part of her life."

Looking around the studio of Twiggy Lott, you'll see furniture he created with another collaborator, Josh Bishop, out of salvaged industrial materials and discarded bits of metal and wood. These beaten-down scraps and structures have outlived their intended uses and find new purpose as polished artworks. Similarly, the subject matter of Lott's paintings draws from that sensibility.

"My art now is influenced by the very incessant decay of the South. When I think of my home, it's junk cars sitting around rusting and old buildings," Lott says.

The inspiration that these four now find is heavily tied to home, but exploring new places invigorates it. Goodman references a recent trip and the sights that have seeped into his paintings.

"I spent a couple weeks in Miami this summer. Visual stimulation everywhere," he says. "Somebody had spent so much time doing a mural on one of the streets, and then someone rolled over some of it. Someone else had painted something else on top, and then that was rolled over. I'm looking at the paintings I'm doing right now as old walls that maybe somebody has written something on, and I'm trying to bring new life to it."

"I'll find I'm influenced by what I've seen when I travel but not even really know it," Lott says. "I'll come back, and the way I see that influence is through my work. It's a mirror for what I've experienced."

It isn't about getting out of Mississippi. Rather, discovery of other cultures and climes becomes additive to the art scene in Jackson when the artists return. "It's really about finding that creative pulse and energy and being authentic to that," Williams-Cook says. "Not feeling like you have to live in New York."

"To this day, I feel I can't live in another major metropolitan city and do my art full time," Goodman adds. "We're blessed that we have this place. Jackson's never given up on us. I remember that, and I know that."

Meanwhile, Josh Hailey was somewhere five, 10, 15 states away. But even his absence from Jackson for the better part of two years is in service to his artistic vision with the goal of bringing back what he learns to the state. In 2011, Hailey took a job art directing a photography project for the Mississippi Development Authority documenting workers throughout the state, which he calls "the best damn job I've had in my life." After that, he looked at the American landscape and saw the Occupy movement in full swing and a presidential election around the corner.

"I was watching 10,000 kick starters happening, and I was like, 'I'm not going to stand still,'" he says. "I can spend the same amount of money in my van and travel, do a documentary, make art and invest in trying to make the world a better place by talking to people."

Hailey made it through 35 of 50 states in 2012, supported by a successful crowd-funding campaign, and returned to Mississippi briefly to raise money for the final leg of his nationwide sojourn.

"Here I am, about to finish up," he tells me. "I'm bringing it back to Jackson in October, hopefully getting a storefront in Fondren, and putting a lot of effort into putting a showcase together for December to show all of this stuff from the good, the bad and the ugly in America."

These four artists are strangely in tune with one another despite the distance of separate lives and projects. Without prompting, they speak of the same themes and philosophies and express fondness for the place where they started. "Jackson's been good to the three of us," Goodman says, sitting with the other two Projectors in Lott's studio.

Speaking later from his van, rumbling down the road, it is as if Hailey had been listening in. "I love my state," he says. "And I always will."

Those years together in Fondren were central for all four artists. It wasn't about the physical place, necessarily, though they found the perfect arena for creative experimentation. Their relationships with each other bond them together as they pursue individual endeavors. They became intertwined back then, like tributaries colliding, making waves. That will be part of their narratives even if they leave Jackson. But for now, it looks like they'll be home for a while.

Paint fades, photographs yellow, and pieces peel off our stories. Details drop out, and we replace them with new shades, making confabulated compounds of recollection. The mythology to those early Fondren Corner artists will always be around, though it may continue to change forms as they grow professionally.

At roughly the same time as The Projectors' mural at Walker's vanished beneath fresh designs this summer, Goodman painted a mural downtown at Steve's Downtown Deli & Bakery, the first he'd done in two years, as if to prove that energy is never made nor destroyed.

Keep up with these artists at joshhaileystudio.com, gingerwilliams.tumblr.com, enhancedmixture.com and jasontwiggylott.com.