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.