Nashville Visual Arts Events September 2010

It’s like 2005 revisited. Is it too soon for nostalgia? With Kristina Arnold, Amanda Dillingham, and Jason Driskill all showing in the Arcade, it’s a return to a happier time, long ago, when… OK, I’ll snap out of it. Kristina’s last show at Twist was really good, and I wish I’d had time to take my notes on that and turn them into a longer piece of writing. And representing the good new days, TSU and Watkins have faculty art shows. I have not kept track with comings and goings at TSU, but it looks like there are several names new to me—given what’s been coming out of that department, it will worth finding out more.

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, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

September 1

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Tyler Hicks. Photographs of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq take over the entire course of the Long War.

September 2

Zeitgeist, James Perrin. A distinctive younger painter, the latest paintings I’ve seen have overlaid new elements on the abstract grammar he’s been working with.

Cumberland, Margaret Ellis. One-night show of jewelry.

Vanderbilt Space 204, Vesna Pavlovic and Amelia Winger- Bearskin.

September 3

Midtown Care, Manuel Zeitlin and Todd McDaniel. A good pairing, Manuel and Todd share an architectural style—an off-growth of Manuel’s work as an architect, and of Todd’s ongoing creation of abstract forms. Opening reception from 4-6

Watkins, Faculty Exhibit. Listed on their website as Friday but the 4^th of September, my guess is the Friday part is right—that’s usually when they have their openings.

Sewanee University Art Gallery, Pradip Malde Two groups of platinum-palladium prints that play off each other—one of the artist’s wife and son, the other of Greek statues. Artist’s talk at 4:30.

September 4

Blend, Amanda Dillingham and Jason Driskill Jason and Amanda were part of a great small collective, which started as the Secret Show series when they were at Watkins and then was known by the space on Chestnut St. Jason has since moved to San Francisco but the members of the group have been staying in touch. Amanda and Jason are calling this show Splintered Self in reference to questions of identity and the body, which has been a shared interest for them for some time. Since this is Blend, there is a community/public aspect of the show—in this case they are inviting the public to “submit jpg images by email of their faces for a collaborative video piece to be featured” in the show. Those submissions should be directed to splinteredselfartshow@gmail.com

Twist, Kristina Arnold and Matthew Carver. Kristina has moved to Kentucky, and extended her long-standing interest in health and the body to environmental health, and has started to reflect on the social and material landscape of the semi-rural, semi-suburban places that fill in the space outside the major cities of our region. These experiences factored into her last installation at Twist and from her artist’s statement I expect another foray into that realm.

The Arts Company, John Welles Bartlett and Julianna Swaney Bartlett is a printmaker, Swaney is an illustrator, from opposite sides of the country. A curator, Brian Downey brought these two artists together and asked them to do a piece in the other’s style.

Rymer, Charles Clary. Clary builds wall-based sculptures out of overlapping loops of material that look like topographic maps in 3D. If I’m remembering previous works right, this round stretches the color palette more.

Estel, Beth Keitt Brubaker

Tinney, Todd Alexander Show continues

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Children’s Art Show. Every summer our church does an art project with the kids in and affiliated with DPC, and the children always surprise us with the unexpected and acute ideas that come through. This may mean more to those of us who know these children, but it seems pretty remarkable. This year it sounds like they’ve taken it to a new level, turning the smaller chapel into one big installation representing the human body and a kind of spiritual journey through it. That’s the short version—there’s more going on then I can quite fill in here. The show’s title will give you some idea: “Consuming Catastrophe: The Comedy of the Heart; A Play in Ate Parts.” At the opening there will be art activities for kids.

September 9

TSU Faculty Biennial. The participants this year include Herman Beasley, Samuel Dunson, Cynthia Gadsden, Xingkui Guo, Jodi Hays, Jennifer Leach, Micheal McBride, Jane Allen McKinney, Scott McRoberts, Kaleena Tucker, and Paul Zeppelin. The reception runs 2-5.

September 16

Open Lot, Session #5. The latest in Open Lot’s combination of music and art events, this one featuring the Black Swans.

September 17

Billups, Untitled Fall show

September 18

LeQuire, Figurative Art show. Figurative art is LeQuire’s raison d’être, which they celebrate every year in a show dedicated to the human figure. The artists featured this year are Joshua Bronaugh, Greg Decker, and Andrew Woolbright.

Nashville Visual Arts Events August 2010

Comings and goings in the Arcade this month: First, Twist Gallery celebrates its 4^th birthday. At the same time, Davis Art Advisory has closed up its physical exhibit space for now. So Twist, to celebrate its birthday, is expanding into the space Sera was leasing. Twist is inaugurating its new space with an exhibit by Todd Greene. Who was the first artist to show at Twist, and the first to show when Twist had its second space down the hall.

Got this out too late to get the openings on Thursday night. For one, Zeitgeist has the latest round of its Right to Assemble group show—this installment includes Phillip Carpenter, Vesna Pavlović, Brent Stewart, and John Whitten. And LeQuire opened a show in late July called the “Dark Palette” to complement their previous show on the “Influence of White.”

And getting this out late enough that I’m going to settle for several entries that are just the venue and artist. Sorry I wasn’t able to do more.

Next Thursday (the 12^th) Brady Sharp and I are playing in Birmingham as part of The Improvisor Festival, organized by LaDonna Smith. All sorts of great people are playing there all month.

Winter’s Bone is playing a few more times at the Belcourt this weekend. It’s quite amazing. And the last few Kurosawa films, new print of Breathless, and so on.

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, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

August 7

Gallery F, The Fisherwoman: An Artistic Response to the Gulf Oil Crisis. Group show with work by Iris Kleinschmidt, Erin Plew, Matt Christy, Adriana Larios, Patricia Earnhardt, Robert Bruce Scott, Channing Bailey, Maya Moore and dance performances by Maya Moore, Megan Harrold, Lily Heine, and Adrienne Bailey with music/sound by Tony Youngblood and Charlie Rauh.

Blend, Ben Vitualla One of Blend’s founders, Ben has put together a project to address crime in East Nashville. He’s led community activities like video and art projects, questionnaires, and information areas, with life-size figures of children were painted at the events by attendees and then displayed outside of their homes as public art in private spaces in East Nashville neighborhoods In addition to the opening at Blend, there will be related events at the Tomato Festival in 5 Points on August 14 and an artist talk at Blend on Saturday the 21^st.

Twist, Mitch O’Connell and Todd Greene. In the original Twist gallery, their show by Chicago artist O’Connell continues. But this time there will be live tattooing by Kustom Thrills. As mentioned in the opening, Todd’s got an exhibit in the new space/Davis Art Advisory’s old space. And there will be music—by Todd’s group Bulb and Eastern Block.

The Arts Company, Annual Avant-Garage Sale and equestrian paintings by Marek Bohemus

Rymer,SCAD MFA graduates. Tony and Margy Rich, Christopher Priore, Nora Mulheren, Jonathan Yoerger and Masumi Nyui.

Estel,.R. Ellis Orrall

Tinney, Todd Alexander

August 10

Open Lot, Audrey Chen and Luca Marini. Audrey is a cellist and vocalist, trained classically at a high level, who in the last several years has burst into the experimental and improvised music world. She’s performed in all sorts contexts with a lot of different collaborators and a surprisingly large number of fairly regular groups. Here she is performing with the percussionist Marini as Kamama.

August 14

5 Points, Tomato Art Show

August 21

Gallery One, Thomas Monaghan

Gallery F, Ripple Effect. Collaborative project led by French artist Corinne Spielewoy involving 26 local artists who have created a set of related pieces, done in a sequential fashion. At the opening the Scarritt-Bennett resident artists will also have a studio open house.

August 22

Harpeth Hall, Lori Putnam At the Marnie Sheridan Gallery, opening from 3-5

August 28

Billups, Diorama-o-rama. As the name suggest, dioramas! Participating artists include Jeff Bertrand, Charles V. Bennett, Dustin Dirt, Brooke E., Dave Fritts, Brandt & Aurora Hardin, Mai Harris, Julian Herrera, Jessica Hill, Jonny Lashley, Kevin Presley, David Pound, Amanda Sekulow, Brittany Danielle Smith and Greg Veach.

Open Lot, Printervention.

September 1

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Tyler Hicks. Photographs of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq take over the entire course of the Long War.

Nashville Visual Arts Events July 2010

I haven’t gotten much of anything for the last half of the month, but there’s probably something coming up and more than likely something I’ve gotten notices on but I’m missing. Several good things opening on Art Crawl night. Tinney’s show should be good—Longobardi and Prusa have both shown engaging work on previous occasions. Laura Chenicek (at Blend) is always thoughtful, and the work at MIR sounds like it should be good.

Local galleries are continuing their events in support of Rusty Wolfe and Kim Brooks’ Finer Things Gallery, devastated by the flood. The participating galleries will show work from Finer Things and pass on the proceeds to Rusty and Kim. This month it’s LeQuire, Local Color/Midtown, and Zeitgeist:

July 1 (5-8pm) LeQuire Gallery

July 8 (5-8pm) Local Color/Midtown Gallery

July 9 (5-8pm) Zeitgeist Gallery

See Facebook for more info.

Belcourt’s got really good films coming up. I Am Love, opening on July 9 and probably only up for a week, and Winter’s Bone opening July 16 are getting amazing reviews. And the Kurosawa series continues.

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery opened two new exhibits in June that I didn’t get into the listings: American art from the collection, and a survey of drawings also from their collection.

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, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

July 1

Cumberland, Bob Durham talk. Bob’s a great painter, and always a lot of fun to talk to. He’s got a reputation as a kind of satirist, and he enjoys cracking jokes in his paintings, but there are times when he stops you dead in your tracks with an effortless integration of classical images and forms into his work.

Zeitgeist, Kristi Hargrove, Todd McDaniel, Andrew Smaldone, Ruth Zelanski, and Derek Cote The second installment of Zeitgeist’s summer group show. Kristi’s work keeps evolving, starting from a foundation of high level draftsmanship but that keeps messing with what you can see and increasingly questions the surface she’s working on. I realized I haven’t seen Todd’s work in a while. It looks like he’s working with more schematic elements that the abstractions of his that first caught my attention.

Oosimaginary, Ovvio Arte. Oosimaginary is a 3-person performance group that does improvisation that incorporates music, dance, and theatre. They are also performing Friday night (July 2). Performance at 8:00.

Gallery One, Chad Awalt. A sculptor of figurative work in wood.

July 2

Center for the Arts (Murfreesboro), Ezzy Harrold and Charlie Rauh. Guitarist Rauh and dancer Harrold have done a series of experimental dance/composition collaborations in the last year or so at various venues in town. This is their latest and apparently their last local performance as they head off to New York. Nikki McFadden and 84001 are also performing. Center for the Arts, Murfreesboro, 110 West College Street, 7:30-9:00

Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, Music City Sheraton Hotel. A concert of classical Hindustani vocal music presented as part of a Bengali cultural festival this weekend. According to the email I receive, this concert is free but I would double check and make sure that conference registration is not required (www.bangamela.org). The concert starts at 11:30 p.m., and it’s at the Sheraton Music City Hotel, not the temple.

July 3

Tinney, Pam Longobardi, Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Margery Amdur, Carol Prusa, and Peggy Cyphers Longobardi has shown previously at Tinney, with works like wall-mounted collections of monochrome objects that bring to mind the accretion of human debris in the ocean and the transformation of objects from function to form and converging in ways where individuality gets absorbed into the mass. I saw strong emotions in her work, as she responded to devastating chaos in the world with smaller acts of order-making. Her new works are paintings bursting with color. The other artists are billed as new to Tinney. Prusa was in a very nice exhibit at the Frist, Shades of Gray—this show will include finely detailed drawings on domed pieces of acrylic accented with points of light from fiber optics.

MIR, Bernard and Danesha Stallings. This couple have endured the hardships of Bernard’s multiple deployment to Iraq and put their conversations and experiences over those years into works on paper.

Blend, Laura Chenicek For her Blend project, Laura takes on the subject of sexual violence—marital rape, sexual abuse, and incest—in work designed in ways that force viewers to decide how much they want to see. She has done work with similar devices of exposure and multiple surface, but not, in what I’ve seen, dealing with such charged material.

Davis, Urban Project 2. For a second year, Davis is doing a show of graffiti artists and “urban” designers and jewelers. It’s a great change of pace for the Arcade and the Art Crawl.

Twist, Mitch O’Connell. A Chicago artist who whips up wild compositions with tattoo, circus signs, cartoons, and advertising iconography. Not just borrowing from tattoo imagery, O’Connell has done actual tattoo design.

The Arts Company, Chris Beck, Tony Breuer, Judy Nebhut, and Deborah Wait Typical variety from the Arts Company—paintings by Breuer, photos by Nebhut, sculpture by Beck, and Mosaics by Wait.

Rymer, Thomas Petillo, Christopher Rodrigues, Caleb Charland, and Matt Mikulla and Chris Ellis. Petillo, Rodriguez, Charland, and Mikulla are all photographers associated with the Society of Nashville Artistic Photographers (although Matt’s even better known as one of the pioneering gallery/studio owners in the Arcade who used to put out a new body of work every month). Ellis is a sculptor.

Estel, Dana Costello and Moco Sasamoto. Cartoon-like paintings of ambiguous scenes by Costello, biomorphic, vaguely sexual wood sculptures by Sasamoto.

Open Lot, Diet Blood. Another multi-media event at Open Lot, with paintings by Donny Smutz and performances by Dave Cloud, Deluxin’, Square People, Marj, and the Panty Raid burlesque group.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, works related to Magdalene House This exhibit includes Kaaren Engel, Paul Harmon, and others, including women who’ve been through the program, which serves women who have a history of prostitution and drug abuse. The group has had great success with the Thistle Farms line of bath and body products that they design, manufacture, and market.

Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan, Music City Sheraton Another concert at te Bengali cultural festival at the Music City Sheraton, this one featuring Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan on sitar. This one does have an admissions price--$50 or $25 according to the email I received, but again I’d check with the conference on it: www.bangamela.com. It’s scheduled to start at 3:00 in the afternoon.

Nashville Visual Arts Events June 2010

Rusty Wolfe and Kim Brooks’ Finer Things Gallery is one of the great hidden spaces in Nashville—pass through the gates on Nolensville Road and down a short driveway, and you’re in a realm that seems far away from the city, surrounded by a sculpture garden and cut off from the city by trees, with maybe the biggest commerical gallery space in town. All of it perched on the edge of a creek. Bucolic. Except when it rains over a foot in a day. Then it’s a mess. Apparently they had devastating damage from the flood—10 feet of water in the building, sculptures swept away, and in addition to the gallery, the facility includes Rusty’s studio and their living space. Several Nashville galleries are helping out by donating their sales on one day to help out Rusty and Kim. This round robin fundraiser starts on June 3 during the Art After Hours when Cumberland will pitch in with 100% of their sales for the evening. The entire list of dates and galleries is as follows:

June 3 (6-9 pm) Cumberland Gallery

June 11 (5-8pm) The Arts Company

June 24 (5-8pm) Gallery One

July 1 (5-8pm) LeQuire Gallery

July 8 (5-8pm) Local Color/Midtown Gallery

July 9 (5-8pm) Zeitgeist Gallery

See Facebook for more info

A couple of shows I’m particularly looking forward to this month: Sisavanh Phouthhavong and Jarrod Houghton at Tinney and David Hellams at Downtown Presbyterian Church. And in addition to the shows opening I’m listing here, Rymer and Davis have shows continuing from May.

William Pope L. is going to be back in town June 13-19 for more shooting on the “Versioning Nashville” video project that he is doing with TSU. Contact TSU if you want to be involved: gallery@tnstate.edu

And the Belcourt has the new Harmony Korine movie, Trash Humpers, for a few more days, then a documentary kind of about Banksy coming up (Exit Through the Gift Shop) and a big series of Kurosawa films that starts with Ran on June 11.

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, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

June 3

NCAP Neuhoff Building, Kevin McGarry talk. NCAP is starting a new lecture series with a talk by New York-based critic Kevin McGarry. The event will be a conversation for RSVPs by June 1, but you might check with them and see if you can still send in an RSVP. McGarry’s in town to review Alicia Beach’s show at Seed Space on Chestnut Street. I haven’t seen anything about an opening, but it is listed at being up for all of June and July.

Cumberland, Dane Carder talk. A gallery talk by a young artist showing at Cumberland, whose paintings are drawn from old photographic images.

Zeitgeist, Nicole Baumann, Mark Bynon, Shannon Clark, Joe Saunders, and Patrick Schlafer Zeitgeist continues its tradition of summer group shows with at least longish term gallery artist (Bynon) and some newcomers (at least to me), like Baumann who has recently finished an MFA at the very highly regarded program at VCU and Schlafer who just got his bachelor’s degree from the surprising and challenging program at Lipscomb.

Vanderbilt Space 204, Jennifer Stoneking-Stewart. Exhibit by a printmaker who was teaching at Belmont but is moving to a school in South Carolina next year. Reception from 4-6. The gallery is open 10-4 on weekdays.

June 5

Tinney, Sisavanh Phouthavong and Jarrod Houghton. Independently Phouthavong and Houghton are two of Nashville’s best artists—she’s a painter and he’s a sculptor of life-like scenes. They are also married, and they’ve collaborated on the work in this show. I don’t know if I’ve seen the results of their collaborations—they had a great show together at Ruby Green, which presented separate bodies of work from them (and Erin Anfinson). Even there, some of Houghton’s work was intimately connected to their shared experience, and it is easy to imagine that the work they make together will be coherent and compelling.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, David Hellams. Hellams is known for his brilliant comic figurative drawings, executed in a meticulous hand, but he’s trying something different for the paintings in this show. He’s looking at rooms rather than people, and using very different methods that include layers of canvas. It sounds (and from one image, looks) much rougher than earlier work, but also more tactile and less tightly coded.

Estel, Anna Jaap, Steve Knudson, and Ian Kessler-Gowell. Paintings by Jaap and Knudson, glass by Kessler-Gowell. Jaap’s work has a very specific and uncommon tone, that entwines beauty, even prettiness, with wildness and darkness. It embraces decoration and familiar tropes like botanical forms, but much else lurks within it. It is romantic in the historical sense of the word, with a capital R.

Blend, Ali Bellos Ali’s project is called re:seed, and revolves around creating and disseminating seedballs around town. There are all sorts of seeds, but there’s an emphasis on “phytoremediating plants that can help to repair soils contaminated with heavy metals and organic pollutants, green cover crops that will help to restore nutrients to the soil, and native plants that heal, either through medicinal properties or aesthetic beauty.” In the exhibit and a website (www.alesandra.net), participants can see where the reseeding will occur and suggest other sites. In June there will be a bike tour of the sites and at the end of the growing season the plants will be sampled to analyze them for the presence of metals and the impact of the remediation. The project probably had its origins before the floods but takes on new significance in its aftermath.

MIR, Marc Pewitt. An exhibit of photograms, images made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper. It’s an old experimental technique, probably most famously used by Man Ray.

Twist, Margaret Pesek. A body of work that riffs on the imagery of Catholicism, its shrines and icons. Pesek sounds like she approaches this material with a particularly intense engagement with the mystery which these images and objects hold.

The Arts Company, Brother Mel Brother Mel’s annual exhibit at the Arts Company is accompanied this year by a monograph on him written by The Arts Company’s Anne Brown. Brother Mel will be doing a book-signing for that at Davis-Kidd Friday evening. The exhibit at The Arts Company covers the many media this wildly prolific artists works in.

Rymer, Erin Anfinson, Jonathan Ferrara, Michael Brown. Closing reception.

June 8

Zeitgeist, Jonathan Neufeld. Zeitgeist launches another series of cross-disciplinary gallery talks with Neufeld, a philosopher at Vanderbilt whose interests include performance and interpretation, and the philosophies of music, aesthetics, politics, and law.

June 11

Belmont Mansion, Beth Gilmore. Part II of Beth’s senior show opens at Belmont Mansion, where she has worked for many years and which has been a huge source of images for her work. The elements shown in May at Downtown Presbyterian Church included all sorts of twisted Victoriana, like gilt frames burgeoning with computer circuit boards and constructions under bell jars. Reception from 6-8:30 on the 11^th.

June 17

Tennessee State Museum, Bernard de Clavière and Romance of the Horse. Two related shows, one of which features a renowned painter of equestrian subjects who has lived in Nashville since 2002. The State Museum has assembled a selection of equestrian art and artifacts from its own and other local collections to go along with Clavière’s work.

June 18

Frist Center,The Golden Age of Couture and Tokihiro Sato. The couture show was organized by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and looks at fashion houses in London and Paris right after World War II (1947-57). The period covered starts with the establishment of Christian Dior’s house and ends with his death. The V&A is one of the world’s leading collections of design and decorative arts, and it sounds like they’ve got examples of some of the major works by the designers active during these years. In the CAP Gallery, Sato is a photographer who started out as a sculptor and uses the photo medium as a way of capturing light and space. He uses large-format cameras and long exposures to capture light that he moves across a scene. It’s a kind of painting, and also performance.

June 26

Cheekwood, Aaron Rotham. Rothman is a photographer who has put together a site-specific exhibition for Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary space.

Art Crawl 1, the Storm, and Art Crawl 2

I had a pleasant time at Art Crawl last night, but it really was just a half-sized version. The Arcade galleries, Estel, and DPC were open, but the 5th Avenue galleries got together and closed. And I guess one of them sent out an email that Crawl was off. Thanks to that and also to the unquestionably foul weather, the crowds were pretty small, at least as long as I was around. I can't remember which one of the galleries sent out the email message, but they said they would reschedule, and that's the point of this post--this is an appendix to my listing to say keep an eye out for word on a rescheduled Art Crawl. Sometime after you've put the Ark back into dry dock. From the conversations I had, the Arcade galleries will run receptions again whenever May Art Crawl 2 gets scheduled.

Nashville Visual Arts Events May 2010

Big month it looks to be. Dale Chihuly’s campaign of conquest finally overruns Nashville’s defenses, knocking off both the Frist and Cheekwood in one month. As of now, I really don’t know how many cultural institutions in the United States have withstood the force of Chihuly and refused to stage a big show of his work. I think there’s a train museum in Cozad, Nebraska, the boyhood home of the fourth governor of Mississippi, and a bottlecap collection in Bend. Oregon (which I hear is particularly irksome to the Chihuly camp due to its proximity to world HQ in Seattle). Snarkiness aside (OK, that doesn’t really fix anything), it’s great to see the Frist and Cheekwood coordinating exhibits. They should do this more often. I think it’s good for both places, and good for increasing the sense of event around big exhibits. The two venues have different strengths as exhibition spaces, which these shows will capitalize on—Cheekwood will display work outdoors, the Frist will take advantage of its larger gallery spaces.

One piece of old business. I keep forgetting to mention that the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is now open in its new quarters in the renovated Cohen Building on the Peabody Quad. Vanderbilt is in final exams, so the gallery will be open only through May 13. At least that’s the date that the inaugural show closes. Yes, they have every right to have me strangled for waiting so long to mention this.

Also, I keep slipping up on mentioning the various activities that Adrienne Outlaw has going on related to N-CAP. I think I failed entirely to mention any one of a series of events related to the Art Makes Place project. Right now she is curating at Seed Space in the 427 Chestnut building, where there will be a recap of Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s Performance for an Audience of One on May 8. The webstie also mentions a show by Alicia Beach for May and June (I think she’ll be showing her MFA thesis work from UT).

Since I failed to send out this listing last month, I missed many things, some of which are still up—like a show of prints at Sarratt (including Lesley Patteron-Marx), a continuing show by Martica Griffin and Jeanie Gooden at Tinney.

Also this month, Erika Johnson’s back in town preparing for her exhibit at Blend which opens this Saturday.

And Beth Gilmore has her thesis show at Downtown Pres, also opening Saturday.

And new paintings from Erin Anfinson (Rymer) and Anna Jaap (Estel)

April 30

Open Lot, ART.EDU. A show of work by recent or soon to be graduates from area art programs.

Terrazzo, Watkins Design Students. Senior show by Watkins Graphic Design students—Lindsey Armstrong, Brian Dennis, Andy Gregg, Valerie Hammond, Luke Howard, Janna Laxton, and Christopher Martin.

May 1

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Beth Gilmore. Beth puts together the threads she’s been working on a while for her senior show. It will have 2 parts, the first opening at Downtown Pres this month, then a second park in the Belmont Mansion opening in June. It’s clear that Beth’s continuing her engagement with history in images and objects, and with the spaces of that history. In addition to the systems of screened and drawn vintage images, she’s gone back to things like bell jars that she has used in shows before.

Rymer, Erin Anfinson, Michael Brown, and Jonathan Ferrara. A new series of paintings by Anfinson jumping off from the phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder among bees. Ferrara owns a gallery in New Orleans that always seems to have really good shows but I have not gotten myself down there to take a look when I’m in the city. Great to have him show his stuff here.

Estel, Anna Jaap, Steve Knudson, and Ian Kessler-Gowell. Jaap is one of my favorite painters in the areas, profoundly entwining beauty and wildness. And Estel is sort of piggy-backing on the Chihuly madness with Kessler-Gowell, who makes works in glass.

Blend, Erika Johnson Erika is back from Pittsburgh for project/exhibit with her friends at Beldn. So far the project has involved getting people together to make paper.

MIR, Matthew Shelton. Lightboxes.

Twist, Minor Victory. Group show by a bunch of printmakers from here and Chicago: Brady Haston, Mark Hosford, Patrick DeGuira, Keith Herzik, Chris Kerr, Jennifer Leach, Lesley Patterson Marx, Hans Schmidt Matzen, Paul Nudd, Onsmith, DeeDee Scacci, Tom Stack, Manuel Zeitlin

Davis Art Advisory, Stanford Kay and Iveta Simacek Prints and paintings by Kay, scarves by Simacek

Zeitgeist, Dwayne Butcher, Gadsby Creson, Tad Lauritzen Wright, and Bobby Spillman. They’re calling this show The Memphis School, which sounds like it has a provocative intent. I mean, I don’t think any of these guys is an abstract painter.

The Arts Company, Jane Davis Doggett Exhibit by a big figure in design, known for innovations in things like signage and “way-finding systems”—critical elements of the built visual environment.

May 2

Open house with Marla Faith, Margaret Krakowiak, Sue Mulcahy, Daniel Arite, and Thandiwe Shiphrah. I really liked Sue Mulcahy’s show at the Main Library in late 2008. One day show and sale at 811 Park Terrace, 2-5 p.m

Belcourt, SNAP. Month-long show by the SNAP photo coop in the Belcourt lobby. Reception from 5-6:30.

May 6

Art After Hours First Anniversary. All over town.

May 7

Sri Ganesha Temple, Mandira Lahiri (vocal) and Subhajyoti Guha (tabla). These artists are performing Hindustani classical and light classical music. Nothing against the very fine instrumentalists who come through Sri Ganesha, but the vocal concerts are the best. 7 p.m.

May 8

Seed Space, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Performance for an Audience of One. In a performance that seeks to overthrow the structures of performance, Winger-Bearskinoffers to perform for a single person who picks from a list of topics/actions. Narrowing it down to 2 people must eliminate any sense of separation, and at that point the other person is as much a performer as Winger-Bearskin, performing the role of audience, which is required to make this a performance, and which in this context gets close to the sense of the word as in audience with the Pope—private, privileged, personal. There’s a limited number of spaces and you have to RSVP of course. Go to the Seed Space web for those details. Seed Space is at 427 Chestnut.

May 9

Frist Center, Dale Chihuly. Chihuly has put modern glass (and Seattle glassmaking) prominently on the cultural map. His stuff is effusive, often elaborate and built to large scale, moving in out of the worlds of decoration and display.

May 14

Gallery One, Jeff Faust. Surrealist painter from California.

May 15

Studio East Nashville, Myles Maillie.

May 21

Frist Center, Aaron Doenges. Performance by a composer who is one of the masterminds of the Nashville Sound Crawl. Aaron’s work is compelling, and he’s extremely sensitive to location and context.

Open Lot, This is Not Art

May 25

Cheekwood, Dale Chihuly. After the Frist, then Cheekwood opens their Chihuly exhibit. This of course is going to be one of those Chihuly in the garden shows, including some in the ponds like he’s done at other botanical gardens.

Lew Spratlan's opera finally getting a full performance

I'm going to have to figure out how to get to Santa Fe to hear Lew Spratlan's opera "Life is a Dream" finally get it's full premiere. Lew was my composition teacher in college.

More on Barnes

Last night I moderated a panel discussion at the Belcourt for The Art of the Steal, a doc about the Barnes Foundation controversy. (Here's the url for the opponents of the move.) The panelists worked together great.

Jim Hoobler, who among other things is the most dedicated connoisseur of museums I know--he's been to practically every museum or historic home in the country with a program related to art, history, architecture and culture. Of course he's been to the Barnes a couple of times. And since he knows everything about Nashville cultural history he was able to talk about the other case in Nashville where an institution is having trouble honoring the wishes of the donor of cultural legacies--no, not the Stieglitz collection at Fisk, but the Cohen bequest of an art collection and gallery to Peabody--the Cohen Building, which has reopened as the home of the Art History Department and the Fine Arts Gallery. There's a whole story to that, for another time.

Mark Scala from the Frist was also on it, and what's great is that he is the curator for an institution that would not exist if museums did not lend art. He made some points I really wanted to see made, particularly how odd and out of step Barnes' curatorial stance was. The Barnes might be an exceptional place, but I find it hard to believe it is the ne plus ultra of art presentation. In fact it reminds me of those Baroque paintings of picture galleries where the loot was stacked top to bottom on the wall. But I haven't been there, and I do want to go before it moves in 2012.

And I had Jodi Hays there, the one artist, who had this formative experience of seeing the Barnes paintings when she was a teenager and went from Arkansas to see them in Texas. Jodi's points were subtle and serious, with plenty of healthy ambivalence. like her work. The first drawings of hers I saw appeared at first glance to be revealing, in terms of what you saw on their surface, but they turned away from the viewer, and were veiled in some more fundamental way. And of course that veiling suggested more about a character than the surfaces. I've been looking at her work for a while now, and it's changing the way I see the world and what I see, slowly. It's interesting to be around an artist's work for an extended time, for years, and to let it seep into you and take a place in your visual vocabulary. Those series of experiences differ so much from the singular encounter in the gallery, where there is a kind of collision with the work, emitting a spray of particles. And to see different pieces from the same person, intermittently, from different series and bodies of work, is different than taking one work home to reflect on it. I think the question of quality is fundamentally different when you experience an artist's work as part of an ongoing acquaintance. It may be the case that the work you absorb this way, through a communal familiarity, is not necessarily the best you've seen. Or it becomes good in a different way.

The point of this post is to add something to the conversation about Albert Barnes and his Foundation and collection. I think the panel made most of the important points. Art exists within a machine, within capitalism, and that machine grinds along in certain ways that are unpleasant all around. There are serious problems with the current Barnes Collection--it was hard to get to, and it seems a monument to the ego of one person, not necessarily the best curatorial use of the art. The idea of controlling the display of art works into perpetuity is likely a fool's errand.

Like I said, I really want to get up there to see it before it closes, but it also seems to me that at some point works of art become a kind of general public legacy, and transcend their owner and maker. But there was one point we didn't get to yesterday. I'm not convinced that Barnes' desire to stick it to the Annenbergs and Philadelphia big wigs from the 20s should prevail over an open consideration of the ways for people to experience this art. However, I think that someone like Barnes presents us with a challenge. If you decide that the terms of his will are no longer tenable, the world is more interesting if you still try as deeply as possible to understand what he was trying to do and really do it. The new museum sounds like it will be a fairly half-assed attempt to continue the Barnes Collection. I would say they are trying to recreate it, but I'm not sure that's right. They are planning to hang the paintings the same way alright, but I wonder about the rest. The choice of starchitects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien means that the building will compete with the art for attention. Also, they are planning to put educational space on each floor, but will you have to wonder if they could possibly pursue education with the same passion. I wonder about the profundity of the old Barnes educational program, but there is no doubt they were committed to it. The challenge for the new program ought to be to try to put themselves in Barnes' head, really try, and see what this means for everything about the collection and program in the new building.

Still, it's sad they couldn't find a way to keep the old facility going. I wish I could have taken a look at their internal budgets. I bet there was a way. But I still think the organization should also have been pushed, pushed to figure out what Barnes' ideas and notions would point to in contemporary terms. He was a demanding and rigorous figure, and his legacy deserves to be addressed with comparable rigor and daring. There is no doubt that there will be tremendous pressure to water it down, even in the new cutting edge lightbox.

Nashville Visual Arts Events March 2010

Last month was a little thin when it comes down to it, but this month looks better. Ron Lambert has a solo show at Davis, Cumberland has a good double bill, and the installation at Twist looks fun as hell.

Also, the Belcourt films noir continue until March 11. And we’ve got our fundraising party this Sunday for the Oscars.

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, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

March 4

Zeitgeist, Justin Terry and Richard Painter. Justin is a native Nashvillian now in New York doing interesting things—in addition to painting, he’s writing about art. Richard Painter creates ghostly images by burning wood in a nice bit of technical virtuosity crossed with a pervasive momento mori quality.

Cumberland, Kell Black book signing. APSU professor Black has done some notable work constructing surprising objects like insects out of paper. Now he’s got a couple of book projects going working from this sort of material, and will be signing one book and displaying the sculptures used in another.

March 5

Watkins College, Aftermath. A group show of more or less local heavies, curated by Pat DeGuira: Harmony Korine, Leigh Ledare, Angela Messina, Laurie Nye, Chris Scarborough, Rob Smith, Brent Stewart, Terry Rowlett, and Kurt Wagner.

Centennial Art Center, Kaaren Engel and Sydney Reichman artists’ talk. 5-7 in the afternoon for this.

March 6

The Arts Company, Snap Shots. This exhibit starts not with art, but poetry, by the late Robert Michie, which will be exhibited along with art work by Anne Goetze, Denise Stewart-Sanabria, and Pam Moxley

Rymer, Dan Addington, L.A. Bachman, Casey Pierce. Of the 3 artists, Pierce might be the most interesting—he has done paintings in the past that were dense with references and pattern.

MIR, Cryptozoology. A group show of work about imaginary and legendary critters: Charles Bennett, Nathan Parker, Steven Knudson, Andrew Casali III, Chip Boles, and Wesley Kinsman Hall.

Blend, Tina Ahyoka. Tina is working primarily with reclaimed glass. The plan for this show was to create an environment in the gallery inspired in part by a temple she came across in Thailand constructed from glass bottles.

Davis Art Advisory, Ron Lambert. Ron moves between dimensions and media, putting out 3D work (“sculptures”) as well as 2D and video work, where sometimes the sound is as striking a part of the experience.

Twist, Oliver and Lucha. From the pictures up already, this looks like a very theatrical and elaborate installation.

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Anti-Depressants. Our annual group show for the Lenten season.

Tinney Contemporary, Lyle Carbajal. A painter with a strong art brut thing going on.

Cumberland, Ahren Arenholz and John Fraser. Arenholz makes appealing constructions out of found materials, painted white to add to their abstract, idealized character. Fraser puts together quiet, calm collages.

March 8

Rocketown, Clean Drips. The Workforce Rebellion group, and maybe others, exhibiting work at Rocketown.

March 11

Cheekwood, Virginia Overton, American Impressionists in the Garden, plus Courtyard and Video gallery openings. Cheekwood is holding an opening for all four of its spaces, including a new video show (which includes work by Kara Walker, Eleanor Antin, and Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley). Cheekwood organized theAmerican Impressionists show and it is traveling to a couple more venues.

March 13

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F, Native. A group show by artists with connections to Native American cultures, doing work that explores those connections: Ronald Anderson, Adriana Larios, Sara Estes, Brandon Donahue, Jule Kaiser.

March 18

Tennessee State University, Cause Collective talk. Hank Willis Thomas and Jess Ingram from the Cause Collective will give a talk. Their video mosaic of people in Oakland is the inaugural exhibit in the Space for New Media

March 22

Tennessee State University, Annual student show.

March 27

East Nashville Art Stroll

Nashville Visual Arts Events February 2010

Better late than never or something.

TSU is bringing in William Pope L. for a talk and a project. See below for details.

I really need to plug the Belcourt more often. Great series this month—French and English noirs—lots of Jean-Pierre Melville, Jules Dassin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Carol Reed. Bob Le Flambeur, Rififi, Le Samourai, Diabolique for a few.

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, send me an email at dcmaddox@comcast.net. To get taken off the list, email to that effect at the same address.

February 5

Sewanee Carlos Gallery, Jim Lommasson. A social documentary project based on photos and interviews of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and their families, along with snapshots by the soldiers themselves. Opening reception at 4:30.

February 6

The Arts Company, Steven Walker and Lucius Outlaw. Outlaw, a professor at Vanderbilt, went to the Obama inauguration with his camera last year and trained it on the multitudes who came there. It was a marvelous day, a strange combination of the cold, which had everyone bundled up and sort of subdued, as you dealt with your own needs to stay warm, and thick coats and gloves seemed to dampen sound, and the energy of a massive crowd of people gulping in the brisk air of the watershed many could hardly believe came during their life, with others just breathing the most massive sigh of relief. It was remarkable to me how many older folks there were, but also not surprising. Many of the people I saw were old enough that they would have lived through almost every painful step of desegregation and the fight for full citizenship. Along with Lou Outlaw’s photos, the Arts Company has a series of Nashville urban landscape paintings by Walker that look like they take that unblinking look at desolate or overlooked but ubiquitous urban spaces that you see in Rackstraw Downes or Todd Gordon (who has shown at LeQuire and Tinney).

Estel, Scott Turri.

Rymer, Charles Clary, Kristina Colucci, Jamey Grimes, Brandi Milosavich and Dooby Tomkins. Closing reception.

MIR, Group Photography Show. Ashley Burress Smith, Barry Noland, Greg Sand, Jace Freeman, Jennifer Ford, Kay Ramming, Susan Walker, and Tammy Dohner

Blend, Workforce Rebellion. I’m familiar with posters produced by this collective with activist messages. For this show they worked with students at Jere Baxter Middle School who are part of a program at the Oasis Center training youth to take on active and activist roles in their communities.

Davis Art Advisory, Byron Jorjorian. Nature photographs.

Twist, Watkins faculty + 5. Watkins faculty members Brady Haston, Terry Thacker, Ron Lambert, Derek Cote, Kristi Hargrove plus several students at the school: Lauren Willis, Clayton Lancaster, Robert Dunn, Claudia O'Steen, Alexis Hicks, and Tim Marchbanks.

Tinney Contemporary, Eduardo Terranova. Terranova is an architect from Colombia who cuts, punctures, resews and stains canvas to produce works that memorialize those who have disappeared in the years of civil war in Colombia.

Cumberland, Art Feeds People. A group show benefiting Second Harvest Food Bank, with food–themed art by Andy Saftel, Ron Porter, Marilyn Murphy, Barry Buxkamper, Billy Renkl, Dane Carder, Jeff Danley, Johan Hagaman, Kell Black, Kit Reuther, and Max Shuster.

February 8

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F, artists talk. The current show features work by the Off the Wall Collective, and they’ll be doing an artists’ talk: Jenny Luckett, Mahlea Jones, Jaime Raybin, Iwonka Waskowski, Nicole Baumann and Marcie Little.

February 11

Alias Winter Recital, Vanderbilt Turner Recital Hall. Typically interesting program. The group often programs one Baroque piece among more contemporary fare, and it’s often one of the highlights. This program has a piece by a 17^th century female composer, Bianca Maria Meda, and then a contemporary quartet by Belinda Reynolds scored for baroque strings. The first piece is a duet for English Horn and soprano that will be sung by the composer, Deborah Kavasch.

Parthenon Symposium, Barbara Tsakirgis. Dr. Tsakirgis is chair of the Classics Department at Vandy and will speak on the spaces, everyday life and events in the home in classical Athens.

February 13

Open Lot, Concrete Comedy. Performance featuring Anni Hi from Syracuse, NY doing a one-woman play dramatizing her experience as a self-made YouTube celebrity. Also doing performance pieces will be Shepherd Alligood and Amelia Winger-Bearskin from Nashville and Brett Williams from Saint Louis. 6-10:00

Marnie Sheridan Gallery, Harpeth Hall, Kelly Williams and Claire Brassil.

February 18

Tennessee State University, William Pope L. talk. William Pope L. is in Nashville conducting a project with Tennessee State, which you may run across. Look for people dressed up like Robert E. Lee. Pope L. is one of the bigger names in conceptual and performance art these days. He probably first came to wide attention for his “crawls,” when he would dress up in some way and drag himself along streets like Broadway. Other pieces involve participation and contributions by people in a community, like the Black Factory, in which he rolled into different cities and asked people to bring objects that represent blackness to them, and are incorporated in an on-line library or reconstituted into products made by the Black Factory. His talk is at 6:00 in the Humanities Poag Auditorium at the TSU Main Campus.

Tennessee State Museum, Sharaku Interpreted by Japan’s Contemporary Artists. This exhibit starts with woodblock prints by a Japanese artist from the late 18^th century, Toshusai Sharaku, along with works by 11 contemporary Japanese artists interpreting their predecessor. Sharaku used the ukiyo-e technique, which is the process that Chuck Close used in his collaboration with Japanese artists that was included in the recent show at the Frist, which showed how painstaking and demanding the process is.

Sarratt Gallery, Richard Painter. Painter makes his images by charring wood to produce fragile images that teeter on the edge of decay, pretty much one momento mori after another. Gallery talk at 5, reception at 6:30

February 19

Frist Center, Masterpieces of European Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, and U-Ram Choe. The painting exhibit is from a museum in Puerto Rico sounds a bit odd—heavy both on Baroque and the Pre-Raphaelites. But it’s work that has a lot of appeal. Choe’s a Korean sculptor who makes kinetic pieces that look like big metal bugs.

February 20

Gallery One, Michelle Firment Reid.

Rocky Horton's new art criticism blog

Rocky Horton has just started a new blog for critical writing on art in Nashville. It's called Nashville Critical. It is safe to say that's all you need to know. Keep an eye on it.