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.