Terry Lynn is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in a historic African American community in Arlington, Tennessee, on the outskirts of Memphis. Surrounded by family, church life, craftsmanship, music, and storytelling, Lynn developed an early awareness of how personal experiences connect to broader histories of place, identity, resilience, and belonging.
Working across painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, textiles, sculpture, and public art, Lynn creates layered surfaces that combine figurative imagery with fabric, stitching, found materials, sand, soil, pattern, and expressive mark-making. His visual language is informed by family photographs, African American quilting traditions, Southern church culture, jazz, blues, gospel music, and the legacy of builders and craftspeople within his family. Through these influences, he connects intimate personal narratives with larger reflections on community, spirituality, labor, migration, and collective memory.
Lynn earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Memphis and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Mississippi. He has taught drawing, painting, printmaking, design, and mural-making at the University of Memphis and has worked extensively as a teaching artist with children and young people.
His practice includes works on paper, large-scale paintings, textile-based works, murals, and permanent public commissions. Major projects include Celestial Lineage, a large-scale steel sculpture in Memphis; a three-panel installation for the African Methodist Episcopal Church Publishing House in Nashville; and Sweet Lorraine, a commissioned work honoring the history and legacy of the Lorraine Motel. His artwork was also featured on the HarperCollins boxed edition of novels by Zora Neale Hurston.
In Revival, Lynn brings together works from multiple periods of his practice, exploring remembrance, transformation, spiritual endurance, and the ways personal and collective histories are preserved, reinterpreted, and carried forward.