Thanks Amanda

Amanda Dillingham was nice enough to do a Best of Nashville on this blog. With the dearth of posts for a while, it hardly seems to deserve it, but knowing this was in the works (the list goes around at some point to all the writers) chastened me, and I've been trying to make an effort to come up with stuff more often.

On the topic of Best of Nashville, I was too clever for my own good with a few of my titles and the editors provided titles that would be comprehensible to actual readers of the paper. But for my entertainment, here's the original titles for the ones that were changed:

Best Installation = Best Shower Curtain. Erika Johnson's installation at Parthenon. I was glad I got some chance to talk about it, and at least make the point in print that this was a really ambitious piece, with a real sweep. She captured big junks of history and cultural change, and made all of it personal and visceral.

Best Drawing Exhibit = Best Birds. For Erin Plew's drawing of a bunch of birds and bird parts. Technically this should have been "Best Drawing" and leave off Exhibit. I saw that she was exhibiting the drawing again at the Arcade last Art Crawl (I had to go by early so I only got to look in the window at the show).

Best Interactive Work = Best Interactive Housekeeping Exercise. Libby Rowe's show at Belmont. Again, one of the nice things about Best of Nashvilles is the chance to mention something when I missed the chance to write about it first time around.

In retrospect these titles are not as clever as I thought they were at the time, and the editors did keep Best Exploding Whale, which might actually have been a clever title. Let's face it, I ain't going to be writing for the Simpsons any time soon.

On the topic of things not written about (yet), don't forget that Amanda's in the show at Gallery F, The New Dress Code. She has a video about herself, her mother, and bodies and skin, installed in a fabric structure, kind of womb-like. It's gotten me to thinking about what I think about pieces that combine video and sculpture in this way, about the way the elements balance. Video demands your attention in a specific way, I don't know to what extent you take this in as an integrated visual experience--that can be part of the point, but it's one of the things I want to look for when I go back. There is all sorts of logic connecting the tangible and video elements in Amanda's piece. The show's up through November 16, which is helpful for me. And there's an artists' talk at the gallery at 7:00 next Tuesday, the 21st. I didn't get this talk into the events listing.

P.S. One more thing on Best of Nashville--as usual my wife hit it out of the park, packing her art BON dense with ideas and interpretation of Lauren Kalman's work.

Process of elimination

The new Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle has a fun inaugural show, which works out to be in large parts the greatest hits of what I've seen in galleries for a couple of years. There's a Tara Donovan piece made from buttons, one of Chakaia Booker's shredded tire sculptures, a faux museum display by Fred Wilson, one of Devorah Sperber's amazing pieces where she forms an image out of an array of spools of thread seen through a clear acrylic sphere that inverts the image and by reducing it in size smooths out the forms. There's piece after piece that you can remember, using every kind of material imaginable--plastic utensils, record albums, US Army dog tags, plastic shopping bags, quarters, and so forth.

This museum used to be called the American Craft Museum--I thought it was affiliated with the American Crafts Council, but I think I was wrong about that. The Museum of Arts & Design has put together a good show, but it does raise the question of what this museum is--how does it differ from say the New Museum in the Bowery or any number of Contemporary Art centers? I'm not sure it's a problem, but it has been interesting to think about this.

What I've come up with is that MAD distinguishes itself by what it does not show, if I can use the inaugural show as a guide, which is exactly what I'll do. In the past, it was a museum for work that could be identified as the crafts, largely defined by media, techniques, and aesthetic intent. Its inaugural show seems to say it will not be limited to those media--clay, glass, metal, fabric, wood. But maybe it will be defined by what it does not show--paintings (unless it's on clay or similar material). Prints. Photographs. Sculpture in stone, metal, wood, or cast resins (unless it has reference to a functional items). These of course are the media of the traditional fine arts (as opposed to craft). So the New Museum can do a show of Elizabeth Peyton, that would never happen at MAD (the process of elimination is yielding benefits if it saves the museum from that fate). Also, it is probably the case that MAD will stay away from video, although there was at least one piece with some.

I think it's interesting to think that the museum will become the place for "everything outside" of the most familiar vehicles for art.

To be fair, MAD does retain its ties to the crafts. After you get done with the inaugural show, the selections from the permanent collection go back to the familiar forms (if the choices are somewhat skewed to recent work). In a section for jewelry, in addition to display cases they have a whole bunch of drawers you can go through, each one filled with a few items from the collection. It's similar to a section in the renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has an even bigger section of cabinets filled with small items that they could not otherwise find room to display.

This approach seems to be coming into favor to deal with the sheer volume of material museums have, balancing access to this material with view-ability. In old days, museums displayed cases jammed with everything the museum had--100 stuffed specimens of finches, woven baskets from Western Native American tribes, samples of quartz crystals, whatever. This was overwhelming and bewildering, so museums turned to selecting a few items and displaying them carefullly, often nearly boasting about what a large percentage of the collection was out of public view. This new technique attempts to balance the two--highly edited display cases as the central focus, but much more material available off to the side for anyone who wants to take the time and dig deeper. The Met has done this in a few of its collections, notably in the mezzanine floor of the Greek, Roman and Etruscan department, where they have cases filled with material that you identify by checking on an interactive video screen.

All of this seems like a fine thing. It does mean you need to think about what kind of experience you want to have when you go to a museum, whether you want to go and settle in for something a lot like archival work.

Oh yeah, the new building looks good and seems to work well. It's got kind of a small footprint, but that's not really a problem, a lot of times it's better to have an exhibit broken up into bit-sized pieces. And it will seem like a lot more room when they do exhibits of more traditional "crafts." I don't know whether I miss the Edward Durrell Stone facade--I didn't have any particular objection to it or any particular attachment to it.

I feel like Balboa

Seeing the Pacific again always seems like arriving some place, getting to the end. I never feel that way about the Atlantic. Partly, no doubt, this is an ethnocentric tribal memory--the Atlantic has always been there, if you assume you are starting in Europe. After all these centuries, the Pacific is still new. It is also the case that one approaches the Pacific so often from above, from high cliffs that look out far to sea. In almost every case, you walk up to the Atlantic.

Off the edge

On the topic of unchecked, destructive chaos...

In discussion of the current economic crisis, I haven't run across anything that interprets this as economic end times, the absolute collapse of the economic system as we've known it. It's probably bad analysis, or maybe irresponsible, or too scary. Oh, and there's probably someone out there writing this, I just don't read that avidly.

I don't have any empirical basis for my sense of what we might be facing. It's a reaction to the tenor of things. Is this the big one, the final structural crisis that has been predicted over the years by left wing theorists? The stock market keeps plummeting. Is there any reason it couldn't go to zero--that we just can no longer fund productive enterprises this way, no one will hand over money to people they don't know who say they are using it for a productive enterprise, but who knows, the level of fraud and pure bullshit is so high and the incentives so skewed to encourage it. And there will be less going to the market because we moved from a regime of dispersed consumption to a regime of dispersed deprivation. Say the airlines keep cutting back flights and making the ones they have more expense, until there's little reason to even try to travel by air. A whole sector of the economy essentially disappears.

The slow or not slow unraveling of the globe as a hospitable environment keeps throwing us into a hole. It becomes more expensive to do everything, and more of life is a recovery effort. Nashville, thanks to the storm-driven gas shortage, got a taste of a Mad Max future.

Is the question now how we will survive and who will survive? Is there any model for people, communities, or nations to come together in the absence of a functioning market to produce and distribute food and services? What are the aggregations we need to form--do all people need to be tied in some way to productive farms? Does it come down to provision of potable water or household level energy? Yes, there are theories, but is there anything that's worked in practice?

It seems the crisis comes at an inopportune time, when alternate social structures are not waiting for their turn, the pursuit of something different anemic after years of disillusion.

Maybe everything will look better in a few weeks. Maybe we'll bump on bottom. Maybe Obama will make a difference--I'm looking forward to the prospect of his victory, and maybe the very idea of him will give people the idea that something decent actually can happen in our national culture.

Chaos connections

Let's start with one thing I saw in a brief stop in Chelsea last week--photographs by Kay Hassan, a South African artist at Jack Shainman. They were photos of multi-colored debris that had floated onto a beach in Mozambique. Rags and plastic in wild range of colors function as abstract art in big, gorgeous pictures. But the seductive qualities of the images don't mask that it's a scene of devastation, human trash overrunning the landscape.

The next day I saw Pam Longobardi's show at Tinney in Nashville, which deals with a similar material, just a different ocean. In her case, she has collected debris that washed up in Hawaii, I guess some of the huge mass of human trash that has collected in the North Pacific Gyre. In the main work, she takes some of those artifacts and lines them up in groups on the wall, ordered roughly by size. It's a touching gesture, responding to this overwhelming, world-destroying chaos by trying to retrieve a little bit of it and put it in an order, straight lines, like with like, the utter opposite of what happens when the sea is forced to absorb our monumental wastefulness.

Chaos can be a source of energy and creativity--I like to think of it that way, because my life is an exercise in chaos. These two pieces put chaos back into the realm of destruction. The forces that produced these art works can't really be redeemed.

New York notes--Eliasson Waterfalls

The Olafur Eliasson waterfalls are in place for a few more days in New York, until October 13th. I got a chance to look at them this summer and have been meaning to say something about it.

In my usual manner, I didn't plan very carefully, but set out on foot from a subway stop near City Hall in search of the waterfront. I knew they were there somewhere. Eventually, I got to the river near the foot of the Manhattan Bridge and could see 3 of them pretty well--a wide one under the Brooklyn Bridge, one pouring from a scaffolding on the Manhattan side north of the Manhattan Bridge, and one down by Governor's Island. At first the effect is "ehn." A bit of water pouring into the river seen from a distance. Unlike Eliasson's indoor works, they don't dominate the environment in any way. I'd seen the Eliasson show at MOMA a few weeks earlier, and it was filled with light and action spectaculars. It was all about creating environments.

So the waterfalls were just these little events in very complex open environments with a lot going on--traffic, boats, people going about their business, all sorts of sounds and smells. But if you gave it time and focused, you noticed the way the shapes formed by the pouring water changed as the wind picked up the water and moved it around, and as the light shifted as clouds passed by. It focused you on detail. And eventually I started to think of these as torrents, raging wilderness streams intruding into the urban environment. The sublime made present.

The waterfalls actually fit the title of the museum show, "Take Your Time," better than the show itself, which really didn't require you to take your time. You walked into each room at MOMA and the effects jumped out at you. It was fun to stay in those environments a while, but you could get a fair amount of the information on offer from your immediate observations entering the room. (This here's a pic of me and my mother at the show in a hallway flooded with yellow light, which had the effect of canceling out all of the colors. The shirt I'm wearing is a very loud plaid with bright red and blue.)

Once I got to the point of contemplating these sculptures as approximations of mountain streams inserted into the would-be orderly human environment, it occurred to me that in fact the experience was not that different than a broken water main, a fairly common distraction on most summer days in Houston, where the soil constricts and cracks open pipes.

Then again, when I flew into LaGuardia on later trips to the area, I'd look out the airplane window and could pick out the waterfalls from the air. That's something.

MacArthur genius grant

Tara Donovan got one. Glad to see it. Here's a picture of me and my dad inspecting her work. I don't remember the name of this. I don't think it was called A Billion Plastic Cups, but that's what it was.




Here's another shot that gives a better idea of what the piece looked like.

Annals of Homeland Security

In the previous post with my listings for October, I had an item for a concert at Sri Ganesha Temple featuring a vocalist named Rekha Surya performing Hindustani light classical music. Turns out the concert was canceled. According to the email announcing the cancellation, Ms. Surya's accompanying musicians, Durjay Bhaumik (tabla) and Ratan Prasanna (guitar) were unable to get visas to enter the U.S. You would think this would be getting better by now, that Homeland Security would have figured out a way to differentiate Indian classical musicians from arms smugglers. Guess not.

Nashville Visual Arts Events all of October maybe

I'm posting this a little late, but it covers the whole month so I suppose it's good to have it here for reference.

Joseph Whitt is making his presence felt at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. First, there’s the current exhibit of the Warhol Polaroids the gallery was given by the Warhol Foundation, shown with two current artists working with Polaroids. Bringing in these artists makes a nice way to think about Warhol. That’s going to be up for a week or so. Later in the month they’ll open a show of work by Jules de Balincourt, also curated by Joseph. The other Joseph at Vanderbilt, Mella, also puts together very smart shows, so this isn’t a matter of “upping the ante” or any related cliché—it’s a matter of a different voice, and it’s encouraging to see that both Josephs will share curatorial air time.

I’m trying to do just one email this month due to some travel that will take me out of commission the middle of the month. As always, sorry to the venues I missed.

October 1-8

TSU Gallery, Plus 3 Ferris. This is a traveling video exhibition with 26 artists, organized by Western Michigan University. It’ll be at TSU for this one week.

October 2

Renaissance Center (Dickson), 10^th Annual Regional Art Exhibit and Graduate Exhibition. The Renaissance Center’s regional exhibit is always worth checking out, usually someone in there worth seeing whom I haven’t encountered before. And last year they started a program of selecting a recent art graduate from a regional college for a solo show. This year they’ve selected 2 artists, Heather Hartman and Charlesey Charlton. Hartman is a graduate of Auburn currently in the MFA program at UT, Charlton graduated from MTSU and is working on an MFA at ETSU. Hartman in particular has gotten some early recognition in Atlanta.

Sarratt, Francois Deschamps. The works in this show are photographs and images from the house of an eccentric character named Albert “Yellow Kid” Gerontian who lived in the Catskills.

October 3

Centennial Art Center, Nashville’s Internationals. This is the second year the Centennial Art Center has done a show with this theme, and it’s a great idea, reflecting profound changes in Nashville. Of the artists this year, I’m familiar with the work of Sabine Schlunk, the curator of the new Gallery F at Scarritt-Bennett, who had a couple of interesting pieces in a show at TSU last year, and Ben Vitualla, who has exhibited a lot in town. But there’s a whole bunch of artists here: Olga Alexeeva, Alfred Awonuga, Heide Browne, Ayla Dumont, Roberta Winnett Harrison, Geppe Hernandez, Bharati P. Kakkad, Johnson Chang, James Bol, Jacob Deng, Chol Garang, John Kur, James Makuac, James Nguen and Gabriel Wal (these last 8 are from the Sudan and involved with the Lost Boys Foundation), Voymir Mustapich, Camille Torchon, Lucia Timis, Joy Min Xu.

Snow Gallery, Tucker Neel. OK, this looks interesting. Where to start. Tucker Neel is the son of Roy Neel, one of Al Gore’s chief advisors. The younger Neel is an artist based in LA, and he’s done a lot of pieces in many media with political themes or source material. That will be the case here, where his work will be shown with related printed by Piranesi and Hogarth. This sounds like something you’d see in a serious museum show.

Watkins, Annual Juried Student Show. I always try to get by and see this, lets you know who’s at Watkins and what they are up to.

Rekha Surya, Sri Ganesha Temple. Rekha Surya is a vocalist from New Dehli who performs Hindustani light classical music. These are folk songs treated with Indian classical musical technique, so they are based on more worldly stories and themes than the abstract classical forms. Surya sings in Nashville the day after she performs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The concert starts at 7, and is preceded by dinner at 6. Tickets cost $35.

October 4

The Arts Company, The Art of Politics. In honor of the Presidential debate at Belmont on the 7^th, this show features the work of Robert Grossman, an illustrator who contributes frequently to The Nation. The show is curated by Ronnie Steine—not sure if that means there will be political art from his collection or he was involved in selecting the work by Grossman. They also have signed copies of debate posters by Grossman and Nashvillian Jorge Arrieta commissioned by the Arts Company. And there’s Get Out the Vote paintings by Jonathon Kimbrell.

Twist: Drew Peterson. Drew is one of the artists from Minneapolis who had a show at Twist last year and did the mural on the Downtown Presbyterian Church side of the Viridian tower. He comes back to show a series of works that take patterns from old advertisements and mix them up into kaleidoscopic patterns.

Art and Invention, Duy Huynh Dreamy paintings by this Vietnamese-born artist.

Tinney Contemporary, Pam Longobardi. This show opened last weekend, but they are having a “special presentation” by the artist on Art Crawl. This show, “Drifters,” is based on the North Pacific Gyre, where huge amounts of drifting man-made debris collect in the middle of the ocean.

Plowhaus, The Art of Love. Again, the Plowhaus is showing in the Tennessee Art League galleries on Broadway. Cool to see the love theme showing up in October rather than February. The artists this month are: Kevin Brock, Nelson Curry, Terry Thornhill, Betty Turner, Sylvia Byrn, Oli Oldacker, Kathy Vago, Shelly Santana, Ayjey, Stacy Klinger, Curt Perkins, Willow Fort, Barry Noland, DJ Justice, Mel Davenport, Landry Butler, Sarah Fowler, Carrie Mills, Tracy Ratliff and Marlynda Augelli

Rymer, Kevin Kelly. Kelly worked with Tom Wesselmann and follows in the pop art tradition with work that looks more like Roy Lichtenstein.

October 5

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

October 9

Vanderbilt Divinity School, Sam Dunson. The painting on the announcement card has the pieta image put into a context with the hyperactive cartoon imagery Sam used in his last show at TAG. This image – its just on a card mind you – works really well. The reception is from 4:30-6:30.

TSU Gallery, Sonor Et Visio. This is a one-night only presentation of a performance piece that includes sound, images, projection, and video by a duo called Black/Jones. They say the work is “based on the writing of Abbot Suger, a medieval monk whose theory of “Luz Externa” revolutionized the art of stained glass.” The performance starts at 9:00.

Estel, Harry Underwood. The latest group of paintings by Harry. He makes densely packed pieces, filled with words and images that reward sustained viewing. Harry’s also got a unique process, creating limited multiples of most of his works, and working with a stock of images he reuses. The paintings draw from a shared world of nostalgia and fantasy, but each piece feels like a carefully thought-through world of its own.

Alias, Turner Recital Hall, Vanderbilt. Alias is doing a year-long series of work by women composers through the ages. This program includes pieces by Margaret Brouwer and Vivian Fine. They’re also doing a trio by Andre Previn and the Franck violin sonata. Concert starts at 8:00.

October 10

Cheekwood. Michael Oliveri and Emerging Video Artists. Temporary Contemporayr will open an exhibit by Oliveri, chair of Digitial Media at the University of Georgia. The show, titled Innerspace, Permaculture and UFOs, consists of sculptures and photographs that make up Oliveri’s investigation of the inner spaces of physics and biology. In the video galleries, Greg Pond has selected work by several young artists, several from New York.

Frist Center, Photography and Film from the George Eastman House Collection, photos by Lalla Essaydi, and Snapshots and the Family Album. The Eastman House, in Rochester, was founded by the founder of Eastman Kodak and has one of the world’s leading collections of photography. This show includes landmark photos by Matthew Brady, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and many more. Essaydi is a Moroccan photographer whose work will be on display in the CAP gallery. And finally, the Frist Center asked volunteers to submit amateur snaps and then put them together as an exhibit.

October 11

Plate Tone Print Shop open house. This printmaking coop moved relatively recently. The artists showing at this open house will be Marleen De Bock, Kaaren Hirshowitz Engel, Lee Ann Hawkins, Patricia Jordan, Reesha Leone, and Jaime Raybin Reception is from 2-6. 5124 Charlotte Pike

Cheekwood: Artists Collect, The Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong Private Collection. This should be very interesting, art from the collection of Red Grooms and his wife Lysiane Luong. 1. It’ll surely show us something more about what Grooms looks at and thinks about. 2. No doubt they own really fine stuff.

Zeitgeist, Megan Lightell, Christie Nuell, Jee Yun Lee. Landscape paintings by Lightell, prints by Nuell that combine botanical and architectural elements, and delicate watercolor and ink compositions by Lee.

Magpie, etc., Donnie Firkins. Bronze sculpture by an artist from Bowling Green.

October 15

TSU Gallery, Heroic. This exhibit presents works by Mark Belton, Nathaniel Creekmore, and Shaun Leonardo that are large in scale. On the evening of the opening, Creekmore and Leonardo along with Sam Dunson and Dr. Graham Matthews will participate in a panel discussion on the topic: “Getting Complex: Complicating the Definition of the Black Male in Art and Education.” The panel discussion starts at 6:00

October 18

Cumberland, David French and Marilyn Murphy. Two of the gallery’s artists are the focus this month. French’s abstract wood sculptures have a tribal feel in their patterns and colors. Murphy’s witty compositions speak with an unmistakable voice—I think of it as domestic surrealism, but her images range much farther than hearth and home.

Ruby Green, Southern Exposure. Southern as in Southern California. This show is organized by Mery Lynn McCorkle, who was in a group show at Ruby Green a couple of years ago and showed some of the most atypical “Katrina” art I’ve seen. She comes back for this show with drawings by 15 artists from the LA area. They’ve pretty much all got gallery representation in LA, so this should provide a nice taste of that scene. Every time I see work by LA artists it makes me want to get out there and spend some time looking around.

October 23

Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Jules de Balincourt. At the end of the month we have Vanderbilt opening another show curated by Joseph Whitt, this time focusing on a single contemporary artist. De Balincourt is known for deploying the tones of folk art with contemporary cultural and political themes. This show reviews his work since 2002, when he started exhibiting regularly in New York. And de Balincourt is delivering a lecture the day before, 7:00 on the 22^nd in Room 103 Wilson Hall.

October 23-26

ArtClectic, University School Nashville. This is the 12th year for this fundraiser for USN. Mostly local folks, some from farther afield.

Terminal at APSU

Received this last week--it's an on-line project hosted by the Art Department at Austin Peay, currently featuring a project curated by Jodi Hays from TSU, currently we are all in this together: on collectives, highways,and the superhighway. I haven't had a chance to go through this yet, so I figured I'd park the URL here for my benefit as much as anyone else's.

Nashville Visual Arts Events September 4-16

Well everyone has been very busy and has something to offer for the beginning of the month. The start of “the season,” if we’ve got one of those.

The best thing this month is Scarritt-Bennett getting into the mix as an art venue. The space is starting up with a show by 7 women with Nashville ties all of whom got MFAs from Vermont College of Art—this includes Barbara Yontz, Kristi Hargrove, Amanda Dillingham, and Jodi Hays. The curator is Sabine Schlunk, an artist who is new to town and showed some nice pieces at TSU last Spring.

TAG Gallery is showing two of its artists at Estel—Lori Field and Anna Jaap. I’ve been getting very interested in Anna’s work lately.

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 4

Carlos Picon lecture at the Parthenon. Picon is the curator of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. As in the guy in charge of one of the world’s great collections of classical art. This collection has gained new prominence with a renovation of the galleries that has been extremely well perceived. When you go to the Met, go see it. Go to the left off the entrance hall. I think Picon is going to discuss the renovation of the galleries, which may or may not be interesting, but I hope he will talk about the art in those galleries. The lecture is free but you need to call ahead for a ticket (862-8431).

September 5

Scarritt-Bennett Gallery F, The New Dress Code. For the gallery’s inaugural exhibit, Sabine Schlunk organized a show around the work of seven women with Nashville ties who have gone through Vermont College of Art’s low-residence MFA program. No college in Middle Tennessee has an MFA program in the visual arts, so people who want this degree usually have to move, but low-residency programs have been a good solution for folks who want to keep their ties here. One of the best low-res MFAs is offered by Vermont College, and their growing group of local alumnae includes really good people—Barbara Yontz, Kristi Hargrove, Amanda Dillingham, Jodi Hays, Erika Nichols, Michelle Sciumbato, and Mandy Sauer. The reception is from 5 to 9, and includes music from Lola, Carry A. Nation (that’s Sarah Dark, Sherry Cothran and Jewly Hight’s group—old hymns updated, electric guitars, marching drums, and clogging), and Xiaolun Qi.

September 6

TAG at Estel, Lori Field and Anna Jaap. It sounds like Lori Field is getting some decent interest lately. Among other things, she gives her surfaces a distinctive tangibility through layers of encaustic and beeswax. Like Fields, Anna Jaap makes images that are pretty—delicate floral and botanic elements and pastel colors, but also darker threads. In earlier work she also combined carefully rendered shapes with their opposite, gestures and shapes marked on the surface blindly. Control/out of control is one of the tensions she uses to give the paintings their energy.

Twist: Irene Wills. Irene Wills and her family are great supporters of the arts and culture in Nashville, and she herself paints. This show puts her paintings, largely florals and garden scenes, into the spotlight..

Twist at 214 3^rd Avenue, Process. A one-night show including Kelly Bonadies, Kristi Hargrove, Erin Plew, Nick Stolle, Terry Thacker, Iwonka Waskowski, and John Whitten Oh yeah, and I’m going to be playing. Me, Amy Marcantel, and Joseph Hudson, doing some sort of derivative of Forest Bride filtered through the ears of people who have been listening to Fred Anderson and Ornette Coleman.

Plowhaus, Sprawl: Art in the Urban World In their new home at the Tennessee Art League on Broadway, another group show by members of the coop.

DPC Art Luck and Fundraising Concert featuring Les Kerr, Sarah Dark, Julie Lee, and Dave Perkins This is a closing reception for the show of pieces our kids did on icons. They came up with some amazing things. Get Sarah Dark or one of the others to walk you through the show—it’s worth it.

Studio B, Steven Miller and Victor Schmidt. Miler paints from enlarged photos of viruses like HIV, the make something beautiful out of something frightening idea. Schmidt is a sculptor grounded in traditional metalworking techniques.

Sri Ganesha Temple, concert by Binay Pathak, Madhusudhan Barman, Gopal Barman. Pathak plays Harmonium as a solo instrument—it’s a keyboard with bellows, sort of a stationary accordion used more often to accompany vocalists. The concert starts at 6:30.

LeQuire Gallery, New Approaches to Figurative Painting. With a strong sense of their mission and aesthetics, LeQuire present a group show that includes gallery artists and others: Juliette Aristedes, Cindy Billingsley, Josh Bronaugh, Ron Cheek, Brendan Getz, Murat Kaboulov, William Kooinga, Alan LeQuire, Jonathan Matthews, Jonathan Stone, Brody Vincnet, and Jammie Williams.

The Arts Company, Three Generations of Nashville Photographers. That would be Ed Clark, Bob Schatz, and Greg Miller. This will include photos from Schatz’ series on Southern writers’ homes, which are darned interesting. My wife the perfume freak was very interested to see a bottle of something sitting in one of the women’s bathrooms, maybe Eudora Welty. Clark, who passed away in 2000, documented the city for the Tennessean and Life. And Greg Miller’s new to the gallery.

September 7

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

September 11

Sarratt, Retablos: Miracles on the Border. Retablos are traditional Mexican religious paintings. The collection on display at Sarratt features retablos that incorporate contemporary experiences of migration. Jorge Durand of the University of Guadalajara will give a lecture on them at 4:00 in Buttrick 102. Sarratt’s expanding our range with this show.

September 12

Frist Center, Rodin. This is a show drawn from one of the major collections of Rodin’s sculpture, assembled by Iris and Gerald Cantor. It’s a big show, 60 sculptures, and includes The Kiss and The Thinker. My favorite Rodin sculpture is the portrait of Balzac, but I don’t know if one of those is here. The point for me is that the brute strength in Rodin’s masses lines makes this timelessly modern art that doesn’t let itself get relegated to sentiment and tradition.

University School of Nashville, Jaime Raybin. A closing reception for Jaime’s exhibit of her Milk Shelf series at USN. 6-7:30.

September 12-13

NAA Studio Tour and Juried Show. Nashville Area Arts, which runs a web site consolidating a lot of information on Nashville visual arts, has organized a tour of 30 artists’ studios in Nashville. The tour is on Saturday—not guided, you get a map listing everyone participating, and their studios are open from 10-6 on Saturday. Friday evening they are having a reception at Belmont’s Leu Gallery for a juried show that I assume is taken from participating artists.

September 13

Ruby Green, Chris Campbell: Necessary Collector After a summer hiatus, Ruby Green is back with an exhibit of pieces from director Chris Campbell’s personal collection. The artists include many who have exhibited at Ruby Green over the year, and plenty of others: Sue Coe, Mark Mulroney, Sandra Bermudez, Mary Shaffer, Terry Glispin, Leslie Kneisel, Sam Dunson, Cheryl Pfeiffer, Angela Willcoks, Jill Larson, Mery Lynn McKorkle, Don Evans, Erin Anfinson, Donte K Hayes, Cecelia Kane, Richard Mitchell, Michael Durham, Donna Stack, Tom Zarilli, Joseph Whitt, Hunter Brice.

Cumberland, Raine Bedsole and David Kroll Kroll is one of the gallery’s figurative painters, more or less surrealist, relishing the fine details of birds, fish, and objects. Bedsole is sort of the opposite, a painter of almost abstract compositions where surface texture is everything, and who tends towards forms that are simple in their basic outlines and complex in detail.

Group show at The Vine, Murfreesboro. A one-night show organized by John Schramlin in a new venue in downtown Murfreesboro (118 W. Vine), with work by Joey Tigert, Tarri Driver, Jeff Bertrand, James Clark, Charles Bennett, Charles Clary, and Schramlin. 6 to 10.

September 16

Eugene Borza lecture at the Parthenon. The second lecture in a month on classical art and architecture at the Parthenon, this time by a professor from Penn State. Borza will discuss the history of the Parthenon (the one in Greece) and current research and restoration efforts. Like the event on Sept 4, it’s free but you need a ticket, which you get by calling 862-8431

Nashville Visual Arts Events July 5-13

This Saturday will be sad—the last opening for TAG as a stand alone gallery. The community has also gotten word from Daniel Lai that he won’t be reopening Dangenart. So that space will go dark for now, and we lose two important sources of interesting shows. Maybe someone comparable will come in there.

One narrative we can apply is we’re sorry to see Jerry Dale and Daniel go, they’ve each done a great job in their own ways, as the vitality of the current gallery scene attests. We will miss both places, but isn’t it great that other galleries are opening all the time. OK.

But another narrative is that this, in combination with a few other things (some of them stretching back a few years), indicates an ongoing depletion of aesthetic vitality. The cause of that could be specific to Nashville’s art community, or maybe it’s a matter of larger economic forces. Selling art is hard and maybe it’s getting harder, and it’s not clear that Nashville’s downtown renaissance is everything we want or need it to be, and pressure from everything from oil prices to the floods in the Midwest ain’t helping.

I may have occasion to weigh in on this more later. I need to do some homework first.

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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.

July 5

TAG: Rik Catlow, Matthew Feyld, Jason Dunda, Julianna Bright. Jerry Dale’s ending up with a good show. To start with, he’s got Kelly Williams, and I’ve really liked her work, which is a fragmented exposure of her immediate perceptions that gives a vivid sense of the phenomenology of perception (to borrow a phrase) at work. You can probably think of Rik Catlow and Jason Dunda as falling in the Juxtapose realm of artists with a visual connection to cartooning and illustration. The same goes for Julianna Bright, but I also see bits of some sort of indeterminate European folk drawing and Amy Cutler’s characters.

Rymer, Phurba Namgay Something different for Rymer—a Bhutanese painter, trained in traditional styles who combines the techniques and imagery of those traditions with modern elements. He lives part time in Nashville now.

Sera Davis Advisory, Pamela Johnson and Anne Karsten. This is the new group in Matt Mikulla’s old space on the second floor of the Arcade. They are running an art consulting business but also will present artists in a gallery setting. The two painters here have different takes on consumer society—Johnson makes oversized images of mass-produced foods, magnifying their attractions as objects of desire, and Karsten takes objects for sale on eBay and makes them the subject of “psychological portraits.”

DPC Art Luck For this month, the Art Luck supper is continuing the art from The Contributor, Nashville’s street newspaper But this month there’s also going to be a concert by Carry Nation, which is Sarah Masen, Jewly Hight (Jewly’s also a pretty fair scholar), and Sherry Cothran. I saw them a few months back and found them really engaging. They do some things with old hymns and songs they’ve written, and the three women are compelling performers in different ways. The group is going to perform at DPC around 6 or so and then move matter to Twist to play later set there. You might see them wandering up or down 5^th Avenue too.

A bunch of galleries have continuing shows:

Estel, Common Thread: Cathy Breslaw, Vanessa Oppenhoff, Teri Moore.

Arts Company: Brother Mel

Tinney + Cannon Contemporary: Linda Mitchell

Plowhaus at Tennessee Art League: Value Menu Show (everything $49.99 or less) I think this show is continuing.

Twist: Quinn Dukes. Plus that concert by Carry Nation.

LeQuire Gallery: Learning Green Sri Ganesha Temple, Odissi Dance Program In conjunction with the Temple’s celebration of Jagannath Ratha Yatra (Chariot Festival), there will be a performance by the dance company Rudrakshya from India. The company performs in the classical style of the eastern Indian state of Orissa. It is described as having many sculptural elements, recalling Indian temple relief sculptures. The program starts at 6:30, after the Temple’s chariot procession from 4-5:30.

July 6

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

July 11

Centennial Art Center, CV-TACA Crafts Show. This is a pretty big show of area crafts artists. It includes a couple of very prominent fabrics artists—Paula Bowers-Hotvedt, who was part of the Judy Chicago project at Vandy, and Martha Christian whose large scale hangings have been shown in various places, but I go back to what I thought was a really effective placement in the airport lobby given the geological and topographical qualities of the work. Wood-turner Brenda Stein’s also in the show. 29 artists in total. Reception at 5:00.

July 13

Main Library, Beyond the Page: Carol Barton’s Art and Influence. Barton designs artists books with pop-up elements, and this exhibit features her work and books made by Nashville artists who have studied with her. No one can resist pop-up books. I don’t know if there’s an opening reception for this show, but the press says it opens on the 13^th.

Visual Arts Events June 19-29

Got a look at the Frist shows today. Lots of big, big paintings. Modern Baroque. Also, a nice set of drawings—I especially liked the work from Carol Prusa.

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.

June 19

Tony Hernandez, Gordon Jewish Community Center I know this is getting out too late for the reception (7-9 on Thursday the 19^th), but it is an opportunity to let you know that Hernandez, from Tinney+Cannon, has this show at the JCC that runs through June 30. Hernandez takes images inspired by the artwork from the kindercamps in the Nazi concentration camps and isolates them on wood panels. It’s the same body of work he showed earlier at Tinney+Cannon, if you missed that. Or want to see it again.

June 20

In.Form.All. A group show (one night only I believe) featuring Arlene Bates, Betsy Clapsaddle, Charla Steele, Hans Mooy, Judy Klich, Merry Beth Myrick, Shonna Sexton and Stacie Berry. It will be held from 5:30 to 8:30 at 5725 Stoneway Trail.

Frist Center, Color as Field and Shades of Grey. As a DC guy I thought of the Color Field painters as a local phenomenon revolving around Morris Louis, Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam. Washington is a little too close to NY for it to sustain much of its own artistic styles, so you tend to latch onto anything that looks like distinct local product—like Go-Go. Well, that narrow parochial view doesn’t hold up, as this show demonstrates—my DC people are there, but it goes way beyond that and Helen Frankenthaler is really the central figure. This show provides what turns out to be a quick (due to the sheer size of the paintings) survey of this era in American painting (1950-75). In another clever bit of Frist counter-programming, the CAP gallery has black and white drawings by regional artists: Kell Black from APSU, Sue Mulcahy, Jane Allen Nodine (South Carolina) and Carol Prusa (South Florida). Also, a video by Jennifer Steinkamp. The Color as Field curator, Karen Wilken, is speaking at the Frist Center Friday at 6:30.

Renaissance Center: Victoria Boone, Erin Anfinson, Julie Lee, and Doug Stevenson. The Ren Center in Dickson is picking up the pace in getting Nashville artists in front of viewers in Dickson and the surrounding counties. Last month they had John Donovan and the Southern Graphics Council, and this time several people who have been featured in Nashville galleries recently: Victoria Boone had a show at the Parthenon (it sounds like this features some of the same material or a continuation of that body of work), Julie was at Twist, and Erin Anfinson is carried by TAG (but I think the last show I show of hers was at Ruby Green about a year ago, but I might have missed something). This show goes up June 19 or 20, but they are dividing the receptions—they’ll have the reception for Boone and Stevenson on the 20^th, the receptions for Anfinson and Lee on the 27^th.

June 21

Zeitgeist, Dialogue 3, Sculpture The second in Zeitgeist’s medium shows, sculpture up now. I’m enjoying John Donovan’s recent work, which I think may be a function of its significance sinking in on me. It’s always important to see Greg Pond’s latest work. I haven’t seen Michael Baggarly’s work in a while, so this will be good. Also: Jason Briggs, Mark Bynon, Mark Clarson, Buddy Jackson, Christopher McNulty, Jack Dingo Ryan (who’s leaving town, not sure when—but I believe I was the last person to hear about it), and Bethany Springer.

June 27

Renaissance Center: Erin Anfinson and Julie Lee opening reception. See above—they’re splitting up the receptions this month. June 28

CRAFT: A Creative Community Summer Extravaganza. This group of local artists/artisans had their regular monthly show/sale on June 1, but there’s also doing a second event on Saturday the 28^th at Memorial Lutheran Church, 1211 Riverside Drive in East Nashville from 10 to 5.

Cheekwood, A Century on Paper A show of selections from Cheekwood’s collection, starting with early 20^th century artists like Reginald Marsh, but it probably picks up in interest with later stuff by Rauschenberg, Ruscha.

June 29

Magpie, etc. A new gallery on 10^th Avenue South, trying to extend the activity of 12^th itself. The gallery is the project of Emily Harper and Rhiannon Guillet, and in addition to art will have accessories, clothes (designed by Guillet), and jewelry.

OK, this is late getting to the web, but for the sake of completeness and the things coming in the next few weeks (there’s some Frist Center opening on the 20^th that didn’t quite make it in, but will get posted). This week features the triumphant return to town of performance artist Quinn Dukes, and some interesting artists using needle work and fabric at Estel.

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.

June 7

Twist, Quinn Dukes Quinn graduated from Nashville last year and moved to NewYork. The core of her art is a dramatic, ritualistic (well all performance art is) performance art that had involved odd costumes and a love of playing with dirt. From her artist’s statement, it sounds like she’s been having fun contrasting the relative wildness of Tennessee with her new urban environs, where the natural world comes onto the stage of the built landscape as more of an intruder.

Estel, Common Thread: Cathy Breslaw, Vanessa Oppenhoff, Teri Moore, and work by Rodney Wood. The Feminist Art Movement of the 60s and 70s reclaimed traditional women’s craft techniques as an avenue for artist expression. Over the decades, the influence of this movement can be seen in the way needlework has become a common technique in gallery art, getting to be just another medium like drawing or painting. Still, the medium occupies ambiguous ground, sometimes looking like a form of drawing, other times verging on sculpture, and still with a foot in the craft world. This show features three women making art with fabric and thread. Just to pick out one, Oppenhoff’s work includes several series—one takes variants of the simple figures used in instructional illustrations to describe the notions of threat in today’s society. In the small gallery, new paintings by Rodney Wood. Some of the new paintings struck me as being more naturalistic but still capturing the idea of something mysterious going on—it seems like a good direction, if I’m seeing it right.

TAG, Nice to Meet You group show. A group show of new and returning artists: Terri Saul, Keith Greiman, Mary Addison Hackett, Greg Gossel, Maura Cluthe, Andrew Hem.

Arts Company, Brother Mel. A big 80^th birthday show for Brother Mel, celebrating 50 years of art-making and 10 years at the Arts Company. This Marianist monk makes art in all sorts of media, changing styles with the context and purpose of his art. He’s been one of the Arts Company’s consistently popular artists.

Rymer, Dominic Besner, Aniocles Gregoire, Leszek Wyczolkowski, Antoine Claes, Kristina Colucci Rymer is opening its new location on 5^th Avenue with a group show. It’s like one door down from Tinney+Cannon, which with Arts Company gives us three major galleries in a row.

Tinney+Cannon, Linda Mitchell Mixed media paintings, a lot of which feature animals in fanciful settings.

Plowhaus, Value Menu show, at Tennessee Art League. For a long time Plowhaus maintained nice space in East Nashville, but now the coop is homeless/itinerant. They’re doing their Value Menu show (everything under $49.99) on the second floor galleries of the Art League. The participants are Denny Adcock, Marlynda Augelli, Chuck Beard, John Barcus, Peggy Bonnington, Jennifer Bronstein, Chris Cheney, Jack Coggins, Carri Hofacker, John Holland, DJ Justice, Franne Lee, Stephen McClure, Carrie Mills, Susie Monick, Lois Moreno, Ayjey Odom, Tracy Ratliff, Julie Sola, Diane Stockard, Mary Sullivan, and David Wariner.

DPC Art Luck, The Art Works of the Contributor The Contributor is Nashville’s version of an idea in place in several cities to provide an opportunity for the homeless to earn some money and spread the word on their experience by producing a newspaper featuring articles and artwork mostly by members of the homeless community, sold by vendors from the homeless community. The Contributor got started earlier this year, and DPC is going to feature art work by some of the people involved with the paper and the homeless community in Nashville.

LeQuire Gallery, Learning Green Landscapes by Suta Lee, Arthur Barnes, Lori Putnam, Ashley Wiltshire. Barnes and Putnam do plein air work. Lee, a professor at Austin Peay, works in a couple of styles, but this show will include his very traditional watercolor landscapes.

Cumberland Gallery, Group show, Kit Reuther and new artists. Cumberland has their summer group show going, and they are also doing short-run features on some of their artists and cycling through some new artists. The new folks are Jeff Green, Denise Mayo Stewart-Sanabria, and Dane Carder. The feature from June 7-21 is Kit Reuther.

June 13

Untitled, Multiple Origami This quarter’s will be held at the University of Phoenix’ building out by the airport—you can see it on the right when you’re driving back into town from the Airport. I think you get to it by taking the Elm Hill Pike exit from Briley Parkway. Runs from 6-10.

June 14

Studio B Gallery, Kaaren Hirschowitz Engel. Kaaren’s latest paintings integrate Hebrew prayers from her childhood. I’m not sure if this is going to include some of her sculptural work—paintings rolled or cut up, like the globes hanging in the Arcade—or will focus more on on-the-wall paintings. The opening will be from 7-9 on the 14^th.

June 19

Renaissance Center: Victoria Boone, Erin Anfinson, Julie Lee, and Doug Stevenson. The Ren Center in Dickson is picking up the pace in getting Nashville artists in front of viewers in Dickson and the surrounding counties. Last month they had John Donovan and the Southern Graphics Council, and this time several people who have been featured in Nashville galleries recently: Victoria Boone had a show at the Parthenon, Julie was at Twist, and Erin Anfinson is carried by TAG (I think the last show I show of hers was at Ruby Green about a year ago, but I might have missed something). I don’t know for sure, but the reception might be on Friday the 20^th.

June 20

In.Form.All. A group show (one night only I believe) featuring Arlene Bates, Betsy Clapsaddle, Charla Steele, Hans Mooy, Judy Klich, Merry Beth Myrick, Shonna Sexton and Stacie Berry. It will be held from 5:30 to 8:30 at 5725 Stoneway Trail.

June 21

Zeitgeist, Dialogue 3, Sculpture The second in Zeitgeist’s medium-specific and media-bending shows, this one covers photography. Jason Briggs, Mark Bynon, Michael Baggarly, Mark Clarson, John Donovan, Buddy Jackson, Christopher McNulty, Greg Pond, Jack Dingo Ryan, Bethany Springer

June 28

CRAFT: A Creative Community Summer Extravaganza. This group of local artists/artisans had their regular monthly show/sale on June 1, but there’s also doing a second event on Saturday the 28^th at Memorial Lutheran Church, 1211 Riverside Drive in East Nashville from 10 to 5.

Cheekwood, A Century on Paper A show of selections from Cheekwood’s collection, starting with early 20^th century artists like Reginald Marsh, but probably picking up with later stuff by Rauschenberg, Ruscha.