Wednesday, December 12, 2007

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

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