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.