Mobile Museum

Here's something cool I ran across--it's a project by Ally Reeves, formerly of Nashville, Austin Peay, and Rule of Thirds, now in Pittsburgh and grad school at Carnegie Mellon. She's rigged up a bike to be a movable gallery that carries a compact body of art around to different places. It's the kind of thing that could and seems like it should be replicated everywhere. And I just realized the current project in the Mobile Museum was covered on NPR this week, it's an artist who collects lost gloves and posts them in hopes of reuniting them with their mates, which ends up being as much about ways of marking space.

David Lefkowitz show at Cheekwood

It took me a while to get over to see this show in Temporary Contemporary at Cheekwood—it’s only up until Sunday. Worth a stop if you are around town this week. What else you got to do?

David Lefkowitz does paintings of the built landscape, particularly what you associate with cars—highways, tourism—and modern architecture in its various guises. One painting, “Outlying Area,” was particularly perceptive. It’s an aerial view of an indistinct exurban landscape dominated by a complex set of highway interchanges. Some of the islands between the roadways are occupied by isolated structures of uncertain purpose. The ground is painted in vaguely winter tones of greens, grays, and browns, but no vegetation or topography is distinguishable. The key detail is that the bits of roadway are labeled with the names of fabled roads of all sorts—Champs-Elysees, Broadway, Division Street, Route 66, the Natchez Trace, the Oregon Trail, the Spice Road, the Nile, Elm Street. Whether it’s the almost mythic qualities of the Spice Road, the frontier history of the Trace, an archetypal small town “tree” street, or the multi-ethnic working class urban life of Terkel and Algren’s Division Street, each of these roads had life-giving character, qualities that differentiated and distinguished it, that added to store of human experience. The brutally efficient bands of concrete of the Eisenhower interstate system offer nothing like that. They are just empty space that get you from here to there. The time spent on them is lost. You learn nothing from these roads. No books or songs will be written about them. In this painting Lefkowitz succinctly puts his finger on what is lost in these contemporary landscapes and in our way of life.

The rest of the show has different bits and pieces—he packs a lot into the one room gallery. There are pennants of non-existent, ridiculous tourist destinations, maybe a little broad by themselves, but effective in context. Various depictions of unknown modern buildings made out of cardboard boxes (and in one case painted on cardboard). Blurry diptychs of sections of highway at different times of day. And several paintings of imaginary cities floating over aerial views of landscape, projections of future developments on the green fields if Italo Calvino was the developer. In one of those paintings, several clusters of buildings with red-tile roofs are bunched on the pods of a suburban cul-de-sac street system. Each cluster has an exotic name, like Zorgi or Brusto. The appearance of these exotic, evocative little settlements on the cul-de-sacs points out something similar to the famous labels on the highways, the profoundly uninteresting quality of structures we build today. These structures consume a lot of resources, but somehow they contain nothing of us, no trace of humanity.

So you’ve got this imagination of landscapes in the Temporary Contemporary gallery, and the main show at Cheekwood offers photos of notable American house gardens from the early 1900s, places like Cheekwood, Winterthur in Delaware, or Dumbarton Oaks in DC. These are artificial landscapes, spectacular yes, but definitely the realization of imagination. With enough money, one could commission this sort of transformation of the natural world into perfectly lovely sequences and vistas. Dumbarton Oaks is one of my favorite places on earth. For me, it is what heaven should be like. It was nice to see some photos of it. Beyond feeding my nostalgia, the show didn’t seem to have much to offer.

Me and Brady at Buzz and Click

Brady and I played our annual or so duo set at Buzz and Click earlier this month. Here's video of it on the Google site. I was pleased with it. I also played a set with Ben and Amy Marcantel and a big group at the end with Brian Siskind/Fognode. The last set has some nice heckling at the beginning. These files I guess are too big to embed, but click over and I think everything comes right up.

Merry Christmas?

Nashville Visual Arts Events Dec 14 plus

We’re finally winding down for the year. Just one event/opening to report, making this email more or less a dedicated advertisement for Untitled. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable New Year’s, Christmas, Feast of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever.

For 2008, among the things coming up:

• SQFT Gallery’s last show in January. They’ve done a nice job, I’ll be sad to see them go. One thing about this gallery is that right out of the gate they had a distinct tone in their shows. A mix of technique, whimsy, stylishness, archness. You expect a new gallery to wobble about trying to find a voice. Not so here.
• Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Oswaldo Guayasamin. Guayasamin was an Ecuadoran painter who died in 1999, and Vandy is putting together a major retrospective of his work. There’s a back story to how this show came about, I’ll get into that another time. Hearing about this put me in mind of the Inverted Utopias show of Latin American art I saw in Houston a few years ago—it made you realize there’s this alternative history of modern art that was playing out in Latin America, in parallel to Europe and the U.S., similar in some regards, but significantly on its own terms. Guatasamin wasn’t in the show—he’s more of what you think of with Latin American art, figurative work with social bite, where a lot of the work in Inverted Utopias was more formalist. But the connection for me is this parallel/alternate art history.
• Zeitgeist dialogue series. Starting in January and running all the way to September, Zeitgeist is running a sequence of shows that will be accompanied by panel discussions and forums. It’s an outgrowth of Lain and Janice’s interest in building and experiencing community. The shows are organized by medium—prints, then painting, photos, sculpture, works on paper.
  

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email version of this listing, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

Happy New Year’s one and all.



Dec. 14

Untitled, Chill Untitled’s winter show is being held at Layl’a Rul near Vandy. No doubt this is going to feel like a big ole Christmas get-together. As always with Untitled, expect lots of artists, tons of their friends milling around, some inspired work, some not so much—or maybe it’s more accurate to say there’s something for the eye of every beholder.

Announcements

I got an email from Joseph Whitt, who is now Assistant Curator at Vandy Fine Arts, about the gallery’s receipt of a gift of photos and prints from the Andy Warhol Foundation. First of all, I hadn’t realized Joseph was working at the Fine Arts Gallery. He’s got a really lively spirit, and has an intense radar for things that are happening. I don’t know when we started at Vandy (where he graduated from college, won the Hamblet Award). Oh yeah, the Warhol gift. If I’m reading the announcement correctly, Vandy was one of 183 (!) college museums to receive a gift out of a massive cache of material. Sounds like the Foundation was cleaning its attic. Now it comes down to what the gallery do with it. But the two Josephs running the show there, Vandy will have no trouble making good use of the material. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery/specialevents

Gaelic psalms

Here's my discovery of the week--Gaelic psalms, a form preserved from the early days of the Scottish Reformation in the Hebrides (seems to have been preserved particularly on the island of Lewis, where there is still no ferry service on the Sabbath). I picked up a disc in a shop in Edinburgh and just got a chance to listen to it. Wonderful. Really intense. Maria says it sounds like American mountain music. Definitely. Or maybe Sacred Harp singing. Or the Polyphonic Spree in their dreams.

Here's a page with some history of the form. The recordings below were done at a center for Scottish music near where we stayed in Glasgow last week.

Nashville Visual Arts Events December 1-8

It’s the beginning of the month, I’m a little late getting this out, so I’ll keep everything short. It looks like we’ve mostly got the first Saturday openings and then a few stragglers. Imagine this will be it for December, except for the inevitable “oops I forgot one” follow-up email.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email version of this listing, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

Dec. 1

Twist, Plate Tone Printshop This is the local printmaking coop specializing in non-toxic printmaking methods. It’s something you might not think about, but all those acids to etch on metal plates can’t be good to handle. It reminds me of my mother talking about the respiratory problems sculptors would get from handling plastics and whatnot, often done with minimal protection in a heroic frame of mind. Also self-destructive. In addition to trying to do themselves (and children, etc.) a favor, Plate Tone consists of very fine artists: Jenny Baggs, Marleen De Bock, Kaaren Hirshowitz Engel, Pam Haile, Lee Ann Hawkins, Lou Horner, Susan Hulme, Linda Illingworth, Patricia Jordan, Reesha Leone, Lesley Patterson-Marx, Jaime Raybin. Twist also has affordable holiday art by Watkins student printmakers to go along with the Plate Tone folks.

Dangenart, Self Series by Laura Young and Extremely Superficial Juried Exhibit. Young will be at the gallery on Saturday for a one night presentation—she uses her body as a canvas for drawings, photographs them, converts the photographs into a digital piece. The gallery is also opening its annual juried show, this year featuring Donna Meeks, Rob Tarbell, Nuala Sawyer, and Michael Kelley.

Ruby Green, Steven Finke, Composite Things. Small sculptural objects that are meant to serve as meditational objects. Jonathan Marx did a good article on the show.

TAG at TAG (Susan Tinney) Greg Decker. I won’t go into this again, but Susan Tinney and Jerry Dale McFadden are splitting up their partnership. This is the TAG space on 5^th Avenue, now with Susan Tinney as sole partner and Virginia Cannon as curator. Their first show is work from painter Greg Decker.

Estel, Richard Heinsohn. These look like really appealing abstract paintings, very rhythmic, strong almost in your face geometries and tone contrasts. This is a short note on this, but I’m really looking forward to seeing these paintings in the flesh, not just JPEGS.

TAG at Estel (Jerry Dale McFadden) Paul Roden and Valerie Reuth. Jerry Dale McFadden is doing his exhibits at Estel in December and January, and will borrow the Dangenart space from February-July. The December show is husband and wife printmakers Roden and Reuth, who have collaborated on many of the pieces here, which should be interesting because they’ve got pretty different styles and approaches, although I assume they get along OK with each other.

SQFT, Deck the Walls. A group show of affordable art by several artists who have shown at SQFT: Agnes Barton-Sabo, Eleanor Grosch, Caitlin Keegan, James Keegan, Jessica Rosenkranz, and Shea Steele. This will be SQFT’s second to last show—they are closing their doors after their January show.

The Arts Company, Annual Holiday Arts Market. This year the Arts Company will feature work by April Street, Jim Hubbman, and David Sokosh. Street’s current paintings look like they’ve taken a turn further towards abstraction to good effect, Hubbman has created very finely detailed works in watercolor and graphite, and Sokosh has a season-appropriate series of tintypes of Christmas ornaments.

Rymer This month’s artists are Tom Baril, Richard Jolley, and Drew Galloway. The one I’m most familiar with is Jolley, a glass artist from Tennessee who has had major shows at places like the Hunter in Chattanooga. It seems like he was included in the Frist’s Art of Tennessee show, but I might be confusing that with some other appearance here.

Art Rogue. I’ve vowed not to neglect Matt Mikulla’s gallery in these listings. He puts together a new series about every month, an exercise in variation which constitutes nearly a performance action.

Dec. 2

Nashville Craft Mafia. Not to be confused with the group that convenes each month in East Nashville, but another collective group of crafts artists doing their winter/holiday show in Franklin at the Factory in Franklin. Runs from 10 am to 5 pm.

Dec. 5

Nashville Art Party, City Hall. One night group show in the Gulch with Myles Maillie, Langford Barksdale, Marcie Allen Cardwell, Chris Kuhn, Matt Reasor, Max Shuster, Brooke Sisco, Andrew Smaldone and Vadis Turner. Runs from 6-9.

Dec. 7

Vanderbilt Studio Art Department, Open House for Student Work. A show of work produced by students in Vanderbilt’s studio art classes this term. The department wants to connect more with the community, so maybe we’ll start to get familiar with some of the student artists at Vanderbilt. Not sure what to expect at this point. The open house is in the afternoon, from 3-5.

Centennial Art Center, Holiday Show. A show and sale of work by teachers and students at Centennial Art Center, including Harry Denson, Ron Epps, Hazel King, Lafayette Mitchell, Kathy Tupper, Kathy Carter, Lena Lucas and Wanda McMahan. Reception 5-7 on Friday.

Dec. 8

Buzz & Click, The End. Self-promotion here. The annual show (fifth installment) of electronic music organized by John Brassil, Jeremy Dickens, and others, who graciously bend the rules and allow Brady Sharp and me to do our skronky improv thing (Brady uses electronics, so we’re here really on the basis of his qualifications). It’s a whole bunch of people doing things with loops, programming, and improv, playing tight 20 minute sets. It’s going to be one of the last performances in town by Fognode/Brian Susskind, with Let’s Say Baltimore. They always put in a good set—last year it had very odd echoes of country music. Brian’s one of these guys who seems really smart, thinking seriously in several directions. The show starts at 8:00—promptly. Brady and I are scheduled to go on at 9:30.

And a couple I missed from November

Sip Café Gallery, Camille Jackson, Debbie Kraski, Emily Laird, Erin Plew and John Whitten. This show opened last night with a performance yesterday, but there are drawings up through January 4. The five artists have created drawings in response to a book by German filmmaker Werner Herzog about a walk from Munich to Paris. Debbie Kraski’s drawings (some are in the Frist show of student work) do grow on me. The premise here sounds promising. And it’s a new venue. Sip Café Gallery is at 1407 McGavock Pike.

Watkins Senior Thesis Show, Reesha Leone, Justin Key and Curt Pintenich. The next round of these, it includes photos by Justin Key which are sampled in the current Frist show and were on display earlier at an architect/design firm in/near the Gulch. The show opened Wednesday, runs through Dec. 14.

Visual Arts updates for Nov 12-17 (DJ Spooky alert)

Hey, I don’t know how I missed this – Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is doing a “lecture/demonstration” at Austin Peay this Tuesday. This comes in conjunction with APSU’s exhibit of new media works at the Art department gallery. DJ Spooky is the art world’s favorite hip-hop artist, and I have to say I enjoy my copy of Riddim Warfare. Miller’s a significant theorist of contemporary aesthetics through the lens of remix-based artistic practices, and he’s gotten a lot of attention for his remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, just to mention a couple of projects. From his recordings, the wide range of this guy’s intellect is obvious—he cuts so fast between different and unexpected ideas. His website has an interview where we talks about Deleuze and Guattari, and he seems like them, making connections prodigiously. His talk starts at 7:00 on Tuesday the 13^th, in the Clement Auditorium on the APSU campus.

Last email I also missed a couple of things for next weekend—Cumberland Gallery’s Packages Large and Small show, and Plowhaus’ Festivus sale/show. Both start on Nov. 17, and are the same basic idea with different price points—group shows with lots of stuff on offer for holiday shopping.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email version of this listing, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

Nov. 12

MTSU, Dave Hickey lecture. It’s probably a completely spurious comparison, but I can’t shake the idea that Hickey is the Hunter Thompson of art critics. He’s in Las Vegas, so there’s that connection, and he drops frequent drug references. His scheduled topic for the talk is the current insane art market, a floating feast of excess that manifests itself in the international art fairs. The craziness doesn’t worry Hickey, who figures no one gets hurt by overpaying for art, and in the end the emphasis on the marketplace will lead to commerce taking over from institutions the role of defining value, leading to a more democratic aesthetics. The lecture is at 7:00 in State Farm Lecture Hall in the Business Aerospace Building. There’s gotta be a message in the choice of room and building.

Nov. 13

APSU, Paul Miller lecture. Miller’s lecture is advertised as going into his ideas about the significance of digital production techniques and pervasive interconnectedness to art. I think I’ve said my peace about him in the intro paragraph to the listings. 7:00 in the Clement Auditorium.

Nov 15-16

Nashville Ballet, Emergence. This program pairs composers from the Blair School faculty with choreographers in the creation of a new work of ballet and music. They do it every two years, and the result last time around was one of the more engaging performances I’ve seen in Nashville. Among other things it’s good to hear substantial pieces by the Vandy composition faculty – their work is not played out that often in town. The composers are pretty conservative, but it’s good to hear new work, and it’s usually not rehashed Americana like a lot of what occurs in town. This year one of the composers is Stan Link, who does electro-acoustic stuff that has sounded really good from my limited exposure to it. The performances are at 8:00 in the recital hall at the Blair School, Thursday and Friday night.

Nov. 16

Frist, Katy Siegel lecture. The parade of distinguished art lectures goes on with Siegel at the Frist. Actually, this might be the last in a run of good fortune. Seigel writes for ArtForum, teaches at Hunter College, and seems to have her finger into every aspect of contemporary art. Just to pick up one thing, she curated a show on painting in New York from the period 1967-75 which I saw in DC and which has been traveling through ICI. The period is significant because this was a time when everyone was declaring the death of painting (sculpture and installation were ascendant), but plenty was still happening, and it’s up to people like Siegel to remind us about it. Hard to say much about what she’s going to talk about from the title—“Contemporary Art in the Age of Extremes.” The lecture is at 6:00.

Future/Now: Mid-State Art Majors, Frist. This is pretty cool—an exhibit of art by current students at local colleges (Fisk, APSU, MTSU, TSU, Watkins, Vandy, Lipscomb, Belmont, and the Appalachian Center for Crafts—looks like they missed Sewanee). The works were chosen by faculty at the schools, so if nothing else it will show you who has ingratiated themselves with their faculty. Seriously, I think it’s great that the Frist is opening their doors to these artists. People who make it to one-night group shows, campus exhibits, and some of the Arcade galleries will see some of these students, but there’s a lot of people who get to those places. It’s also a good counterpoint to the Société Anonyme—most of these students undoubtedly want to be the Modernists of their day.

Nashville Opera, Elmer Gantry. The Nashville Opera is doing the premier of an opera by Robert Aldridge. This is a big deal. Aldridge is a well-known composer and this is the latest entry in the great American opera sweepstakes, which seems to have heated up lately. Elmer Gantry is the story of an evangelical preacher, so Aldridge uses lots of gospel music in his work—he’s a southerner, and he and librettist went to tent meetings in western North Carolina (his father was a preacher there). They are positioning the work as a crossover possibility—“if you liked ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’ here’s an opera you’ll like.” That pitch doesn’t really grab me, but I should probably keep an open mind about this. Aldridge sounds like he’s genuinely engaged by roots music. It’s just it almost never works out that these vernaculars profit from getting transferred into classical settings, and I just don’t think classical music needs rescuing from its own vocabulary and sounds. But leaving aside my carping, it’s a big deal for the Nashville Opera to stage this premier, of an ambitious strategy that has the Opera trying something unusual every year, like the double bill of Davies The Lighthouse and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine a couple of years ago. The people at the Opera (Carol Penterman, John Hoomes, etc.) seem determined to make something happen here. Cool. 8:00 on the 16^th in TPAC Polk Theater. The Opera is also presenting this production at 2:00 on Sunday the 18^th and 7:00 on Tuesday the 20^th.

Nov. 16-17

Watkins, Yart Sale Watkins students offer their work for sale every year about this time, when you’re supposed to be thinking about Christmas. Dave Hickey would be proud. And no one gets hurt by paying very little for a photo by a Watkins student.

Nov. 17

Cumberland Gallery, Packages Large and Small Cumberland’s annual holiday show, formerly the Small Packages show—pieces by many of Cumberland’s gallery artists, a few others, represented by previously limited to 15 inches, now expanded to up to 40 inches in size.

Plowhaus, Festivus Holiday Show. Same idea as above from artists less likely to have a faculty appointment.

Notes on the Ruby Green Ceramics Show

Ruby Green’s current exhibit is a group show of ceramic sculpture selected by Rob McClurg and Dona Berotti. They did a similar show there a couple of years ago with artists working in glass, and there were several things where that stuck with me, especially Becky Wehmer’s application of baking soda to the hot surface of the glass which after it has cooled eats away at the glass, causing it to decay over time. It gives the glass surface a much more organic texture, and the decay process is interesting to contemplate because glass is fundamentally a very stable material. I’m familiar with some researchers at Catholic University in DC who have developed methods to encase nasty chemical waste products in glass because it is so stable and impermeable. Based on stuff like that last time, I was looking forward to what they would come up with in clay, which is Rob McClurg’s primary medium anyway. (BTW, this show closes on Nov. 24.)

First off, all of the piece here were sculptural, none were based on vessels, and that’s disappointing to me. I’m really attracted to ceramics that work with the traditional forms as well as traditional materials and play through and with those forms somehow. Nothing wrong with using the medium for sculpture, I’m just into different bits of business with vessels.

That being said, there were, not surprisingly, several things of interest in this show. Let me start with one of Delia Seigenthaler’s pieces, called “Fuhn.” It is an exploded human body, a Buddha head capping it, dismembered arms and legs placed in position like it was being reconstructed from fragments, and in place of the torso, the forms of organs—lungs, liver, intestine, and kidneys I think, in artificial colors. I liked this as a take on eastern medicine, which dwells on spiritual dimensions of body systems at the same time being very concrete about components of the body. There is something earthy about these particular organs—kidneys and liver which process and clean up digestion of what a creature ingest, and the lungs with its mass of bronchia and alveoli to process air. The organs in the sculpture are bright and colorful, an oblique reference to chakra systems or some other method of classifying and characterizing parts of the body. While the colors were cheerful, there is something startling about being confronted by these specific organs that conveys the sense of a human being endowed with beauty but not detached from the practical realities of organic functions. It is a being that is spiritual and extremely physical, but not without a conflict between these two. They are mutual characteristics in this image.

The show includes two of Seigenthaler’s doll-sculptures, and I’m not crazy about those. The subtly (or maybe it’s not subtle) sexualized features give the pieces their problem statement, but I’m not that engaged by them as images/objects. “Fuhn” registered more for me, maybe because it connected with some ideas that already hold interest for me. The more overt spiritual dimensions of it may give me a better entry for the other pieces.

One thread in the show was gross stuff depicted in clay. This thread jumped out in part because of placement of objects. Right inside the entrance were two but pieces by Roxanne Jackson, “Hyena,” which was a threatening, evil-looking canine crouching close to the ground, and a piece called “Self-Sabotage” which has a mashed up figure that was an image of mutilation of vivisection. Somehow this connected with a piece by Ken Rowe called “Bunny Tale” which shows a kid poking at the decaying corpse of a rabbit. There was also some cartoonish violence in John Donovan’s work, as well as bunnies. One shows this cartoon bunny with a hot pink hole going through its belly, a splat of hot pink on the wall behind; the bunny is awkwardly holding a revolver. But with John’s work you’ve gotten away from gross stuff to the colorful, happy patterns of cartoons, even if it involves a rabbit with its guts blasted clean out.

Bunnies are the theme of all of John’s work, including two Bunny Warriors which are Asian-style sculptures of stocky, spear-carrying warriors wearing armor but also each have a bunny sitting on their head, where you might expect to see a helmet or at least a predator’s head.

Ken Rowe’s bunny piece was placed next to a couple of Jason Briggs’ sculptures, which are composed of forms that are abstract but still disconcertingly biomorphic. Rowe’s pieces are very realistic in the manner of a traditional illustrator, but they bring back to mind a point I’ve made about Briggs before, which is that his work is also very realistic. The surfaces look like real skin and hair, some parts of the skin rough and dry, but other parts are moist and fleshy. He convincingly creates the trompe l’oeil impression of skin and flesh within compositions that have no connection to identifiable biological objects.

To my eye, the closest thing to vessels in this show was Rob McClurg’s assemblage “Did X Know Y Too.” It’s a whole mess of similar spermatozoa-shaped forms attached to a wall and piled up at its bottom. The sperm-forms could also be sea shells, and they all seem to have different variations of glazes and surface treatment. This piece shows the inventiveness of working with a single form and finding all the variations you can within certain parameters of color and pattern. It’s a key way potters indulge their inventiveness around the generation of vases or bowls. So in addition to the humor of this depiction of the sperm’s race to fertilize the egg, with failed entrants falling by the wayside, the piece also makes use of the creative sources inherent in ceramics as a medium and a practice distinct from sculpture.

Nashville Visual Arts Events November 7-17

There’s a lot coming up the next two weeks. I suppose its venues getting up shows that will run through December. This should be my final listing for November. And I’ll probably do a quick first weekend thing in December and then another one (maybe).

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email version of this listing, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

Nov. 8

Sarratt Gallery, Vanderbilt, Susan Maakestad and Kevin Kennedy. Susan is one of my favorite painters. She’s in Memphis, teaches at Memphis College of Art. I’ve written about her several times. Here’s an essay I did for the gallery brochure of a show she had in Memphis a while back. She showed last Spring at the Temple Art Fair, and now she’s back, this time at Sarratt. She makes glowing paintings, they make me think about Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn, two other artists I never tire of looking at. Susan (I guess Kevin Kennedy also) is doing a gallery talk at 5, then there’s a reception.

Nov. 9

Tennessee State University, Mary Perrin and Karen Edmunds, Storm Stories. The two artists will appear at TSU’s downtown campus to do a lecture/performance/slide show. The two artists are from Louisiana and dealt with Katrina and Rita (Perrin in Lafayette, Edmunds in New Orleans). They both kept journals during it all, and their performance tells stories from these journals and adds reflections—it sounds like the idea is a two-person Spaulding Gray performance, or something like that. The performance starts at 6:00, in the Avon Williams building at 330 10^th Avenue North. Plenty of details at Jodi Hays’ blog.

Watkins, Quinn Dukes, Senior Show. It’s surprising to realize that Quinn is just finishing at Watkins. She’s been active on the scene for several years, notable for performance pieces that build dance/theatre/motion work up with elaborate costume/sets. For her senior show, it looks like they’ve turned over the entire gallery to her—usually they show about 3 students at a time, but occasionally someone is working at a scale where they use the entire space (I’m thinking of Shaun Slifer’s show from a couple of years ago). There will be video, presumably sculpture also, maybe the artifacts from performance, and performance at the opening – that’s 6:00 on the 9^th.

Centennial, KISS. Katherine Dettwiller, Irene Ritter, and Sharon Charney. Paintings by Charney, encaustic paintings by Dettwiller (probably will be the most interesting work in this show), and stone sculpture by Irene Ritter (I didn’t realize she served as Deputy Mayor in the 1980s—seems like we should start bugging Curt Garrigan about the sculptures in his attic). Opening reception runs 5-7.

Project A, Hunter Armistead photos. Armistead is the leader of Mel and the Party Hats, a Nashville institution. He name (or the gallery) checks Avedon and Marcel Duchamp in the PR. OK. Doesn’t really match the work on-line.

Lance Dupre designs: Melissa Martin, Donny Smutz, Stephen Watkins. I’m listing the opening exhibit for this store, on Rosa Parks Blvd/8^th Avenue. It’s hard to say whether this will be some nasty decorator crap or art worth stopping to look at, but for now let’s assume the best.

Nov. 10

Artrageous. The 20^th anniversary for this fundraiser for AIDS education and services. The participating galleries are Arts Company, Bennett, Cumberland, Dangenart, Estel, Finer Things, Local Color, Midtown, Richter, and the TN Art League. Estel is showing work by a new artist, Laura Kaufman, and light sculptures by Kelly Butler. Dangenart has pulled a neat trick in one of their rooms, which has overtly erotic work by Daniel Lai, Smaantha Callahan, and Barry Noland sharing space with the military images of Ben Vitualla and John Schramlin. This adds to their work the erotic fetishization of the soldier’s body, something that’s not obvious in Ben’s work, but on some level is unavoidable. Wolfgang Tillmans had an installation on this in his exhibit at the Hirschhorn earlier this year.

Alfred Williams & Company, Justin Nolan Key. This is a Watkins senior show, on display at this venue at 716 Division Street, near Frugal MacDougal’s and Flyte. Key is a photographer—I don’t know his work, but the description says it is digitally manipulated images printed large scale, “commenting on genetics & the manipulation of the natural world” to cut corners and quote the press release. The opening is at 6:00 on the 10^th.

Nov. 11

CRAFT: A Creative Community A group of local artists/artisans holds a monthly sale/fair in the parking lot of Lipstick Lounge, the next one is 11-5 on Sunday, November 11. It sounds like the event is growing, because they’ve added a second location—the Lipstick Lounge parking lot is at 14^th and Woodland, and there will also be people at the corner of 11^th and Woodland. And as I read on in their press release, I see the CRAFT people will be at the Farmer’s Market on November 24 and December 1, 8, 15, and 22—that works out to every Saturday between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Dave Hickey would be proud.

Nov. 12

MTSU, Dave Hickey lecture. It’s probably a completely spurious comparison, but I can’t shake the idea that Hickey is the Hunter Thompson of art critics. He’s in Las Vegas, so there’s that connection, and he drops frequent drug references. His scheduled topic for the talk is the current insane art market, a floating feast of excess that manifests itself in the international art fairs. The craziness doesn’t worry Hickey, who figures no one gets hurt by overpaying for art, and in the end the emphasis on the marketplace will lead to commerce taking over from institutions the role of defining value, leading to a more democratic aesthetics. The lecture is at 7:00 in State Farm Lecture Hall in the Business Aerospace Building. There’s gotta be a message in the choice of room and building.

Nov 15-16

Nashville Ballet, Emergence. This program pairs composers from the Blair School faculty with choreographers in the creation of a new work of ballet and music. They do it every two years, and the result last time around was one of the more engaging performances I’ve seen in Nashville. Among other things it’s good to hear substantial pieces by the Vandy composition faculty – their work is not played out that often in town. The composers are pretty conservative, but it’s good to hear new work, and it’s usually not rehashed Americana like a lot of what occurs in town. This year one of the composers is Stan Link, who does electro-acoustic stuff that has sounded really good from my limited exposure to it. The performances are at 8:00 in the recital hall at the Blair School, Thursday and Friday night.

Nov. 16

Frist, Katy Siegel lecture. The parade of distinguished art lectures goes on with Siegel at the Frist. Actually, this might be the last in a run of good fortune. Seigel writes for ArtForum, teaches at Hunter College, and seems to have her finger into every aspect of contemporary art. Just to pick up one thing, she curated a show on painting in New York from the period 1967-75 which I saw in DC and which has been traveling through ICI. The period is significant because this was a time when everyone was declaring the death of painting (sculpture and installation were ascendant), but plenty was still happening, and it’s up to people like Siegel to remind us about it. Hard to say much about what she’s going to talk about from the title—“Contemporary Art in the Age of Extremes.” The lecture is at 6:00.

Future/Now: Mid-State Art Majors, Frist. This is pretty cool—an exhibit of art by current students at local colleges (Fisk, APSU, MTSU, TSU, Watkins, Vandy, Lipscomb, Belmont, and the Appalachian Center for Crafts—looks like they missed Sewanee). The works were chosen by faculty at the schools, so if nothing else it will show you who has ingratiated themselves with their faculty. Seriously, I think it’s great that the Frist is opening their doors to these artists. People who make it to one-night group shows, campus exhibits, and some of the Arcade galleries will see some of these students, but there’s a lot of people who get to those places. It’s also a good counterpoint to the Société Anonyme—most of these students undoubtedly want to be the Modernists of their day.

Nashville Opera, Elmer Gantry. The Nashville Opera is doing the premier of an opera by Robert Aldridge. This is a big deal. Aldridge is a well-known composer and this is the latest entry in the great American opera sweepstakes, which seems to have heated up lately. Elmer Gantry is the story of an evangelical preacher, so Aldridge uses lots of gospel music in his work—he’s a southerner, and he and librettist went to tent meetings in western North Carolina (his father was a preacher there). They are positioning the work as a crossover possibility—“if you liked ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’ here’s an opera you’ll like.” That pitch doesn’t really grab me, but I should probably keep an open mind about this. Aldridge sounds like he’s genuinely engaged by roots music. It’s just it almost never works out that these vernaculars profit from getting transferred into classical settings, and I just don’t think classical music needs rescuing from its own vocabulary and sounds. But leaving aside my carping, it’s a big deal for the Nashville Opera to stage this premier, of an ambitious strategy that has the Opera trying something unusual every year, like the double bill of Davies The Lighthouse and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine a couple of years ago. The people at the Opera (Carol Penterman, John Hoomes, etc.) seem determined to make something happen here. Cool.

Nov. 16-17

Watkins, Yart Sale Watkins students offer their work for sale every year about this time, when you’re supposed to be thinking about Christmas. Dave Hickey would be proud. And no one gets hurt by paying very little for a photo by a Watkins student.

Arthur Danto talk – not so good

Arthur Danto makes you want to write art criticism. His writing makes it obvious how looking at and thinking about art is a serious intellectual activity. Sure, he’s smarter than you (at least that’s the case for me), better read, but you think maybe you could write a review that does a little of what he does, that uses your experience of art as the basis for an interesting idea or two.

So I was looking forward to his Thursday talk at Vanderbilt a great deal. The topic was the restoration of the Sistine Chapel. It wasn’t obvious what he would do with that, but I was sure he wouldn’t linger long on the controversy, but would go from there to observations about the nature of art, of making art, of viewing art, of social and institutional meaning-making.

Well, to some extent he did exactly what I thought he wouldn’t do. The talk focused on making the case that the restoration was ill-conceived. He made a compelling case that the restorers screwed up, but you don’t have to read much to see how that is likely the case.

The talk itself was badly organized. It was emblematic when he threw up a Powerpoint slide that showed a tiny, indecipherable patch lost in the middle of the big screen. It utterly deflated the impact of offering visual evidence to support his point. The whole talk seemed organized or mis-organized that way.

Many of his arguments circled back time and again long after a point was made. For one, he kept returning to the point that Michelangelo was more of a draughtsman than a colorist, so restoration approaches that emphasized the vividness of color and diminished the emphasis in lines would run counter to the nature of the work. This is a point about Michelangelo that I believe is well accepted, and in the context of his talk, he made the point the first time it came up – he didn’t need to marshal additional evidence.

The main Danto-ism in the talk was the idea that the approach taken by the head of the restoration, Gianluigi Colalucci, was a form of positivism which loses sight of more essential arguments about how to approach the restoration. Colalucci’s approach relied on a micro-level analysis of the fresco as an object, examining each brushstroke and taking away anything they determined Michelangelo did not put there. The primary critics of the restoration argue that the restorers could not correctly identify what materials Michelangelo did put there. Did Michelangelo go back after the plaster dried and add paint or soot black highlights a secco?

Danto cuts through the very basis of this argument, and says you have to start by examining the work (not the object) and its meaning (not just its physical characteristics), and see what decisions that leads to. An utterly sensible reading of the Chapel ceiling is that an important theme is humanity’s struggle to emerge from darkness of sin into light. Once you accept that as a possibility, brightening up the colors becomes a dubious proposition, and any place where there's a question about whether to leave in elements that give the work shadows and darkness, the obvious choice is caution and preservation.

This is a good point, and the elevation of interpretation in deciding what to do with art has great implications. But Danto didn’t really get into that, and he wasted a lot of time backing up his points about the Sistine Chapel from every angle. I wish he had taken his ideas, left the Sistine Chapel, and talked about other implications of relying on interpretation more fully and fearlessly. It’s a good opportunity to go back to intent—should you look for intent in interpretation, or is interpretation based on the inherent qualities of the work? Does it matter whether Michelangelo was engaged with Neo-Platonism in Rome, or are the ideas of lightness and dark fully evident in the work without recourse to biographical reinforcement? But he didn’t do this.

In the interests of full disclosure, at the end I asked a completely confused and confusing question that was perfectly designed to thwart anyone’s attempts at responsiveness. I was trying to redirect him into applying his ideas in some sort of contemporary context—I should have stopped myself when I couldn’t remember Christoph Buchel’s name, the artist who is in court with Mass MOCA trying to stop them from exhibiting an installation that is either substantially but partially completed, or completely detached from the artist’s intentions and will, depending on your point of view. I made a pathetic plea for someone to bail me out with the name, but ended up sputtering about “this case at Mass MOCA, I’m sure you’ve heard of it...” Ychyfi.

Gypsy history

The Gypsies themselves have no heroes. There are no myths of a great liberation, of the founding of the “nation,” of a promised land. They have no Romulus and Remus, no wandering, battling Aeneas. They have no monuments or shrines, no anthem, no ruins. And no Book. Apart from just over a hundred words and phrases notes by three non-Gypsies in the sixteenth century, there are no samples of early spoken Romani. But they do have myths of ancestry and of migration. Or any rate such myths have been attributed to them.

Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing

Maria’s been encouraging me to read this book for years and I finally got around to it, working through it in the typical start and stop way I do with any book these days.

Loved this passage. It’s one of the reasons the Gypsies occupy such an important place in the collective imagination. They are such a complete alternative to prevailing orders, in this case even of the orders of the imagination. The idea of a society and culture that is not structured around heroes and nations has a great appeal for anyone who has trouble with the question who is your hero, or who are your top 5 favorite cribbage players. On the hero question, push comes to shove and I’ll say Pete Seeger, but that seems like a really inadequate response. There’s all sorts of people I admire and who interest me, but I don’t want to saddle any of them with the burden of heroism.

We have trouble imagining history and culture without fixating on a few figures, or at least it's more easily packaged that way. The quantity of identities and facts is otherwise overwhelming. If you find every noise band interesting, where do you start and stop. It's a lot easier to say "you need to check out Nautical Almanac" and know you've got it covered.

Isabel Fonseca's passage rings of intense idealism. Strains of John Lennon—imagine there’s no countries, imagine there’s no heaven. Just the life we’re leading. Your Gypsy kin and companions, the ones you talk to all the time, not some long-gone characters who probably weren’t anything like the way they’re depicted.

Words of wisdom from Mario Pavone

Last night I got to hear my old childhood friend Ron Horton play live for the first time since high school. I was in New Haven, and he came to New Haven to play with the Will Holshouser Trio (and quartet much of the time thanks to the addition of Scott Robinson) at Firehouse 12. That’s worth a full blog post, will try to do it. But I wanted to talk about something else that came up.

Afterwards Ron introduced me to Mario Pavone, a great bass player and composer whom Ron has played with and who lives in New Haven. A few years ago I heard this lovely cut from an ensemble recording he did that I really need to track down. It was a stay close to the radio until the talk break moment.

So he was talking about what he’s up to, and it’s a lot. He had just gone into the studio with Paul Bley (!!) and Matt Wilson, and he talked about feeling like the music has really flowing. Then he said something like “Music is on fire right now. The culture is sick, but music is on fire, so much of it, all these young people getting into it even if the audiences aren’t there.” He was definitely talking about it as a kind of reaction to the war and the administration – we had just been talking about Ben Allison’s Cowboy Justice group (Ron’s a member), which just did a gig at the Jazz Standard. The Cowboy Justice songs are all references to current politics, with angry and sardonic edges. (Maria found a YouTube clip of the group at the Green Mill in Chicago.)

I tend to agree with Mario. There does seem to be great energy out there. For jazz music, especially if you’re on the East Coast. There are a lot of inspired projects out there, older guys like Paul Bley are doing wonderful work, older musicians are working with younger ones. The economics of it are shaky as hell, which tends to make it obvious that it is driven by a passion. It would not be the first time that illness in the dominant cultures resulted in a counter-reaction of artistic energy.

One thing I distrust in myself with this line of thought is that maybe I’m glad for incompetent government, a disastrous war, economic disorder, and imminent environment collapse because it makes for interesting music. “Hey, let’s light a fire under these people.” Mario talked about waiting to see what happens when this administration leaves the stage, and you’ve got to be in this with the idea that the energy building in opposition can flow into the creation of something positive in the world as conditions reconfigure to allow it. I remember the strong sense of something new and great being just around the corner in the late 60s and early 70s. I was for some time in my youth discouraged by what came instead. But there’s no reason to just say nothing ever comes of this sort of cultural energy. That’s reductionistic and simplistic. Mario seems hopeful when he talks about this.

Nashville Visual Arts Events Oct. 18-31

OK, the big deal coming up is Arthur Danto speaking next week at Vanderbilt. On top of that, Peter Plagens is speaking this week. How odd to have those two here within 8 days of each other.

Also, for the middle of the month, plenty of exhibits opening.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email version of this listing, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

October 18

Downtown Artists Coop, Monica Quattrochio, Time. Up in Clarksville, at the Downtown Artists Co-op, photographer Monica Quattrochio is showing new work, at least new to me. A couple of years ago she did a series of flowers in close-up and at a very large size, the scale effects extreme enough to give them an unusual fleshiness. This time the photos seems to show actual skin—people’s hands in a couple I’ve seen. I don’t know if she’s working at the same scale in these new pictures.

Emily Leonard, In Returning. Emily’s doing a one-night preview in her studio of some paintings that she’s going to be showing at a gallery in Seattle. These are quiet landscapes, many set at dusk or dawn, painted at a pretty large scale. Her studio is in the 427 Chestnut Street building, suite 230, the preview will run from 5-8.


Peter Plagens lecturing at the Frist Center. The title of his talk is “The Absolute Truth,” so we’d better check this out. Plagens is equally identified as a painter and critic, and as a critic writes for an unusual range of publications—he was the art critic at Newsweek (although I think he’s left there), as well as a contributor to more typical publications like Artforum and Art in America. The lecture starts at 7:00.

October 19

If you’re in New York Friday night, Jerry Dale McFadden is curating a one-night event at Lotus Space, 122 W. 26th Street. The event is sponsored by Keen Footwear and features art by people who use found or sustainable materials or address issues of conservation and sustainability. This gives Jerry Dale a chance to show work by several local artists whose approaches fit nicely within that description, like Adrienne Outlaw, Barbara Yontz, and Mary Sue Kern. He’s also pulled in some national figures like Chris Jordan, whose photographs give a monumental expression to the consumption of resources in our society.

And if you’re in New Haven, CT on Friday, go see my friend Ron Horton play with the Will Holshouser Trio at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street. That’s where I’m going to be.


October 20

Nashville Peace and Justice Center, Tickled Pink for Peace Benefit. This art auction benefits a program called Farms Not Arms that has been organized by people in the progressive farming and agriculture community. One of its co-directors is based at The Farm, the long-standing intentional community in Summerton, TN (the other director listed on the website is based in Northern California, although there’s people involved from all over, including places in the heart of mainstream farm country like Iowa). The program intends to hook up vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with jobs and training on farms and in small communities. Sounds like taking the “beating swords into ploughshares” business very seriously. The auction, co-sponsored by the Nashville Peace and Justice Center and several other Nashville peace groups, will benefit local activities of this group, although I didn’t quite get details on those programs. I imagine that will depend on making connections between individual vets and groups like The Farm, seeing what makes sense for each person. Some of the artists contributing to the auction caught my eye, like Erika Johnson, Ben Vitualla, and Robert Vore. The event will be held at the Peace and Justice Center’s new digs at 4732 Longdale, off Harding Place. The auction is Saturday from 6 to 10; there’s also a preview party on Friday the 19th, with an admission price of $30 for that.

ArtHouse, Whitney Ferre, Cindy Wunsch, and Linda Turner. In addition to making contributions as artists, the participants in this show have been involved in a notable amount of business entrepreneurship around here. Ferre co-owns the ArtHouse itself and Rumours wine bar next door, and Turner owns A Thousand Faces in Hillsboro Village.

October 24

Vanderbilt Ingram Studio Art Gallery, Parts of the Puzzle, Please and Leticia Bajuyo, Forces of Nature, Hurricanes and Slinkys. The first is a three person show (Suzanne Bocanegra, Kurt Dominick, and Erin Cunningham) curated by the new chair of the studio art program at Vandy, Mel Ziegler, plus an installation by Bajuyo. Several of artists seem to have Texas connections, where Ziegler was before coming to Vandy. Bocanegra has done some fascinating things by making tons of small drawings and collecting found images that she then piles up and slaps on the wall in such quantity as to become a kind of sculpture. The reception runs 5-7 on the 24th. The gallery is on the second floor of the Studio Art building.

October 25

Arthur Danto speaking at Vanderbilt. My favorite art writing comes from philosophers who use art as a foundation for thinking. More than other writers, they encourage you to run with your ideas and your responses to a work of art, and let them take you where you will. They show you a way to do that. As you follow Danto along some explanation of a concept from Hegel and how it applies to an image, his writing makes you feel smart, even if he’s the one who’s read Hegel, not you. His topic for the lecture at Vanderbilt is “Before and After: Two Decades after the Sistine Chapel Controversy.” I don’t know what his take is on this, but you know that he won’t be giving a simple account of the restoration process or of the controversy surrounding it. This is the kind of incident that should provide him with a jumping off point to talk about things like the nature of the art object ownership of the object or image, memory, who knows. This is an afternoon event, 4:10 in room 103 of Wilson Hall, so you’ll have to skip work.

October 26

Frist Center, The Societe Anonyme and Rosemary Laing, Flight. The Societe Anonyme was a group founded in 1920 by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray that staged exhibits which introduced New York to leading Modernist artists, collected work by them, hosted lectures and readings, and sponsored publications. The collection ended up intact at Yale University, which has put together an exhibit that gives a comprehensive view of the group’s reach and interests. You can see this group as sowing the seeds for the kinds of American art experimentation that came after Abstract Expressionism, which really had more in common with the sardonic, prickly qualities of Dada figures like Duchamp or Schwitters.

October 27

Zeitgeist, Pinkney Herbert and John Geldersma. Pinkney Herbert is one of the people who make Memphis something of a bastion of abstract painting. He’s showing with John Geldersma, who makes masks and quasi-ritual objects inspired by Native American and other non-Western practices.

Plowhaus, Dia de los Muertos celebration. This is the 6th year that Plowhaus has done a Day of the Dead exhibit, featuring shrines by a number of their frequent contributors. This show has been a really good context for Franne Lee’s work in particular. Some of the other participants include Beth Seiters, Andee Rudloff, Carrie Mills, and John Holland. I started tuning into the Day of the Dead when I was living in Chicago 15 years ago, and had a number of powerful experiences as art galleries were turned over for acts of remembrance. In American society, we have all sorts of commemoration of the dead, but a lot of it is highly programmed. Someone “important” dies and we go into a media-fueled process of grief and commemoration. Maybe its flags at half-mast, or marathon shows on WSM or WKCR. Day of the Dead was a chance to be with whomever you felt like invoking on the day. You could indulge some sadness but you couldn’t avoid the fact that it was a chance for people to get together, have a few beers, and look at colorful stuff. The art world’s adoption of Dia de los Muertos doesn’t have a huge connection to Mexican culture and Mexican communities, but it serves its own purposes.


Samhain (October 31st )

Renaissance Center, Dickson – a bunch of stuff. Armon Means seems to be keeping busy out at the Renaissance Center, finding every nook and cranny out there to show art. They’ve got four exhibits opening on the 31st. Actually, the opening receptions are on Nov. 2, so I’ll save more on this for next email. Just a quick run-down: ceramics by Jason Briggs (also in the ceramics show at Ruby Green), paintings by Kate Badoe, a Cookeville resident originally from Ghana, photos by Jaime Tracy inspired by color field painters, and a group show of photos of the human figure.


Other stuff

For the November first Saturday downtown art extravaganza, Downtown Pres is inviting people to exhibit their art during the Art Luck meal before the openings. All you have to do is show up at noon on Saturday, November 3 with your art (they just ask that the work be appropriate, or not inappropriate, for the kids who will be there), and that you take it with you at the end of the evening. Get in touch with Beth Gilmore if you think you’re going to want to do this: beth.gilmore@gmail.com

Nashville Visual Arts Events October 1-15

There’s a lot going on, and I’m sure I won’t do justice to everything.

I have to say, the highlight for the next couple of weeks is seeing Erika Johnson get full art museum treatment at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. They’re featuring a piece of hers that she developed “in conversation with the 2007 fellows of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt.” Just seeing that description made me realize one of the things I respond to in Erika’s installations is their strong discursive quality. A major part in most of her pieces are old photos, transferred onto transparencies and selected for their ability in isolation and in combination to suggest, but not spell out, lines of description and reasoning about gender, history, and memory. I’ve also realized that last quality, the creation of memory, transcends the particulars of her pieces. Erika has worked at Vanderbilt for some time, and was at the Warren Center for a while. It’s good to see her time there express itself in work. Oh yes, the show opens on Thursday, October 4. I can’t tell if there’s going to be an opening reception. They are going to have a reception on Oct. 25, when they are brining Arthur Danto (!!) in to talk. More on that when we’re closer to the date.

As always, if you have an email list of your own, feel free to forward this.

If someone wants to get added directly to my list for the email version of this listing, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

First, there’s a few things I missed that opened early this week (in addition to the Emma Amos lecture at Vandy yesterday).

October 1

Austin Peay, Figure 8. A group of figurative drawings curated by Austin Peay professor Kell Black, who has work in the show along with Anne Beidler, Amy Fichter, Eileen Greene, Marcus Greene, Patrick Hammie, Marilyn Murphy, and Scotty Peek. Offhand I don’t know the work by most of the others (other than Marilyn Murphy and Black), but Black’s work is great and I trust him to select well. This show is only up through Oct. 21, so if you are going to go to Clarksville to check it out, get on up there.

TSU, Storm Stories: Artists Respond to Disaster. The first show in the TSU gallery under Jodi Hays, who started her tenure as director this summer. The show features Karen Edmunds from New Orleans and Mary Perrin from Lafayette, who I guess both rode through Katrina and Rita. In addition to work on the walls, the two artists do a performance which they will perform on November 9 at TSU’s downtown campus. There’s a little more information and things like directions on Jodi’s blog.

Sarratt Gallery, Carrol Harding Mctyre and Herbert J. Rieth, III. I got a card announcing this but don’t have it with me right now. I’m pretty sure Herb grew up in Nashville and I think he lives in Mississippi (if I’ve got it right, I met his mother, who is also an artist, in Memphis a while back).

October 4

Vanderbilt Fine Arts, More Than One: Contemporary Prints and Multiples—plus an installation piece by Erika Johnson. This show of prints from the Vanderbilt collection grew out of an academic symposium at the Warren Center. The works on display include pieces by Carrie Mae Weems, Martin Puryear, Sigmar Polke, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, and Alexis Rockman, among others. I got a chance to see two of Weems major photographic and multi-media series at the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga last year, Walker is an important presence (last thing I saw was her exhibit After the Deluge at the Met in 2006 which interspersed her work and selections from odd corners of the Met’s collection), I seem to blog about Rockman every couple of years, etc., Puryear is always delightful (although I’m not sure I’ve seen his prints or photos)—while this selection probably won’t have the same impact as seeing a major exhibit by any one of these artists, it’s a top-notch list. As I said above, I don’t think there’s an event this week, it looks like they are holding off until Danto comes to town. I can’t believe they’re bringing Danto, but then again it’s the kind of thing major universities are supposed to do. In some ways the bigger surprise is that one is surprised.

Alias season opening concert. Yes, a non-visual art event. Alias is the leading chamber music group in Nashville—an admittedly small universe, but they put together very imaginative programs and play with gusto. This program includes Shostakovich’s 9^th String Quartet—the Shostakovich quartets are major works, like the cycles of quartets by Beethoven, Bartok, Haydn, and Carter. They’ve also programmed at Vaughan Williams piece for clarinet, horn, violin, cello, and piano that should be charming. One note: no baroque pieces on this bill, which is usually a highlight, especially Zeneba Bowers’ playing on them.

Brent Green films at The Basement Just got some information on this—Green is an animator who makes films from hand-painted images and wood carvings. Deanna Varagona (from Lambchop and other music projects) is going to improvise a soundtrack. Her email on it says she’ll most likely be playing cello (she mostly plays baritone sax in Lambchop, and she plays guitar and sings in other projects). The show starts at 7:00.

October 5

Cheekwood, Genius of Place, David Lefkowitz, and Open Call: Emerging Video Artists. Cheekwood opens 3 new shows. In the main house is a photographic series on gardens at grand American houses of a similar era to Cheekwood. They include Dumbarton Oaks in DC, which has always been one of my favorite places. But I’d think I’d rather go to the house than look at photos of it, but we’ll see. The video show was the result of an open call for submissions, with a jury choosing 7 finalists to include in the show. This almost certainly will have some interesting stuff.

Watkins Student Graphic Design Juried Exhibit. Annual student show by Watkins design students, with an opening from 6-8.

October 6

The first Saturday will be busy as usual.

Twist, Mark Sloniker, Beyond the Luminous Edge. An installation by an artist who makes his living making puppets for theme parks around the country.

TAG, Michael McConnell and Nick Butcher McConnell was at TAG last year (here's one of his pieces) in a joint show with Jonn Herschend where they played off each other in making work over a year and tied it all together with string. Now he’s back on his own. Butcher, in the back gallery, combines print and painting techniques. The works in this show are abstractions, although he's known more for figuration.

SQFT, The Painting Show. SQFT has done several shows of drawing, now they are doing one for painting. Like many of their other shows, the line up includes several young artists from New York and California: Jennifer Garrido, Eric Graham, Jieun Zaun Lee-Choi, Miyeon Lee, and Elizabeth Schuppe.

The Arts Company, The Frenzels, Meagan Kieffer, Brother Steve. Brother Steve and Meagan Kieffer are sculptors, Brother Steve worked in clay (he was a Marianist and is now a Benedictine monk, and I gather he isn’t making art now). The Frenzels are a husband and wife team who jointly make paintings about Nashville icons.

Dangenart and Rymer. I don’t have any information yet on their shows, but I assume they are opening new stuff Saturday night. Rymer is a new gallery on 6^th Avenue run by artist Herb Williams and some associates. Also, Estel will be open on gallery crawl night.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Art Luck and children’s art show. To kick off the art crawl, Downtown Pres has a pot luck supper. The art this month is by the children of the church—we do a big kid’s art project every year in one form or the other. I think this is the second year we’ve done it as an art show. This year the kids did photographs under the watchful guidance of Liz Streight among others.

LeQuire Gallery, Tennessee Sculptors, the Legacy of Olen Bryant Bryant is well-recognized sculptor who always strikes me as having an strong Earth-centered, mystical streak. LeQuire is showing work by him and five of his students Mike Andrews, Frank Lyne, Reverend Howard Brown, Scott Wise and Tom Rice. They’ll have their opening the same night as the downtown gallery crawl.

Plowhaus benefit show at the Alley Cat. This is an all-day fundraiser at the Alley Cat Lounge, starting at 10 AM with an art show that will run through the whole day, and then music hosted by Chris Mitchell starting at 7:00.

Centennial Art Center, Nashville’s Internationals. A great idea for a show, Centennial is exhibiting work by sixteen artists who have immigrated to the US and Nashville. It includes 5 young men from Sudan, and artists from Germany, Belgium, Croatia, Nigeria, Haiti, the Philippines and some others. Immigrants have changed our city profoundly, for the better, and we are just starting to feel the impact of all this cultural new blood. It’s not the first time these artists have show (I assume the Sudanese are some of the artists whose work was on display at the Frist a year ago or so), but a show like just helps this new diversity become visible.

October 10

Films and installations by Patrick Beaulieu and Bill Daniel, Watkins. This is a one-night showing of film and installation art from two artists with a case of wanderlust. Daniels has outfitted a 1965 Chevy van with sails that serve as a projection screens and allow him to travel around and show videos (he appeared at Sewanee a little earlier this year). Beaulieu has created a mobile observatory for tracking the migration of Monarch butterflies between Canada and Mexico, and done a installation on the inside of the truck that sounds like it should be fascinating: “a series of moving monarch wings powered by the use of micro-ventilators.” This show is a joint production between Watkins and Fugitive Projects, the current incarnation of the Fugitive Art Center. The show starts at 6:30 in Watkins’ parking lot. Watkins film students are also going to project their films on the college’s outside walls.

October 13

Ruby Green, Contemporary Ceramics. This show is curated by Rob McClurg and Dona Berotti, who put together a really nice show of glass at Ruby Green two years ago that introduced me to several artists who have stuck with me. Now they’ve put together a show of ceramics. McClurg is a ceramicist, so I’m sure they know people doing really unusual stuff. The show includes local artist Jason Briggs, whose abstract, biomorphic ceramic pieces are instantly recognizable and I think have become a significant part of our local visual vocabulary. Other locals in the show are Delia Seigenthaler and Ken Rowe.

Cumberland Gallery, Tom Pfannerstill, Trash Talk, and Lay of the Land: New Landscape Paintings. Pfannerstill takes bits of trash like discarded cigarette boxes, detergent packages, or paint spattered t-shirts and meticulously recreates them in hand-painted carved wood. Cumberland is also showing landscapes from several of the painters it represents: James Lavadour, Kurt Meer, Ron Porter and Brad Durham. Lavadour’s paintings of dry Eastern Oregon country are a treat, always drawing you in with intense color and internal motion.

Estel, Rodney Wood, Illuminaria. Highly detailed and carefully crafted paintings in a surrealistic mode, with vivid mysticism.

Pandit Barun Kumar Pal, Hindustani music concert. The latest concert at the Temple presents Hindustani, or North Indian music, from a quartet of Indian musicians led by Pandit Barun Kumar Pal on Hamsaveena. The Hamsaveena is sometimes also called a slide guitar, although it looks more like a form of veena or sitar, with a teardrop-shaped body and a fairly long neck. Barun Kumar Pal is a longtime student of Ravi Shankar, who of course is the most famous practitioner of Hindustani music. Sri Ganesha Temple, Old Hickory Blvd. at 7:00.

October 14

CRAFT: A Creative Community A group of local artists/artisans holds a monthly sale/fair in the parking lot of Lipstick Lounge, the next one is 11-5 on Sunday, October 14.

Other events

Watkins has announced its latest round of community ed classes for October and November. If you’re in the market for classes, don’t forget to check out Cheekwood and LeQuire also.

Samantha Callahan and untitled have started a new blog called Art Leads to post opportunities for artists, things like calls for grant proposals, exhibition opportunities, classes, even practical stuff like health care coverage. This will be invaluable to have this material at one site, and anyone with relevant information should be sure to let Art Leads know about it.