Discarded umbrellas are easy to miss — crumpled in gutters, leaning against poles or stuffed into trash cans — to most, they’re nothing more than litter. For Emily Lamberty, they became an unexpected source of inspiration. As she paused to capture these broken forms with her camera, the images began reflecting something deeper.
The result is “Umbrella Corpse: Retrospective + New Work Exploring the Depths of Resilience,” a solo exhibition on view at Art on Main from Sept. 10-26. It’s a show about damage, survival and the strange grace of things that refuse to disappear quietly. It’s also, somehow, a show about umbrellas.
In “The Real Flex is a Meaningful Life,” Emily Lamberty makes street debris feel strangely human.
From Plano to the puddles of SoHo
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Emily is a Dallas artist in the truest sense, though her path here has been anything but straight. She grew up in Plano after her family moved to the area in the early 1980s, spent her 20s in the Dallas art scene and hung her early work in group shows around town. Then, in 2009, she left for New York.
She describes the time, with a wry laugh, as “a character-building experience.” Translation: it was hard.
“It was like seven years of getting beat up,” she says.
She moved nine times in two years. She weathered bedbugs, bad roommates and a layoff delivered moments after she mentioned how grateful she was to finally have health insurance. Somewhere in that chaos, the umbrellas found her. She had noticed something in the city — people walking through the rain with umbrellas already beaten, battered and broken, still gamely holding them overhead.
“I’d never seen anything like that growing up in Plano,” she says. Then she began spotting the discarded ones.
The tipping point came one morning on her way to work in SoHo. An oversized umbrella sticking out from a garbage can bloomed a whole scene in her imagination — some furious commuter wrestling the thing into the bin, defeated by the weather and the day. It made her laugh.
“That was when I was like, ‘this is a thing. There’s a story here.’”
A totem for the hard years
What began as documentation deepened into something closer to devotion. The umbrellas became, in her words, a totem — small omens scattered across the sidewalk.
“They became like messages from the universe to me,” she says. “I would see one, and I would know that something was about to come to an end.”
At first, the images carried sorrow. Friends started sending her photos of umbrella corpses they spotted, captioned “thought of you.”
“I felt like they were seeing me as broken and discarded,” she admits.
But a few years in, the meaning shifted. The umbrellas stopped being symbols of ruin and began to stand for endurance. Andrea Lamarsaude, who owns Art on Main, understood the pull immediately.
“What drew me to Emily’s work is the way something as ordinary as a broken umbrella becomes a symbol for something much bigger,” she says. “The work is about vulnerability and resilience, but it’s also about transformation — what we do with the experiences that have shaped us and how we find meaning in them. I think those are themes everyone can connect with in some way.”
The living and the dead
The exhibition gathers 48 pieces drawn from hundreds of photographs taken between 2009 and 2016. Emily gives many of them titles pulled from how they struck her. One umbrella, neatly rolled and lying flat on the pavement, reminds her of a heart attack. Another makes her think “double homicide.”
It may sound macabre, but she describes her work as resistant to “spiritual bypassing,” or the tidy insistence that everything is fine.
“You can’t have light without darkness,” she says.
Newer mixed-media pieces push past photography into the realm of ideas, shaped by her years studying feng shui and yoga. Wood-panel works with titles like “Carrying the Wisdom Only Experience Can Teach,” “The Real Flex is a Meaningful Life” and “She Eventually Came to Understand” read like koans left on the wall. There’s even a string installation about time and space woven into a single thread, plus a family heirloom in the form of an Art Nouveau umbrella stand with a lineage stretching back generations.
Poems under the same roof
On Wednesday, Sept. 16, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., the exhibition will welcome Dallas poets Dan Collins, Tim Cloward, Lisa Huffaker, Gabe Shapiro and Jean Lamberty — the artist’s own mother — to read works responding to the show’s themes. Emily handed each of them a small bundle of words: resilience, strength, empowerment, grief.
For Lamarsaude, the evening embodies everything she wants the gallery to be.
“I love finding different ways for people to connect with art,” she says. “Bringing poetry into the gallery gives us another language for exploring the ideas in Emily’s work … I want Art on Main to be more than a place where people come in, look at art and leave. I want it to be a place where art starts conversations and where different creative disciplines can come together.”
Bring an umbrella
The show also asks something small and meaningful of its visitors. Emily has partnered with Genesis Women’s Shelter and Support, which has offered free services to women experiencing domestic violence since 1985, and she’s inviting guests to bring an umbrella to donate.
“If somebody offers you shelter under an umbrella, it’s such a powerful gesture,” she says.
Donations are collected in her inherited umbrella stand. Before opening night, five had already arrived. It’s a fitting close for a body of work about protection, damage and the stubborn will to keep going. Emily once thought this show would shut the book on the umbrellas for good. Now she suspects they’ll simply follow her wherever she goes next.
“I think they’re just like a permanent totem for me,” she says. “It’ll just look different.”
“Umbrella Corpse: Retrospective + New Work Exploring the Depths of Resilience” runs Sept. 10-26 at Art on Main (4428 Main Street, Ste. 200). The poetry reading is Wednesday, Sept. 16, 6:30–8 p.m.