Sweet Lorraine is a mixed-media piece, Created on the actual door from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the work layers paint, collage, and texture to reflect on legacy, place, and the stories that stay with us. It speaks to the weight of the past while reaching toward beauty, healing, and something new.
Sweet Lorraine transforms the original door from Room 305 of the Lorraine Motel into a layered meditation on refuge, memory, and Black cultural life. Once a place of safety and dignity for Black travelers during segregation, the Lorraine later became inseparable from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. outside Room 306. The title honors the motel’s namesake: Walter Bailey renamed the hotel in tribute to his wife, Loree, and the popular jazz standard “Sweet Lorraine.”
The door is treated not simply as a surface, but as an architectural object carrying the history of those who passed through the motel. Red clay from Atlanta, Dr. King’s birthplace, is layered with acrylic paint, collage, paper, caulk, and stenciled language to create a tactile field of gesture, fragmentation, and abstraction.
Images of Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Sarah Vaughan, and Sam Cooke, among the Lorraine’s notable guests, appear alongside anonymous silhouettes. These recognizable figures and unnamed travelers occupy a shared visual space, connecting individual achievement with a broader collective history.
Quilt geometries rooted in the creative labor of Lynn’s grandmothers bring family lineage, handwork, and ancestral knowledge into conversation with the public archive. References to the Green Book recall the Lorraine’s importance as a haven for Black travelers navigating the dangers and restrictions of Jim Crow.
By joining architecture, soil, image, pattern, and handwork, Lynn converts a functional threshold into a vessel of cultural memory. Sweet Lorraine reflects his broader practice of creating contemporary forms from historically significant places, material histories, and lived Black experience.
Private collection, Memphis, Tennessee