Nashville Visual Arts Events January 1-10

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you had good holidays, and you are still talking to all the members of the family you were talking to before the holidays.

Here’s what I know about for beginning of the month. Thanks to the holidays, some venues may get information out later this week. There’s also a few things opening up mid-month, but I’ll get to that later.

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.

Jan. 5

SQFT, Lisa Solomon and Aurora Robson. Kathleen and Aaron are closing their gallery on the second floor of the Arcade after their January show. They’ve done a nice job with it over the last year. Basically every artist here has been someone we probably would not have seen otherwise in Nashville, mostly young artists with plenty of chops, focusing on drawing and graphics. This show is a good example of the East Coast/West Coast community of artists SQFT has been able to draw on. Solomon is based in Oakland and for this show has assembled collages of doilies in the forms of the chemical structure of toxins (the image above is one of hers). Robson works in Brooklyn, and also has collages in this show, in her case exuberant forms pieced together from bits of junk mail and other detritus, and in the image to the left.

Cumberland Gallery, Intelligent Design This should be good—5 architects and 4 artsits, brought together to show intersections between their fields of endeavour. The architects (including Kem Hinton and Seab Tuck of Tuck-Hinton, and Manuel Zeitlin) will be represented by a combination of renderings, maquettes, conceptual drawings, and extra-curricular artistic projects. The artists include Michael Greenspan, maker of good-looking abstractions with subtle detail, and Terry Thacker, one of the smartest people on the local art scene.

Dangenart, Off the Wall. The latest show from this coop of 6 recent Watkins graduates (one or two may still be in school): Iwonka Waskowski, Janet Heilbronn, Mahlea Jones, Jenny Baggs Quinn Dukes, Jaime Raybin. Their release press says the show includes a collaborative piece, as well as individual work from everyone.

Tinney + Cannon Contemporary, Group Show This is the gallery that is the successor to TAG in the space on 5^th Avenue, led now by one of the partners in TAG, Susan Tinney, and Virginia Cannon. Virginia is the curator and will show a lot of artists she has worked with in other contexts like her art consulting business, many of them from Atlanta. The list looks very good.

Estel, new paintings by Harry I always feel like I’m on the receiving end of a hard sell when I get announcements from Harry, which of course is entirely appropriate given his subject matter. He’s obsessed with mid-20^th Century Florida, a continuous boom town of real estate speculation and tourist traps. He revels in images from ads and photos of the time, and laces his images with words of imaginary dialog and pitches.

TAG, Emily Leonard, Julia Martin, Joe Decamillis. TAG’s spending one more month working out of space in Estel gallery. The highlight here is Emily Leonard’s work, which I haven’t seen but feel like I ought’ve. I’ve been aware of her for a couple of years. She paints landscapes, and at first I thought here was someone else doing a variation on dreamy forest scenes, and there are many people working that angle. However, over time I’ve become convinced that there’s something else going on with her work and that I do need to see it. So let’s go see it at TAG.

Downtown Presbyterian Church Art Luck, films by Sid O’Berry. O’Berry was a cameraman for WSMV and Bradley Studios in the 1950s and 1960s, the momentous years of sit ins and the rise of Nashville in the music industry. Film collector Tom Wills acquired a cache of footage O’Berry left behind that captured student protests and music stars. During this month’s pot luck supper before the Art Crawl, Tom will show compilations of excerpts from these film time capsules.

Arts Company, 12^th Annual Gallery Preview What’s new at Arts Company includes new paintings by Lekhleti, and by Leandro del Manzo, who I think is new to the gallery, and a new regular featuring vintage and new art books.

Art Rogue, Twist, and Rymer I’m not sure if Matt will have new work up or greatest hits. Twist is continuing its show by members of the Plate Tone Printshop. Rymer is extending their December show which includes Tom Baril, Drew Galloway, Richard Jolley, Kevin T. Kelly, and Herb Williams.

Jan. 6

Sarratt Art Gallery, Jeanette Martone. Martone has done a series of drawings of people “living in the barest existence” in the words of the exhibit blurb—presumably residents of Third World slums, refugee camps, etc.

Jan. 10

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Xiao Xin Liu, 2006 Hamblet Award Winner. Vanderbilt’s Hamblet prize is something like the richest undergraduate art prize in America, which is odd for a school which only recently elevated studio arts to a measure—it’s nice, but odd. The drill is the prize gets awarded during the student’s senior year, they take the next year to travel, and then the following January they come back and show their work back at old alma mater. Xiao Xin Lin traveled to China, which her family left when she was 7, and she did work exploring the relationship of traditional and modern in China today, and her own connection and separation from that culture.