This Saturday: Belcourt and Sri Ganesha

What to do this Saturday?

Morning: Belcourt Community Meeting, 10-11:30. Back in 1999, when the Save the Belcourt process started, we held a big community forum at the Methodist church in the Village. 9 years later, and the Belcourt is operating as a non-profit, things are going really well with the programming, staff, finances. So well in fact that we were able to actually buy the building this Fall. It was hard to imagine in 1999 how we would get to this spot, but here we are. Now that we own the building we’ve started strategic planning in earnest. And part of that is to do a community meeting again to hear from people about what we’re doing and should be doing. The meeting will be from 10-11:30 at the Theatre. Please come. If you come to the theater a lot, tell us about it. If you don’t come very much, tell us why not. Here’s the write-up on it from the organizers:

Hi there fine friend of the Belcourt.

We hope that you'll join us for the Belcourt Community Meeting
Saturday, March 22 10:00am-11:30am.

In 2003 the theatre was purchased by Belcourt YES! founding committee member Thomas Wills with the intention of reselling the theater to the organization for the original purchase price. Belcourt YES! purchased the theatre from Mr. Wills in November of 2007, for the exact amount paid for the property in 2003. At about the same time, the Board of Directors changed the organization's name to The Belcourt Theatre, Inc.

The Belcourt is now the last of the neighborhood theatres to remain operational, and is recognized as a unique cultural icon and as Nashville's choice for the best foreign, independent, and classic film, great musical performances, cutting-edge live theatre, and unique programming for kids and their families.

Join us Saturday for Step 1 of The Belcourt Theatre, Inc.'s Strategic Planning Process:

Programming: What are we doing well? Where might we improve? Is there anything you'd like to see us do that we're not doing?

Membership: Are you a member? If not, why not?

Communication: How are you hearing about Belcourt news and events? What suggestions to you have for improved communication?

Facilities: We KNOW! But tell us again anyway . . . and try to think beyond theatre seats, bathrooms, and accessibility . . . dream BIG!

This meeting is open to the entire Nashville and Middle Tennessee Community. We'll even have coffee and doughnuts. We need to hear from YOU! We hope to see you there.

OK, so that’s your morning. I don’t really have any suggestions for the afternoon. Consider that open time, like a conference.

Evening: TNS Krishna, Sri Ganesha Temple, 6:00.

Last Fall Sri Ganesha presented a concert by major Carnatic vocalist T.N. Seshagopalan. I missed this concert for some reason I can’t remember, but it was one of those cases where you looked at the write and said this is going to be very good, and reports from the concerts were that this was exactly what happened. So now Seshagopolan’s son is coming to town. I’d say it’s a consolation prize for those who missed the father’s concert, but I suspect it will be much more than that. Here’s Sankaran Mahadevan’s writeup on the concert:

T. N. S. Krishna is the son and disciple of the great genius Madurai T.N. Seshagopalan, the leading vocalist in the field of Carnatic music today. Many of us remember the brilliant and moving concert by the father at the temple last October. Now the son comes to sing for us, already one of the prominent young stars in the field, and having proved himself worthy of carrying forward his father's rich legacy. Krishna's performances are marked by the same brilliance as his father, rendered in a rich melodious voice. In 2004, he won the Yuva Kala Bharati award in Chennai, one of the most prestigious awards for accomplished young artists.

Jayshankar Balan learnt Carnatic violin in Bombay under well known musicians T. S. Krishnaswamy and N. S. Chandrasekaran, and has frequently accompanied many leading Carnatic musicians during the past twenty years, such as T. N. Seshagopalan, K. J. Yesudas, N. Ravi Kiran and others.

M. Lakshman is the student of Palghat T. R. Rajamani, son of the legendary Palghat Mani Iyer, and has regularly accompanied prominent Carnatic musicians during the past fifteen years, such as N. Ravi Kiran and R. Prasanna.

Nashville VisArts Events March 14-27

Pretty busy for the middle of the month. Maybe the galleries not quite downtown are gravitating to the middle of the months to stay out of the first weekend rush. A couple of good group shows, particularly at Cumberland and Zeitgeist, which between the two of them feature a bunch of reliably interesting local folks.

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 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.

Mar. 14

TSU Hiram Van Gordon Gallery, Cutie Pie. This is a show Jodi Hays put together last year that as the name suggests explores the idea of cuteness, and that certainly is a common/important (you pick the adjective or replace with one of your choosing) trope in art today. The artists include Mark Hosford of Vanderbilt, and his little kids and dolls in cartoonish but gory settings give you an idea of what the show is working on.

Untitled, Active Ingredient This quarter the show is at the Limelight in East Nashville, and in a new twist Untitled is hooking up with the Dr. Sketchy’s group to do a life drawing session during the show, featuring some of Nashville’s burlesque queens as models.

Gallery One, Botanica. This show features Jean Hess (painting), Lendon Noe (painting/mixed media), Brant Kingman (sculpture). Noe makes attractive, colorful compositions that have been some of the more satisfying stuff I’ve seen at Gallery One. Kingman’s bronze sculpture weave together different objects to create some other overall form—based on descriptions he may do some interesting things with what elements he chooses as the basic elements he ties together.

Kronos Quartet, Sun Rings by Terry Riley. Vanderbilt has the Kronos Quartet in for a concert at Ingram Recital Hall, performing a new piece by Terry Riley. Riley is one of the pioneers of minimalism (his best known work is In C), and this looks like a major work, described as “evening length” with the Blair Choir and multimedia images.

Mar. 15

Estel, Daniel Lai. Daniel Lai shows up this month not as proprietor of Dangenart but as artist in his own right. The show will include both his portraits made by burning canvas, and sculptures. The title of the show is “Icon,” with portraits of Western cultural figures Daniel did not encounter growing up in Malaysia. Daniel seems like a total insider to Nashville art by now, but by virtue of birth and background, he has the capacity to look in on American culture as an outsider as well.

Cumberland Gallery, Billy Renkl, Ken Rowe, Ann Wells Three very solid artists. Billy Renkl does drawings with collage, the elements taken from maps and books. The incorporation of maps and books is something I distrust a little—the material is inherently interesting, which means an artist can skate by without much to say—you’re distracted looking at the map, or at least I am. But Renkl has sold me sold with a lot of his work—the pieces in the Frist’s Fragile Species show come to mind (here’s an old post on them). Ann Wells’s stoneware sculptures are refined objects that retain some of the form of vessels. And I don’t know if Cumberland has shown Ken Rowe’s sculptures before—they are extremely detailed depictions of strange scenes like a kid poking at the decayed corpse of a critter or people in bunny costumes.

Zeitgeist, Dialogues—the Painting show. This year Zeitgeist is structuring several months of their exhibit schedule around group shows focused by medium. They have ambitious aspirations for the series, and will be holding panel discussions in conjunction with each installment. The artists in the painting show are very good: Will Berry, Richard Feaster, Brady Haston, Farrar Hood, Rocky Horton, Sara La, Megan Lightell, Johnny Nelson, James Perrin, Kelly Popoff-Punches, Julian Rogers, Terry Rowlett, Lars Strandh, John Tallman, Gene Wilken, Lain York. Julian, who along with Mike Calway-Fagan ran the Sooplex space at Chestnut Street, does big striking pieces; Sara La’s work is always good to see—when she’s on, the work is first-rate. Terry Rowlett’s stuff is great, full of classical references, There will be a panel discussion with Rocky Horton, Terry Thacker, and Kelly Williams in April, and then the next installments in the series are photography, drawing and sculpture, and works on paper.

Lost Boys Foundation Art Gallery. The Lost Boys are a group of Sudanese boys who fled civil war in that country in 1987, walked a thousand miles to a refugee camp in Kenya and then were resettled around the globe. 150 of these refugees came to Nashville. The Lost Boys Foundation was formed by several Nashvillians including photographer Jack Spencer to help these young men by creating a community complex for them. Several of the Lost Boys have become artists, and the Foundation holds art auctions to support the Foundation and the community center. The Center and Gallery are at 4^th Avenue South and Lea, the opening is at 6:00.

March 27

Metro Arts Commission Gallery, CarrieGlenn and Larry Megill, Michael Serkownek, Jorge Yances. I haven’t seen the gallery space yet at Metro Arts, but they’ve been promoting their exhibits there for a while. In this show you’ve got the Megills, who collaborate on welded sculptures drawn from natural scenes, a nature and landscape photographer (Serkownek), and a painter of landscapes, some with surrealistic elements (Yances). The gallery is in the Howard School building on 2^nd Avenue South. Their opening reception will run from 2-4:30 on the 27^th, which is a Thursday if you aren’t counting ahead that far.

Nashville Visual Arts Events Mar. 1-15

I think writers as naïve as me are tempted to believe that if someone ever reads anything you wrote, then they read all of it, and track what you write from piece to piece—so you’d better not recycle an idea or phrase from one outing to the next. Or maybe it’s as a reader from time to time I notice that recycling. The point of this is that I was tempted to say “those of you reading my pieces in the Scene will know the high regard I have for Sam Dunson’s painting.” Well, let’s not worry about whether you, dear email recipients, have tracked on this, but we will make a fresh start. I think Sam has a good claim on being the best painter in Nashville (there is competition for the title, I’m happy to report). I think he does a remarkable job of drawing a bit of hip-hop aesthetics into some of his work, and he’s got a lot going on in the response to and use of narrative. When he comes out with a new body of work, this should be of interest to everyone in Nashville. And this month he’s got new work at TAG Gallery (operating out of Dangenart’s space on the second floor of the Arcade). To me this is a big deal.

OK, in addition to the openings listed here, Kaaren Hirschowitz Engel has hung up a bunch of her paintings-turned-to-something-like-sculpture-or-at-least-objects high in the rafters of the Arcade. The official opening is later in March, but I gather the pieces will be there this weekend.

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 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.

And—check out my wife’s excellent review of Lauren Kalman’s show. Maria is a remarkable person. A great writer, and perceptive to a degree that still thrills me after many years.

Mar. 1

TAG, Sam Dunson, Jason Lascu, and Robert Vore. OK, I’ve covered Sam Dunson’s work in the opening paragraph. Enough said for now. Also on tap at TAG are sculptures from Lascu and charcoal drawings by local artist Robert Vore. Robert’s drawings look appealing from

(fov), Teresa VanHatten-Granath VanHatten-Granath is chair of the photography department at Belmont. This show consists of mixed media books and digital images. The books address childhood/motherhood in ways that look like they contain a lot of good contradictions in tone and emotion. I’m looking at one image that includes a composite figure that makes nude flesh look like meat as well as a human form.

Estel, WJ Cunningham. Portraits by this painter from Madison (TN, not the People’s Republic in Wisconsin).

Twist, Rachel Hall Kirk, “The Big Payback” Kirk is teaching art at Austin Peay and has put together an installation for her show at Twist. I don’t know much about the show from the description.

Arts Company, Nelson Grice, Calvin Morton, Hollis Bennett, Kimiko Grice makes raku-fired clay sculptures that mix animal forms with obvious signs of constructedness. The piece in the PR shot, a pig with 4 legs attached like bedposts, has oddly loving details as well as a broadly humorous character. Bennett and Kimiko are both photographers, Kimiko here with a series about New Orleans, Bennett with American landscapes, maybe a lot of what I think of as road pictures. Calvin Morton is a painter, and this series has to do with smoke in the environment and the landscape.

Rymer, Brett Eric Osborn Osborn is Rymer’s featured artist this month. From what I can tell he’s on faculty at SCAD and does dream-like images of people and landscapes in the Midwest.

Project A, Kathryn Fortson

Art Rogue, Tinney-Cannon, et al Dont' forget Matt Mikulla at ArtRogue, Bart Mangrum, etc. on gallery crawl night. Susan and Virginia are extending their Tony Hernandez show for another month.

Mar. 2

Diane Getty, Marnie Sheridan Gallery, Harpeth Hall Getty uses quilting techniques, stitching, and painting to make fabric pictures, some of natural scenes, others more abstract.

CRAFT: A Creative Community A group of local artists/artisans, bringing Nashville into the world of DIY crafts, holds its first monthly sale/fair of the new year in the parking lot of Lipstick Lounge from 11-5 on Sunday.

Mar. 7

Centennial Art Center, Dawn Hale, Lucian Nicholson, Mimi Walsh Dawn Hale does cut paper pieces, often with architectural themes; Nicholson makes sculptural chairs and lighting out of twigs and found materials; and Walsh works in enamels, colored glass fused to metal, which makes for lovely, vividly colored surfaces.

Terri Jones, Watkins I saw an installation by Jones at the 2005 Atlanta Biennial that was really good. In a way the core was a series of delicate, minimal gesture drawings mounted in two-sided glass frames that were installed to form their own diagonal element through the space. She drew the rest of the room into the composition with minimalist sculpture elements and material use to define lines and forms at various points throughout the space. Here’s a review I did of that piece, Now that I think about it, this show could be the other big deal this month.

Mar. 8

Cheekwood, Painters of American Life: The Eight. The 8 would be Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, the major painters of New York before Modernism really took hold, also known as the Ash Can Painters. They used the techniques of Impressionism to depict real life of the day. I think of this as art of greatest interest to historians as documents of life of the time. It’s also art that a lot of American museums have a lot of, and this show is mostly drawn from Cheekwood’s collection.

Mar. 12

Roger Shimomura lecture, Vanderbilt A painter and printmaker who has dealt with visual stereotypes of Asian and Asian American people and the political and social events that drive them. The lecture is at 7 P.M. in Room 103 of Wilson Hall.

David Berman reading at Watkins. Berman is a poet and the leader of the Silver Jews. Last album was great. There’s a reception at 6 and then he’ll do a reading at 7. If I’m reading the press release correctly, this is his first reading in Nashville.

Mar. 14

TSU Hiram Van Gordon Gallery, Cutie Pie. This is a show Jodi Hays put together last year that as the name suggests explores the idea of cuteness, and that certainly is a common/important (you pick the adjective or replace with one of your choosing) trope in art today. The artists include Mark Hosford of Vanderbilt, and his little kids and dolls in cartoonish but gory settings give you an idea of what the show is working on.

Untitled, Active Ingredient This quarter the show is at the Limelight in East Nashville, and in a new twist Untitled is hooking up with the Dr. Sketchy’s group to do a life drawing session during the show, featuring some of Nashville’s burlesque queens as models.

Mar. 15

Cumberland Gallery, Billy Renkl, Ken Rowe, Ann Wells Three very solid artists. Billy Renkl does drawings with collage, the elements taken from maps and books. The incorporation of maps and books is something I distrust a little—the material is inherently interesting, which means an artist can skate by without much to say—you’re distracted looking at the map, or at least I am. But Renkl has sold me sold with a lot of his work—the pieces in the Frist’s Fragile Species show come to mind (here’s an old post on them–this and the Terri Jones item are reminding me of a time when I was actually posting reviews on the blog, during my initial enthusiasm about the venture. Oh well). Ann Wells’s stoneware sculptures are refined objects that retain some of the form of vessels. And I don’t know if Cumberland has shown Ken Rowe’s sculptures before—they are extremely detailed depictions of strange scenes like a kid poking at the decayed corpse of a critter or people in bunny costumes.

Estel, Daniel Lai. Daniel Lai shows up this month not as proprietor of Dangenart but as artist in his own right. The show will include both his portraits made by burning canvas, and sculptures. The title of the show is “Icon,” with portraits of Western cultural figures Daniel did not encounter growing up in Malaysia. Daniel seems like a total insider to Nashville art by now, but by virtue of birth and background, he has the capacity to look in on American culture as an outsider as well.

Nash Vis Arts Events Feb. 15-29

I have a suspiciously small number of openings for events the rest of the month. That can mean only two things—I’m missing a bunch of stuff and/or I’m going to have a lot of stuff to get into the March 1 etc. listing.

Myself, I’m going to be off in Scotland playing with the Cherry Blossoms at the Instal festival. I haven’t really comes to terms with the idea that I’m kinda of going to be sharing a bill with John Butcher and Donald Dietrich (of Borbetomagus). And Alan Silva.

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 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.

Feb. 15

Mark Hosford and Bill Fick, Vanderbilt Studio Arts Building Gallery Mark’s world in prints, drawing, and animation consists of cartoons of creatures that are hybrids between bugs, monsters, dolls, and children engaged in hard to define but usually gruesome actions. Fick, a professor from Duke, definitely is a kindred spirit, with a similarly cartoon-based style. His monsters seem to be taking shape from primordial processes or melting back into a more elemental stage. The opening runs from 5 to 7 on the 15^th.

Frist, Monet to Dali. An exhibit of late 19^th and early 20^th century paintings and sculpture on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I’ve never been to the Cleveland Museum and don’t know what the highlights are, but it looks like most of the big names are represented: Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, etc.

Feb. 16

Finer Things, Benefit Show for Arrowmont Finer Things is sponsoring a one-week show of work by resident artists at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg. Arrowmont is one of the country’s absolute leading centers for teaching “crafts” disciplines—like the Appalachian Center for the Crafts, it’s a program of truly national stature. Arrowmont has a residence program for five artists working in wood, ceramics, fiber, printmaking, and metal, and Finer Things will have work by them. You can see profiles of the artists and some examples of their work here.

Feb. 29

Cutting Fine, Cutting Deep: Cut Paper Works, University of the South Art Gallery Sewanee professor Julie Puttgen (who had a show at Ruby Green around the time she started at Sewanee but who doesn’t seem to have been in evidence much in Nashville since) organized this group show. On one level, it is as advertised, a show of works that involve cut paper. It brings together artists from the U.S. and Switzerland—Puttgen was born in Switzerland but grew up in the States. The Swiss are all artists working within a traditional handicraft practice of papercutting called Scherenschnitt. Several of them create very intricate variations on folkloric images. The American artists are all definitely engaged in contemporary art, setting up a dialogue with the traditional practice.

Nashville Visual Arts Events Jan. 30-Feb. 15

If you have time and energy to think about anything other than Super Tuesday, it is of course the beginning of the month, so there’s art openings to distract you from whatever scares or excites you most about the country’s political prospects. But do vote, if you haven’t already.

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 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. 30

Libby Rowe, Pink, Belmont Leu Gallery. This show opened a week ago, but they held the opening reception this afternoon. I think most of Libby’s pieces I’ve seen involve fabric—there was a series of pseudo-circus side show posters printed on canvas hangings called Circus of the Unremarkable (e.g., “Jojo the Dog-Faced Dog”), and at least one piece that was a modified apron, and it seems like I’ve seen something else like that from her (I think). They are funny and well-done. The Belmont show includes an even broader range of media—video, drawings, photographs, and installations from a series that deals with femininity and the physicality of being female. It looks like it will bring together a lot of pieces that Nashville audiences have seen in isolation. The Belmont space gives artists an unusual opportunity to stretch out and express the range of their ideas in a body of work, and Libby is playing out a lot of ideas in this series.

Feb. 1

Centennial Art Center, Tom Turnbull and Elizabeth Wise Turnbull is a potter showing porcelain wall pieces and ceramics, and Wise is a painter of dreamy domestic scenes.

Feb. 2

Estel, Desi Minchillo. I’m a sucker for work like this, dense and colorful. Minchillo cuts up bits of paper and other stuff into Pop Art shapes like flowers that she bunches and stacks up to create continuous washes of color and a three dimensional surface. She was formerly an architect, and she builds up a topographic space like an architectural model where sections of foam-core or cardboard build up the contours of land and the massings of building on it. Which is not to say her pieces are involved with rigid geometries—no, the opposite, the colors coalesce like flocks of birds with amorphous boundaries.

Tinney + Cannon Contemporary, Tony Hernandez Hernandez is a well-received Atlanta artist. The work at Tinney+Cannon is a series of melancholy pictures of children, isolated in abstract space. He’s inspired by images of children in the camps during the Holocaust. Even though the paintings don’t have obvious indications of their link to that time and place, the association makes intuitive sense. One of his paintings was the cover from Train’s album Drops of Jupiter: it has a kid wearing a crown and holding a dove.

Twist, Scot Simontacchi and Julie Lee Julie more visible lately as a singer and songwriter—she’s put out a couple of CDs on her own, records and performs with Sarah Siskind in the group Old Black Kettle, and Alison Kraus cut a couple of her songs on her last album. But I first got to know her as a visual artist, constructing sculptures and shrines and things in between out of found objects. She’s back in that mode of course for the show at Twist, although there will be a performance. Scott is a musician and I gather a photographer as well—I’m not familiar with his work, but it looks like he’s making stuff that moves towards Julie’s aesthetics in this show.

TAG, Josh Keyes, John Casey, David McClister. Starting in February, for the next 6 months Jerry Dale McFadden takes over the Dangenart gallery on the second floor of the Arcade (don’t worry, Daniel will be back). For his first show there we brings back a couple of his artists from California. Keyes paints scenes of animals in surreal urban environments, and Casey does drawings and sculptures of mutant creatures which often look like elaborate sock puppets or Mister Potato Head dressed up. With them is McClister, a Nashville photographer, who has created a narrative called “They Love By Night” from staged “crime scene” photographs that tell a sort of story about people mutated by radiation from atomic weapons experimentation.

Arts Company, William Buffett, Nicole Katano, Javier Barbosa, and art books. Buffett is a painter based in Nashville who has dedicated much of his work to New Orleans and its music. Carlton Wilkinson used to carry his work at In The Gallery. Barbosa creates prismatic abstract paintings, and Katano is a photographer of flowers, plants, and outside scenes put together into diptychs and triptychs. Some of her work has been published in book form, which will be featured in the gallery’s selection of art books.

Rymer, Laurie Hogin, Trevor Nicholas, Frank Webster The gallery’s show this month features Frank Webster, who paints empty spaces from the contemporary landscape—empty skies, empty walls, marked by minimal features.

Art Rogue et al. And don't forget Matt Mikulla at Art Rogue, (fov), Bart Mangrum, etc.

Feb. 7

Vandy Fine Arts Gallery and Sarratt Art Gallery, Oswald Guayasamin, Of Rage and Redemption Guayasamin (1919-1999) was an Ecuadorian painter and graphic artist who cultivated a classic Latin American modernism informed by a strong social consciousness. Vanderbilt organized this show, the first survey of his work in the United States. It came about through a nice bit of serendipity that brought people from Vandy into contact with the artist’s family (I think it was his son, but don’t hold me to that). After the show runs at Vandy, it is touring for a couple of years to galleries across the U.S., including the gallery of the OAS in DC. It’s not every year that Vanderbilt originates an exhibit that generates that kind of interest at other institutions.

Watkins, Dave Plunkert Lecture Watkins is hosting a lecture by illustrator Dave Plunkert. whose portfolio includes a lot of biggest magazines in the country like Newsweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times.

Feb. 8

TSU Hiram Van Gordon Gallery, Call and Response Another imaginative exhibit at the TSU gallery. This time the gallery asked several artists and some students at McKissack Elementary to respond to the gallery’s collection of African art. The respondants selected works from the collection to display, along with their own work, creating new contexts to view the work. It sounds like a great way to draw attention to their African art collection. This might be time to say, or repeat that interesting things are happening at TSU. The gallery program is notably revitalized under Jodi Hayes’ leadership, and the TSU students in the Frist show this Fall constituted one of the strongest cohorts when you compared the schools (I know you weren’t supposed to do that, but I couldn’t help it).

Watkins, Annual Juried Student Show The annual juried show is the best way to figure who the current Watkins students are and some of what they are trying to do. This year the school is renaming one of the show's awards in honor of Will ClenDening.

Greg Pond and Pradip Malde, Artists' Forum, Frist Center Colleagues at Sewanee who show work frequently (but not frequently enough) in Nashville--Pradip is a photographer with a strong philosophical bent, which he shares with Greg, who starts as a sculptor but ranges into video, sound art, and programming, combining them in all sorts of ways. Greg definitely has a lot to say and draws on a broad and vital body of ideas and knowledge. I haven't talked to Pradip and have only heard him speak once, but I imagine he can hold his own. At 6:30 in the Frist Auditorium.

Feb. 9

Ruby Green, Traci Molloy, JoseX, Joon Sung The featured artist is Traci Molloy, with two bodies of moody work. One is a set of black and white photos overlaid with lines of text and numbers, like some sort of conversion of image into code. In the hallway gallery there will be a series of cards drawn by an illustrator during his commutes on Chicago’s El from 1967-70. I don’t know how Ruby Green got it hands on these, but they sound pretty cool. Joon Sung has videos showing in the gallery’s theater space.

Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School, Five Spot A hipster life-drawing class—the Nashville Roller Girls model, there’s beer and a DJ, and goofy contests and prizes. This is part of a national network of events that started in Brooklyn and spread to places around the country that look to Brooklyn as the epicenter of their cultural world, like East Nashville.

Cumberland Gallery, Paper Goods, Don Porcaro This month at Cumberland includes a group show of gallery artists doing work on paper and sculptures by Don Porcaro, who combines stone, ceramics, and electrical and plumbing supplies, all painted with vivid colors. He was one of the artists who contributed to the Peace Tower at the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Feb. 10

Downtown Presbyterian Church, Emancipation Conversation. With the usual caveat, this is my church, DPC is doing their annual Lenten Art Show. This year the theme is Emancipation, and the opening is going to be on Sunday the 10^th, at noon or so I think. (I guess a lot of the work is going to be up the week before for the Art Luck pot luck supper before Art Crawl.) We’re doing the Thursday film series again this year, featuring among other things George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. You can ask Tom Wills what it has to emancipation, but his selections always make sense when you see them. And we’re also having a concert on the 21^st that’s part of the God in Music City series sponsored by Vandy’s Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, with which Dave Perkins is affiliated.

Feb. 13

Student Art Alliance, City Hall Rotunda, Murfreesboro A group exhibit by MTSU’s student art association. Like the Watkins juried show, this should be a good opportunity to get to know the work of some of the MTSU art students. It’s a relatively big program, and each year some of the students are very good.

Feb. 15

Frist, Monet to Dali. An exhibit of late 19^th and early 20^th century paintings and sculpture on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. I’ve never been to that museum and don’t know what the highlights are, but it looks like most of the big names are represented: Monet, Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, etc.

Nashville Visual Arts this weekend

I missed a bunch of stuff for this weekend, so let me pick up what I know I missed. And of course there’s a whole bunch of stuff coming up next weekend.

By the way, I’ve gotten notice that Jim Brooks is retiring as President at Watkins. On balance, it seems like he’s done a good job. He’s been there for 6 years, and during this time they moved into Metro Center and started building dorms. The dorms are a big deal, both in terms of changing the nature of the school and as a reflection of the school’s ability to inspire support from the community. Of course the whole thing with Terry Glispin came down on his watch, but it’s probably the case that he brought the school back from that crisis as well as imaginable.

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. 25

Renaissance Center. The Secret Show group was a bunch of Watkins students (Amanda Dillingham, Jason Driskill, Derek Gibson, Eve Peach, Jaime Raybin, Heather Spriggs Thompson, Iwonka Waskowski, Kristen Burton and Will ClenDening) who started out doing quarterly shows in borrowed space, then rented their own space on Chestnut, and now they’ve gone off in separate directions. Most of them are still in the area, a couple are in MFA programs. And of course they’re including work by Will ClenDening who died in a motorcycle accident in 2006. They’re having a sort of reunion show at the Renaissance Center in Dickson. Under curator Armon Means, the Ren Center seems to be doing something interesting most months. In addition to the Secret Show exhibit, they’re showing an installation by Memphis artist Sara Good, and work by Jeffrey Morton.

Parthenon, Victoria Boone and Marla Fath. It’s been a while since I tracked on an exhibit in the Parthenon (maybe Carlton Wilkinson’s show), but this one caught my eye. Boone’s got abstract paintings here based on symbols she created for her teenage diary to keep her secrets. That sounds like a pretty good start for something. And she’s got a great title: “Gravity and Merit.” And Fath is doing portraits of women that cast them in a mythological light. They’re doing a reception on the 25^th from 6-8, and then the exhibit stays up through April 5.

Jan. 26

Zeitgeist, Print Portfolio Zeitgeist has commissioned a print portfolio with contributions from 5 of its artists—Jim Ann Howard, who makes images of nature broken, rendered in pigments drawn from natural materials; Brady Haston, whose paintings show the mark of graphic representations in the landscape, Patrick DeGuira, maker of conceptually demanding sculptures that address very down to earth human experience, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, involved in clever transfers of material between media, and Will Berry, who in the past has built a kind of abstract travel account of distant places he has lived or visited. This seems like a very good idea for the gallery and the artists, giving people another way to bring this art into their lives.

Plowhaus, Out of Here. Plowhaus is leaving its space on 17^th Street and wrapping up there with this show, which looks like it includes most of the people active in the group. In their press they say they’re cooperating with the Art House to find new space, and at least one of their press statements say they have leads but no new space yet. So I imagine they will be on hiatus, but I hope that’s really short. They seem to have a large enough membership that I’ve got to think they’re going to come up with new space. I’m sure there will be updates on their website.

Jan. 30

Vanderbilt, Ingram Studio Art Center, Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler. It looks like more of the Mel Ziegler Austin connection—Hubbard’s a professor at University of Texas. She and Birchler collaborate on videos and video installations that seem to have some common ground with photographer Gregory Crewdson. Their work has been shown all over, including the MCA in Chicago, the Venice Biennale, an upcoming show at the Hirshhorn, and they’ve been featured on PBS’ Art 21. They’re delivering a lecture on their work at 7:00 on the 30^th.

Two concerts this weekend

Alright, for the last time on the blog I’m going to plug the Susan Alcorn/Misha Feigin show at Twist, and I also thought I’d pass on info on a concert by a Ukrainian mandolinist and fiddler organized by the Global Education Center.

I’ve got a note on Susan and Misha’s show under my previous post. Read Michael Anton Parker’s description there. I think Susan has achieved something remarkable in absorbing many kinds of music and turning them into something completely organic and integrated, going down to some essence that unites music across styles, nations, eras. Too often someone interested in so many sounds ends up “borrowing” the music, or creating an unlovely pastiche. Not so with Susan. The music is intense, like a reduction in cooking.

The show will be from 3-6 at Twist Gallery in the Arcade. We’re going to ask a suggested admissions of $6-10. I would expect things to get going pretty soon after 3:00. Susan and Misha are both going to play solo sets, they’ll play together, and me and Brady Sharp may or may not play.

Just today I got a notice from Monica Cooley about a concert that the Global Education Center is holding at West Nashville United Methodist Church on Charlotte—Ukrainian mandolin and fiddle player Peter Ostroushko. I’ll paste their notice below. If you haven’t had enough former Soviet bloc string players after Saturday, here’s a second dose. It looks good, though pretty different from Susan and Misha.

Peter Ostroushko in Concert
Sunday, january 20 - 7:30 pm
at West Nashville United Methodist Church
Tickets: $20 adults; $15 students and seniors
Tickets are available at the Global Education Center, 4822 Charlotte Avenue
Information at 292-3023; globaleducationcenter@juno.com;

The Global Education Center, in partnership with West Nashville United Methodist Church, is excited to continue its acoustic music series in an intimate evening with Peter Ostroushko, widely regarded as one of the finest mandolin and fiddle players in acoustic music today. His tours have taken him to the stages of clubs, performing arts centers, music festivals and theatres across North America and Europe, and he has earned an international reputation as a versatile and dazzling master of instrumentation and composition.

In this particular concert, he will be accompanied by Arkadiy Yushin on guitar. The duo will share their most passionate music - a rich ethnic mix of their Ukrainian heritage and the acoustic sounds that Peter has made popular on shows such as Prairie Home Companion and Austin City Limits. Ostroushko, whose resume is dizzying in size and scope, has played with orchestras throughout the United States and on shows as diverse as The David Letterman Show and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. An honored first generation hero among the Ukrainian communities of North America, Peter promises a folksy and welcoming experience for all.

Nashville Visual Arts Events January 10-26

Warning, but not an apology for the self-promotion contained in this listing. My friend Susan Alcorn is coming to town on January 19 to play a show at Twist Gallery (thank you Beth and Caroline for hosting it). Susan makes stunning music, experimental, but melodic, and comprehensive—she seamless draws in country, soul, jazz, Indian music, tango, contemporary classical music, and on and on, and synthesizes it into something that seems to breathe the essence of music. I’ve been reading Ben Ratliff’s new book about Coltrane, and one of its key ideas is that Coltrane was playing a sound, and this sound could absorb everything in music. I have the same experience with Susan’s music.

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. 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.

Vanderbilt, Ingram Studio Art Center, Jon Stone and T.J. Edwards. The Department of Art didn’t send much information on this. Stone appears to be a figurative painter, but I don’t anything about him and there wasn’t much on the web. T.J. Edwards is a potter who finished an undergraduate degree at the Appalachian Center for the Crafts in Smithville. He had a piece in the Frist show of mid-State art students. His piece was a very large bowl filled with lots of small vases, called “Blessed Are The Barren.” It poked fun at the repetitiveness, or the perceived repetitiveness, of production potting, but that title wakes you up to a much different approach to the object. It quickly brings in an entire world of veneration.

Jan. 17

Frist Center, Aaron Douglas: African-American Modernist, and Fisk Art Faculty Aaron Douglas chaired the Fisk art department for 30 years from the 1930s, and before that he has one of the leading visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He is known in particular for the style he used in graphics and murals—figures in silhouette, the positioning of heads and hands indicating emotional or spiritual state. His use of color and organization of figures in monumental works can be seen reflected in other muralists like John Biggers, and his work is one precursor for Kara Walker’s use of silhouettes. His influence as an educator has got to be nearly as large. As is often its practice, the Frist Center has organized an add-on show to complement the main show—in the case works by some of the many important artists who have taught at Fisk at one time or the other, including Martin Puryear and David Driskell as well as current faculty like Alicia Henry and Victor Simmons.

Jan. 18

Cheekwood Temporary Contemporary, Lauren Kalman, Corpus, Figure, Skate Kalman joined the faculty at Watkins in Fall 2006 (I think that’s right), and it seems like this is her first big show in town (but I might have missed something). I have seen a piece or two in exhibits at Watkins, and what I recall are complicated, but not fussy, multi-part installations that were well-coordinated visually. And I recall not getting a chance to come back and spend time with the pieces, so here’s my chance. I didn’t realize, but the PR from Cheekwood points out, that she trained as a jeweler/goldsmith.

Jan. 19

Twist Gallery, Susan Alcorn and Misha Feigin. OK, first, this is a music event (an afternoon one at that, from 3-6). Second, I was involved in organizing it. Susan is a friend of mine from Baltimore, an amazing experimental steel guitar player. For the past few years she’s been coming through town about once a year, and last year she also came with Misha Feigin, an outstanding guitarist and poet. I have raved about Susan’s playing for years, but I found someone who does it better, Michael Anton Parker writing for the Downtown Music Gallery. “Rather than the typical avant-garde path of rejecting melody and focusing on harsh, difficult new sound vocabularies, Alcorn has dug so deep inside her melodies that she's opened up a new space of details in individual note shapes, creating decays that don't decay or suddenly become attacks instead, and patiently revealing subtle shifts in overtones. Alcorn's music is a hall of mirrors flooded with liquid gold shimmering off her horizontal fretboard.” Brady Sharp and I might play some duets also, but only if there’s time left at the end.

Project A, Sheppard Jones Sheppard Jones is designer and fabricator of metalwork. He works as a designer of ornamental metalwork at Herndon & Merry, but he also does fine art gallery work, which I gather is what will be featured here.

Jan. 26

Zeitgeist, Print Portfolio Zeitgeist has commissioned a print portfolio with contributions from 5 of its artists—Jim Ann Howard, who makes images of nature broken, rendered in pigments drawn from natural materials; Brady Haston, whose paintings show the mark of graphic representations in the landscape, Patrick DeGuira, maker of conceptually demanding sculptures that address very down to earth human experience, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, involved in clever transfers of material between media, and Will Berry, who in the past has built a kind of abstract travel account of distant places he has lived or visited. This seems like a very good idea for the gallery and the artists, giving people another way to bring this art into their lives.

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.

Mobile Museum

Here's something cool I ran across--it's a project by Ally Reeves, formerly of Nashville, Austin Peay, and Rule of Thirds, now in Pittsburgh and grad school at Carnegie Mellon. She's rigged up a bike to be a movable gallery that carries a compact body of art around to different places. It's the kind of thing that could and seems like it should be replicated everywhere. And I just realized the current project in the Mobile Museum was covered on NPR this week, it's an artist who collects lost gloves and posts them in hopes of reuniting them with their mates, which ends up being as much about ways of marking space.

David Lefkowitz show at Cheekwood

It took me a while to get over to see this show in Temporary Contemporary at Cheekwood—it’s only up until Sunday. Worth a stop if you are around town this week. What else you got to do?

David Lefkowitz does paintings of the built landscape, particularly what you associate with cars—highways, tourism—and modern architecture in its various guises. One painting, “Outlying Area,” was particularly perceptive. It’s an aerial view of an indistinct exurban landscape dominated by a complex set of highway interchanges. Some of the islands between the roadways are occupied by isolated structures of uncertain purpose. The ground is painted in vaguely winter tones of greens, grays, and browns, but no vegetation or topography is distinguishable. The key detail is that the bits of roadway are labeled with the names of fabled roads of all sorts—Champs-Elysees, Broadway, Division Street, Route 66, the Natchez Trace, the Oregon Trail, the Spice Road, the Nile, Elm Street. Whether it’s the almost mythic qualities of the Spice Road, the frontier history of the Trace, an archetypal small town “tree” street, or the multi-ethnic working class urban life of Terkel and Algren’s Division Street, each of these roads had life-giving character, qualities that differentiated and distinguished it, that added to store of human experience. The brutally efficient bands of concrete of the Eisenhower interstate system offer nothing like that. They are just empty space that get you from here to there. The time spent on them is lost. You learn nothing from these roads. No books or songs will be written about them. In this painting Lefkowitz succinctly puts his finger on what is lost in these contemporary landscapes and in our way of life.

The rest of the show has different bits and pieces—he packs a lot into the one room gallery. There are pennants of non-existent, ridiculous tourist destinations, maybe a little broad by themselves, but effective in context. Various depictions of unknown modern buildings made out of cardboard boxes (and in one case painted on cardboard). Blurry diptychs of sections of highway at different times of day. And several paintings of imaginary cities floating over aerial views of landscape, projections of future developments on the green fields if Italo Calvino was the developer. In one of those paintings, several clusters of buildings with red-tile roofs are bunched on the pods of a suburban cul-de-sac street system. Each cluster has an exotic name, like Zorgi or Brusto. The appearance of these exotic, evocative little settlements on the cul-de-sacs points out something similar to the famous labels on the highways, the profoundly uninteresting quality of structures we build today. These structures consume a lot of resources, but somehow they contain nothing of us, no trace of humanity.

So you’ve got this imagination of landscapes in the Temporary Contemporary gallery, and the main show at Cheekwood offers photos of notable American house gardens from the early 1900s, places like Cheekwood, Winterthur in Delaware, or Dumbarton Oaks in DC. These are artificial landscapes, spectacular yes, but definitely the realization of imagination. With enough money, one could commission this sort of transformation of the natural world into perfectly lovely sequences and vistas. Dumbarton Oaks is one of my favorite places on earth. For me, it is what heaven should be like. It was nice to see some photos of it. Beyond feeding my nostalgia, the show didn’t seem to have much to offer.

Me and Brady at Buzz and Click

Brady and I played our annual or so duo set at Buzz and Click earlier this month. Here's video of it on the Google site. I was pleased with it. I also played a set with Ben and Amy Marcantel and a big group at the end with Brian Siskind/Fognode. The last set has some nice heckling at the beginning. These files I guess are too big to embed, but click over and I think everything comes right up.

Merry Christmas?

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