March 2016 - Nashville Arts Magazine by Nashville Arts Magazine

Teresa Oaxaca Steve Tobin Fred Dusel Nora Sturges Cidny Bullens

1 nashvillearts.com

2 nashvillearts.com

3 nashvillearts.com

4 nashvillearts.com

5 nashvillearts.com

PUBLISHED BY THE ST. CLAIRE MEDIA GROUP

www.facebook.com/NashvilleArts www.twitter.com/NashvilleArts www.pinterest.com/NashvilleArts

www.nashvillearts.com Editorial & Advertising Offices 644 West Iris Drive, Nashville, TN 37204 | 615-383-0278

Editorial PAUL POLYCARPOU | Publisher and CEO paul@nashvillearts.com SARA LEE BURD | Executive Editor and Online Editor sara@nashvillearts.com REBECCA PIERCE | Education Editor and Staff Writer rebecca@nashvillearts.com MADGE FRANKLIN | Copy Editor

Advertising SAM JACO | 615-383-0278 sam@nashvillearts.com

Distribution WOUTER FELDBUSCH | CHRISTIAN LESTER

Subscriptions & Customer Service 615-383-0278

Nashville Arts Magazine is a monthly publication by St. Claire Media Group, LLC. This publication is free, one per reader. Removal of more than one magazine from any distribution point constitutes theft, and violators are subject to prosecution. Back issues are available at our office, or by mail for $6.40 a copy. Email: All email addresses consist of the employeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first name followed by @nashvillearts.com; to reach contributing writers, email info@ nashvillearts.com. Editorial Policy: Nashville Arts Magazine covers art, news, events, entertainment, and culture in Nashville and surrounding areas. The views and opinions expressed in the magazine do not necessarily represent those of the publisher. Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available at $45 per year for 12 issues. Please note: Due to the nature of third-class mail and postal regulations, issues could be delayed by as much as two or three weeks. There will be no refunds issued. Please allow four to six weeks for processing new subscriptions and address changes. Call 615-383-0278 to order by phone with your Visa or Mastercard number.

7 nashvillearts.com

On the Cover Teresa Oaxaca Girl in Pink Oil on canvas, 48” x 40”

March 2016 38

www.haynesgalleries.com

Features

Columns

David Avery Abstracting the Quintessence

Crawl Guide

Antiques & Garden Show A Perfect Blend of Old, New and Still Blooming

As I See It by Mark W. Scala

Arts & Business Council Do You Need a Permit for That?

Die Fledermaus Nashville Opera Visits Vienna

Jessica Ingram Journey through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial

Symphony in Depth Composer with Tennessee Roots and Legendary Viola Come to the Schermerhorn in March

Danielle McDaniel The Clay Lady

The Bookmark Hot Books and Cool Reads

34 John Mayall The Blues Legend's Artistic Expression Extends Far Beyond Music

Teresa Oaxaca Victoriana Revisited

Cidny Bullens Transforming through Transition

Amélie Guthrie Trees of Life

Fred Dusel Now and Then

Steve Tobin Southern Roots Run Deep

Nora Sturges Fictional Spaces

Billy Renkl Glorious Jumble: Conversations with Nature and Thoreau in his Field Notebook

65 5th Avenue Under the Lights Creative Collaboration Sets Nashville Apart 67

Public Art Metro Arts Announces Learning Lab Artist Training Program

74 NPT 78

And So It Goes by Rachael McCampbell

Open Spaces by Erica Ciccarone

Art Smart by Rebecca Pierce

Sounding Off La Ciudad de la Música: Mexican Music Invades Nashville

Poet's Corner

94 ArtSee 96

Appraise It by Linda Dyer

Beyond Words by Marshall Chapman

My Favorite Painting

Publisher's Note I know all the statistics about how quickly Nashville is growing. To be honest, I'm a little tired of hearing them. I don't really care how many cranes are up around town or how many people are moving here every day. As far as I'm concerned they are all welcome, and I hope they all find a parking spot. I don't blame people for wanting to live in one of the great creative cities of the world. I do, so why shouldn't they? I do wish, however, that we could apply that great Nashville creativity to the buildings that are popping up like mushrooms all over town. Does every new building have to look like a giant glass shoebox? Surely with all that creativity in town we can come up with something a little more engaging than that. Something that would be distinctly Nashville. The Sam Dunson show at The Rymer Gallery is a tour de force. Sam's new work, vastly different from anything he has done before, takes on what it means to be black in America and specifically what it means to be a young black man. Frustrated and angered by recent events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and North Carolina, Sam turned that anger toward the canvas. The work is provocative, at times disturbing, but always thoughtful. I'm glad that Sam is addressing social issues with his art. His art talk with me at The Rymer was an eye-opener for everyone there, and I cannot recall a more attentive and engaged audience. Thank you, Sam. I love poetry, and for me the Haiku is a phonetic miracle. Just seventeen syllables over three lines that can often say more than a stack of books. The Haiku is all about economy, a few words perfectly placed to express a perfect sentiment. Maybe some of our politicians should study the art of Haiku. Here's one written by Nashville wordsmith Debbie Smith; it's simply beautiful. Easter daffodils Bonnets dusted with spring snow bow their heads to pray Paul Polycarpou | Publisher

davidAVERY

Abstracting the Quintessence Sarratt Gallery through April 1 by Cat Acree

eople frequently approach San Francisco printmaker David Avery to ask if he has ever illustrated a children’s book. For anyone who’s ever looked very, very closely at Avery’s finely wrought miniature etchings, this might seem a strange question. His black-and-white prints often depict nightmarish, creepy dreamscapes in excessive detail, with layered symbols like memento mori skeletons, disembodied hands, and possibly sexual serpents and flowers. This imagery feels familiar, like the weird metamorphosis and mystery that we drift into when we aren’t policing our thoughts, in sleep. But in these compact visual feasts, traditional symbols don’t insist on traditional interpretations. Ask Avery what it all means, and you’ll get nothing back—not out of stubbornness, but because he doesn’t have the answer. He doesn’t even know how these images come from his own mind, but rather finds himself inspired by literature, art, anything that could be “laden with possible meaning.” He says, “All these little components just kind of pour out of me. Where does that stuff come from? I have no idea. It’s all out there, waiting to be found.” Avery’s solo show at the Sarratt Gallery will exhibit his 2004 series God’s Food or Der singende Knochen, a portfolio of eight beguiling etchings inspired by titles from Brothers Grimm stories. Each evocative title was selected by a friend, and, without knowing the story behind the title, Avery conjured his own imaginative visual fairy tale. Avery will also exhibit his new work Abstracting the Quintessence, a title swiped from Rabelais, referring to someone who has extracted from ordinary matter the heavenly “fifth element” or aether, which surpasses Aristotle’s four earthly elements (fire, earth, air, water). Abstracting could mean reveal or obscure—either will work. In Avery’s mind, it’s what every good artist should aspire to. “It’s trying to create some way of connecting people with something that is not so easy to see.” The artist considers this an “odd” piece, even for him. It depicts a guardian angel suspended by wires or pulleys, wielding a tinsel-wrapped wooden sword to protect our shaky paradise of so-called “reality.” What are we being protected from? What is the outside threat? “We’re surrounded every day by advertisements, media,” Avery says. “People are bombarded by images and words,

God’s Food (“Der singende Knochen”), 2004, Etching

The White Bride and the Black One, 2004, Etching

and I actually think images have taken over from words and are being used in ways that are not exactly for communication.” The unassuming intimacy of Avery’s miniature etchings disrupts that bombardment. With so many layers, interpreting Avery’s work is something akin to alchemy, and it’s a power not limited to the artist but belonging to the viewer as well. na David Avery’s exhibition Abstracting the Quintessence will be on view at Sarratt Gallery through April 1. For more information, please visit www.vanderbilt.edu/sarrattart. To see more of Avery’s work, visit www.davidavery.net.

12 nashvillearts.com

13 nashvillearts.com

14 nashvillearts.com

March Crawl Guide Franklin Art Scene

Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston

Friday, March 4, from 6 until 9 p.m.

Saturday, March 5, from 6 until 9 p.m.

Gallery 202 is featuring artist Michael Hooper, who primarily paints in a folk art style using wood boards. Williamson County Archives is showing work by artist Michalle Sessions. Boutique MMM is presenting paintings by Denise Michelle. Parks on Main is hosting abstract artist Essence DeVonne. Historic Franklin Presbyterian is exhibiting wildlife and outdoor landscape paintings by Tom Zigler. Mike Hooper, Gallery 202 Hope Church Franklin unveils colorful and energetic paintings by Jo Sanders. Stop by Franklin Glassblowing Studio to see glasswork by artist Jose Santisteban.

First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown Saturday, March 5, from 6 until 9 p.m. The Arts Company unveils Nashville Streets Then and Now, photographs by Ed Clark and Michael Nott, and original carbon photographic prints by Fred Dusel (see page 46). Tinney Contemporary is showing Drip Paintings by Jane Braddock. The Rymer Gallery is exhibiting photographs by Caleb Charland and _lack History by Sam Dunson. The Browsing Room at Downtown Presbyterian Church is featuring another 30 photographic portraits in Cassie Ponder’s Portrait A Day. Visit Emily Sue Laird, 40AU Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery to view historic restrikes of original posters from the Hatch collection. In the historic Arcade, Open Gallery is showing Phoebe Bulkeley Harris’s exhibit The Complete Dramatic Works, an investigation of being, illustrated through whimsical, shifting landscapes of the earth. WAG is presenting Unspent Space, an exhibition of traditional analogue photography by Watkins photography majors Brandyn Busico, Haley Carter, Kathryn Napier, Julian Sanchez, Nicole Taylor and Amber Ward. 40AU is unveiling Out of the Shadows featuring paintings and sculptural work by Emily Sue Laird and Jake Wells. Blend Studio is hosting an opening reception for Let’s break apart/ and love ourselves whole, works by Alesandra Tomasa Branca Bellos. COOP Gallery is exhibiting a New Members Show featuring artwork by Donna L. Woodley, Christine Rogers, Duncan McDaniel, Jessica Fife, and Richard Feaster.

Zeitgeist is unveiling Soft Bark by Paul Collins and Probe by Ward Schumaker. David Lusk Gallery is presenting Nora Sturges's Fictional Spaces (see page 68) and KJ Schumacher’s Fragments and a Game of Chance (see page 72). Channel to Channel is holding a onenight pop up entitled Florida Lottery featuring sculpture by Sydni Gause. Seed Space is showcasing The Crappy Magic Experience by David Hellams and David King (see page 28). CG2 is opening New Works by Sean Norvet and Jason Lascu (see page 28). Refinery Nashville is featuring The Black Light Victoria Reynolds, Julia Martin Gallery Show, photography by Nora Canfield. Julia Martin Gallery is exhibiting Brave New Worlds, complex visual narratives by Victoria Reynolds and Erin Murphy. The Packing Plant is pairing Nick Doty and Abigail Lucien in the exhibit To Pour Warm Shade.

East Side Art Stumble Saturday, March 12, from 6 until 9 p.m. The Red Arrow Gallery is opening a solo exhibition, paintings and sculpture, found wood, and other stuff by Rick Borg. Gallery Luperca is exhibiting Adam Higgins’s contemporary abstractions in Big Empty, a show of large-scale oil paintings on canvas. Sawtooth Print Shop is featuring Chris Chrisolux's project 50 Dollar Show. Main Street Gallery and Modern East are also participating. At the Idea Hatchery enjoy happy hour from 5 until 7, and stop in at Fat Crow Press to experience Dexterity games by Julie Sola.

Rick Borg, The Red Arrow Gallery

18 nashvillearts.com

19 nashvillearts.com

2016

Antiques & Garden Show

Words by Emme Nelson Baxter Photography by Tiffani Bing

A Perfect Blend of Old, New and Still Blooming

f you were in the market for an abstract Ed Nash oil painting, an Austrian cherry chest circa 1880, or a stuffed zebra head, then you hit the one-stop-shopping jackpot at the recent 2016 Antiques & Garden Show of Nashville. And if you were in the mood to celebrity watch, you no doubt encountered acclaimed actress and lifestyles icon Gwyneth Paltrow, who headlined a dynamic slate of speakers at the midFebruary exhibition at the Music City Center. Other biggies in the design and horticultural world on hand included designer Bunny Williams, British florist Shane Connolly, and landscape architect Louis Benech. (To her amusement, people also sought autographs from show supporter Llew Ann King—a near clone of Paltrow.)

Overview of the show

But if you just wanted to escape frosty February and become inspired, then your mission was surely accomplished with a stroll of the exhibition hall, which featured treasures from almost 150 vendors and four splendid gardens. The theme: Landscape of Design. The exclamation point of Cheekwood’s “Southern Root” entry garden was a tree root sculpture by artist Steve Tobin, who is currently exhibiting at the botanical garden. The gleaming white piece had been planted within a classic cutting garden evocative of the erstwhile Parterre Garden that once thrived on the Cheek family estate. The cheery garden included a stone walking path and substantive olive jar. Gavin Duke’s “Repos” took the location of Central Garden on the floor. The verdant space with a shingled structure was his interpretation of rest, sleep, or tranquility in the landscape. Todd Breyer and Josiah Lockard’s “High Cotton” garden provided another area for relaxation. The living oeuvre stood out with its wrought iron gateway and allée colonnade draped in real cotton vines and party lights. Other elements within the space were handcrafted obelisk tuteurs, a swirling “Tree of Life” parterre, and a pebble mosaic. Best of Show accolades went to Phillipe Chadwick’s “Garden of Mirrors,” a modern tribute to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. One hundred mirrors created an infinite reflection as they lined the corridor garden. The walkway was edged with vivid delphiniums and Iceland poppies. Elizabeth Coble and Amy Liz Riddick co-chaired the February 12–14 extravaganza that included a Preview Party, Bourbon Party, lecture series, and exhibits. Over the past 25 years, the volunteer-managed show has raised nearly $6 million for Cheekwood and ECON.

“Repos” Garden

A&G Show advisors Kate Ezell and Kathy Rolfe were delighted to report that the Paltrow talk drew an audience of 1,800 and that around 450 tickets apiece were sold for the lectures. But the big surprise was the success of the Saturday night Bourbon Party, which attracted 650 guests. “The Bourbon Party morphed from the Young Collectors Party, which had run its course,” said A&G advisor Jane Sloan. “Social media has really helped young people understand how and in what surroundings they want to live, and that has drawn them to this event.” Longtime dealer Zane Moss agreed as he held court in his booth of truly fine antiques. “The layout of the show continues to improve,” he said. na

20 nashvillearts.com

21 nashvillearts.com

Die Fledermaus: Nashville Opera Visits Vienna Andrew Jackson Hall, TPAC

April 7 and 9

Rousing melodies, quick-witted comedy, champagne, and royalty: an ideal combination that can be found in Nashville Opera’s upcoming production of Die Fledermaus. From famed composer Johann Strauss, widely recognized for his lilting, spirited waltzes, comes the elaborate masterpiece that will be directed by the CEO and Artistic Director of the Nashville Opera, John Hoomes, and conducted by the Music Director, Maestro Dean Williamson. The Nashville Opera Ensemble will be led by Accompanist and Chorusmaster Amy Tate Williams, and the production features a cast of critically acclaimed artists, whose credits include performances with the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House, the Florentine Opera, and Opera Naples. This operetta is set in 19th-century Vienna and centers around a masquerade party held in the palace of a prince, highlighting the many scandals and misunderstandings that befall the nobility in attendance. The fast-paced comedic style of the show is based in French farce and has been described by critics as “The Marx Brothers meet the Carol Burnett show.” True to the tradition of the Nashville Opera, this production promises to be accessible to a wide range of Music City audiences. It will be sung in English, with additional subtitles to ensure that no one misses a word of the intrigue. The performances of Die Fledermaus will be on Thursday, April 7, and Saturday, April 9, at 7 p.m. in TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall and will run 2 hours and 50 minutes, including two 20-minute intermissions. One hour prior to curtain each night, John Hoomes will give an Opera Insights preview talk that will provide an insider’s view of the production process. The cast features tenor John Easterlin, soprano Carla Thelen Hanson, baritone Corey McKern, soprano Lindsay Russell, tenor Todd Barnhill, soprano Lacy Sauter, actor Brian Russell, and baritone Eric McKeever. na Tickets start at $26 and can be purchased in advance to ensure admittance to this final opera of the 2015–16 season through the Nashville Opera Box Office or the Tennessee Performing Arts Center Box Office. For more information, visit www.nashvilleopera.org.

Photograph by Marianne Leach

by Ara Vito

23 nashvillearts.com

Journey through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial An overgrown field. An anonymous back yard. A nondescript, rundown office building. These are the locations of some of the worst civil rights atrocities in American history. Photographer Jessica Ingram has spent the past ten years visiting and documenting these places. You can take the journey with her through her exhibit at the Tennessee State Museum.

Law office, Pulaski, Tennessee, 2006 The Ku Klux Klan was founded in this building on Christmas Eve 1865. The original historical marker, which has since been bolted to the wall backward, reads: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Ku Klux Klan organized in this The Law Office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, December 24, 1865. Names of the original organizers: Calvin E. Jones, John B. Kennedy, Frank O. McCord, John C. Lester, Richard R. Reed, James R. Crowe.â&#x20AC;?

24 nashvillearts.com

by John Guider

he Centre Pompidou in Paris dedicates a significant percentage of space in their contemporary exhibition hall to the exploration of documentary as fine art. Although this is not a new concept, iconic photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Mathew Brady have moved people for generations with the strength of their imagery. Nevertheless, due to the explosion of digital photography and the ease in its posting, it becomes increasingly more important that for a photograph to achieve any level of lasting relevance, the story behind the image has to be as moving as the image itself. From what I saw, Jessica Ingram’s exhibition Road through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial, currently on display at the Tennessee State Museum, surely meets the Pompidou’s standards. Ingram’s eye, coupled with her mastery of the camera, is able to produce work that is impeccable in its composition. As with any studied landscape photographer, Jessica waits for the perfect light to garner the richest, most pleasing color while maintaining a strong sense of reality so important for the credibility of the story. In some instances, shadows formed by trees away from the sight of the lens stream across the image, adding depth to what is ostensibly a two-dimensional image and acting as a reminder to the viewer that the scene doesn’t end at the edge of the photograph. In another striking photograph she frames the reversed plaque commemorating the site of the formation of the Ku Klux Klan so it appears as a sordid cancerous spot on the façade of an otherwise pristine building. With each picture, Ingram tries wholeheartedly to recreate the scene as she saw it, all the while infusing the images with discrete, meaningful metaphors.

Site of Vernon Dahmer’s murder, Kelly Settlement, near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 2009 Vernon Dahmer was killed on January 10, 1966, when Klansmen firebombed his home and attached store. Dahmer was the president of the NAACP chapter in Hattiesburg and helped black voters by letting them pay their poll taxes at his store. Fourteen men were arrested in the late 1960s, resulting in one conviction and several mistrials.

In fact, the show is so well curated a bit of a paradox occurs. At first glance the viewer is drawn into a room of beautifully passive Southern rural landscapes, a fitting addition for the work that hangs in the galleries that surround it. It is not until one approaches each image, close enough to be able to read the statement posted alongside, that the bombshells start to go off. Ingram describes in detail, choosing words as articulate as the clarity of her photography, the horrific events that happened so many years ago. Many were the sites of some of the most brutal race-related murders that brought the plight and dangers of being an African American in the rural South to the national forefront. We learn the placid view of the Tallahatchie riverbank bathed in the warm glow of the late afternoon sun was the site of the mean-hearted killing of Emmett Till, whose only offense was an alleged whistle at a passing white woman. The backyard site of Medgar Evers’s assassination is so anonymous in its urban plainness that it warns the viewer that without proper diligence violence like this can happen anywhere. Aptly named Poorhouse Road, commanding so little traffic that it wasn’t worth asphalt, was where Clifton Walker was brutally attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, rendering his wife a widow and leaving their five children without the love of their father. However, not every site bears total sadness. The image of the white dovelike weathervane appropriately marks the farm where Habitat for Humanity was founded. Yet even there, racial hostilities were not uncommon.

Medgar Evers’s back yard, Jackson, Mississippi, 2007 On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was gunned down in his driveway in Jackson. Byron De La Beckwith was tried for the murder in 1963 and 1964; both trials ended in hung juries. De La Beckwith was convicted with new evidence in 1994.

25 nashvillearts.com

“

Many were the sites of some of the most brutal race-related murders that brought the plight and dangers of being an African American in the rural South to the national forefront.

Koinonia Farms, Americus, Georgia, 2007 Koinonia Farms was founded in 1942 by Clarence Jordan as an interracial community where people could live and work together. During the civil rights movement, neither black nor white children in Koinonia were allowed to attend segregated schools. Koinonia withstood firebombing, night riding, Klan intimidation, and economic boycotts and still exists today as an interracial community, dedicated to affordable housing for all. Habitat for Humanity was founded at Koinonia in the 1960s as a response to poverty in the rural American South.

In addition to her words and pictures, Jessica spent countless hours recording family members and civil rights workers in StoryCorps fashion to bring firstperson accounts of the tragedies that occurred over a half-century ago. The stories are poignant and contribute significantly to the power of this exhibit. A round table prepared by the museum’s fine curatorial staff sits centered in the middle of the exhibit. There, patrons, with the aid of headsets and iPads, can sit and listen to firsthand accounts of the events that prompted the artist to create the images so plainly visible on the surrounding walls. The effect is quite moving and speaks well of the overall assemblage of the exhibition.

During an interview with John Waters, Jeff Koons made the statement, “Art must answer the question of its own being.” In that respect Road though Midnight is definitely a work of art driven by a question that grew out of Jessica’s heart and was spurred on by her soulful desire to learn and comprehend. na You can learn more about the exhibit by visiting the Tennessee State Museum’s website: www.tnmuseum.org/custpage.cfm/frm/39815/sec_id/189073 and see more of Jessica’s work on her website: www.jessingram.com.

26 nashvillearts.com

Jessica Ingram

Photograph by John Guider

What Jessica has done is truly remarkable. Her exhibition is the result of a self-motivated effort that was almost ten years in the making. What started as a personal journey to discover what it meant to be Southern ended up being an important discourse on racism and its resultant pain and suffering. Jessica has not only showed incredible resolve but uncompromising courage as well.

Openings in March The Beauty of Colour West of Knoll Through March 12 Cinematographer and fine art photographer Rob Lindsay was driving through Arrington, Tennessee, when he saw a cool old storefront that houses an art gallery. He stopped in, met brothers Tyler and Jordan Weisenauer, proprietors of West of Knoll, and when they saw Lindsay’s photography, they asked him to headline the exhibit The Beauty of Colour. Lindsay is showing photographs he shot through a piece of antique Peruvian glass, which gives his images a lovely painterly affect. Three additional artists join Lindsay in the exhibit. Sue Blackmore, a California native who recently moved to Tennessee, is showing landscapes in pastels, watercolor, and oil. Local artist Pete Sullivan is presenting oil paintings, and resident artist Jordan Weisenauer is exhibiting still lifes, naturalistic, and abstract acrylic work. West of Knoll is about six miles south of Nolensville in Arrington, and less than a mile from Arrington Vineyards. The Beauty of Colour is on view through March 12 at West of Knoll Gallery & Studio, 7950 Nolensville Road, Arrington, TN. For more information, visit www.westofknoll.com.

Vincent Peach Opens in Marathon Village

The Crappy Magic Experience Seed Space March 5 – April 4

Vincent Peach, designer of fine pearl jewelry, has opened a new flagship store in Nashville’s Marathon Village. After a wave of media exposure and celebrity endorsements, the Nashville designer’s new store will function as a home base for the national wholesale operation and a showroom for Music City locals and tourists alike. Vincent notes, “This location is perfect for us because Marathon Village’s rustic/industrial look from its days as an automotive manufacturing facility works perfectly as a backdrop for our handmade leather work, fine pearls, and diamond pieces. The old brick and wood beams really allow the work to stand out.” Vincent Peach’s new store is located in Marathon Village, 1310 Clinton Street, Suites 107–109. Hours of operation are Monday– Saturday, 9 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. For more, visit www.vincentpeach. com. To read Nashville Arts Magazine’s article on Vincent Peach’s jewelry, go to www.nashvillearts.com/2013/11/08/vincent-peach.

The photographs in David Hellams’ Crappy Magic Magazine are made during the artist’s routine trips to thrift store outlets where surplus donated goods are sold by the pound. Some of the images evoke a celebration of endless variety and unexpected combinations, while others may provoke a feeling of repulsion. Hellams and artistic collaborator David King are bringing an exhibition called The Crappy Magic Experience to Seed Space this month. It will be an interactive installation that invites interaction with unwanted things. The artists will fill bins with a curated collection of items, and visitors are invited to root around in the piles and make photographs of any arrangement of stuff they like. David Hellams says, “The exhibition seeks to encourage our guests to make their own creative statements in the form of collage-like photographs made from a jumbled assortment of low-value goods. Additionally, we plan to question the value of these extraneous, cast-off, mass-produced things in several ways—one method being a live auction at the closing reception.” The Crappy Magic Experience runs March 5 through April 4 at Seed Space in the Track One building. For more information, visit www.seedspace.org. See more of Hellams and David King at www.crappymagic.tumblr.com.

New Works by Sean Norvet & Jason Lascu CG2 Gallery

March 5 – April 15

New Works, opening at CG2 Gallery this month, features a series of paintings and sculptures from artists Sean Norvet and Jason Lascu. Norvet’s paintings are precisely executed, and his subjects reflect the media-saturated, commercialized environment we inhabit. His style can be explosive and often mashes up elegant photorealism with two-dimensional cartoon buffoonery. As urgent and commanding as his images are, he playfully invites viewers in to share the laugh.

he is best known for his sculptures consisting primarily of wax and found materials. His work is inspired by various encounters of adversity and individuals that he met while growing up in a harsh city environment. According to Lascu, “The sculptures are intended to examine the ideas of human frustration, contemplation, labor, and loneliness, which are all reoccurring themes throughout my work.”

Director of CG2 Gallery and sculptor Jason Lascu has worked in a variety of mediums, including bronze, clay, and plaster. However,

New Work by Sean Norvet & Jason Lascu opens with a reception on Saturday, March 5, from 6 until 9 p.m. and remains on view until April 15. For more information, visit www.cg2gallery.com.

29 nashvillearts.com

Listen to the Earth Brad Durham’s Cumberland Gallery Show Spotlights Fairy Tale Landscapes Through April 9

How the Land Talks, 2015, Oil on canvas, 60” x 60” x 2”

Brad Durham comes to Nashville by way of Minnesota with a little side jaunt through the Northwest, though he hails from the Bay Area in California. The painter is showcasing his work at Cumberland Gallery now through April 9 in his second solo show at the venue, and its themes seem redolent of the atmosphere all those regions are known for—verdant forest and rich landscape. Durham developed his strong sense of aesthetics in his California youth, studying at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and at Humboldt State for philosophy. He spent a decade teaching at the former school while exploring the philosophical studies at Humboldt. In an artistic career spanning more than 30 years, he’s had no less than 47 solo exhibitions of his works. He is best known for ethereal landscape images, adding a cool touch to tantalizing visions of tree forms, some with color palettes that evoke a sense of hours or seasons—twilight blues, winter violets, soft honey-gold dawns, vibrant fall reds. His printmaking likewise incorporates love of images gleaned from the natural world, sometimes with a hint of East Asian style and color. Each and every work calls out viewers from their urban and suburban lives to rediscover the beauty that lies in trees, leaves, and flowers. This show, How the Land Talks, will run parallel with artist Billy Renkl’s Field Notebook (see page 90) through April 9 at Cumberland Gallery. For more information, visit www.cumberlandgallery.com. See more of Brad Durham’s work at www.braddurham.com.

danielleMcDANIEL

by Karen Parr-Moody

Photograph by Tamara Reynolds

Dreams Taking Shape, or How One Lady Built a Campus out of Passion and Clay

The Clay Lady, Danielle McDaniel

or decades, my parents used the butter compartment of their refrigerator to house a clay stegosaurus I’d made in kindergarten. Preserved like some woolly mammoth frozen in glacial ice, it lived there, snuggled up next to a chocolate mouse (a treasure of my brother’s). I was in my 30s before it was whisked away by a curveball in time. There are, naturally, many such clay creatures tucked into nooks of homes everywhere. To be a parent is to carve out such shelters of sentiment. In Nashville, this phenomenon can likely

be traced to potter Danielle McDaniel, also known as The Clay Lady. McDaniel has taught pottery to thousands of Middle Tennessee children since 1982 through the “in-house field trips” she offered to schools. During these, she taught up to 800 students a week to create clay artworks. She also developed The Clay Lady Way®, a teaching modality for art educators that trims clay firing into one step instead of two, cutting down on the time and costs needed to create pottery.

32 nashvillearts.com

McDaniel’s entry into pottery was somewhat stereotypical: she was a frustrated college student. “I thought, what did I do in school that I loved the most? And I remembered in ninth grade I won first place for a clay baby shoe. So I thought, I’ll just take a clay class. And I fell in love with it.” While mostly self-taught, McDaniel initially studied pottery under Lena Lucas, who taught with Metro Parks Centennial Art Center for 37 years. It clicked. After a time, McDaniel discovered that she could not only create art from clay, she could teach it. But after 28 years of traveling to schools, McDaniel put down roots with her popular pottery operation called The Clay Lady’s Campus. Located at 1416 Lebanon Pike, this 30,000-square-foot campus is home to The Clay Lady’s Studio, Artist Co-op and Galleries, and Mid-South Ceramic, a pottery supply company operated by McDaniel’s business associate, Tami Archer. McDaniel still teaches plenty of children, as well as students of all ages. Each week, around 125 to 150 students arrive at the The Clay Lady’s Campus to take pottery classes, and 100 to 200 children and adults visit for field trips and tours. Additionally, the campus provides ten weekend workshops each year. There are two studios for classes and workshops. “What a thriving community we are,” McDaniel says. Through its Artist Co-op of 65 members, the campus also acts as an incubator for those who want to grow in the art of pottery. McDaniel does not jury in artists. She wants an environment in which budding potters can be mentored by more seasoned artists. The focus is not on competition. “We call it coopetition,” McDaniel says.

Nan Jacobsohn leading a Campus workshop

Photograph by Tammy Gentuso

McDaniel says she has always told her students: “To be an artist I take what I think, I take what I feel, I mix it all up and make something real.”

McDaniel dreams of building dormitory-style housing on the roof of Studio B to create live-work spaces. She has also spoken to an array of urban housing experts for advice on how to bring affordable housing to the area. Her ideas are percolating. Meanwhile, visitors descend upon McDaniel’s campus each week to see the magic first hand. It’s then that she takes the opportunity to publicize City Side’s potential. “Right now, anytime someone comes to visit me I tell them I’m building a sandcastle and I’ve got one cup of sand,” she says. “Come bring your cups of sand so we can build a sandcastle. Because it takes more than one. I’m here singing my song and doing my dance and creating the energy, the vortex, to bring people in.” na For more information about The Clay Lady’s Campus, please visit www.theclaylady.com.

Then there are the studios, which nurture artists’ studies. One building provides 25 private studios, and another, Studio B, houses 20. McDaniel says, “Studio B is an elevation; it’s more for artists who operate like a small business.”

“I don’t want to just be a pottery studio,” McDaniel says. “I want to have an impact on the city—not only by helping artists have a full-time career in art, but also by giving the community an opportunity to come see it made, come see it sold, come make it, be a part of it. And to see it as a business instead of a hobby or something fun.”

Caroline Cercone creating Husk cups

Photograph by Tamara Reynolds

McDaniel now has her eyes set on yet another goal. She wants to use the synergy of The Clay Lady’s Campus to help grow a larger organism, that of City Side, an enclave that recently became a designated neighborhood, such as East Nashville or Germantown. Its tagline, “Industrial Past, Innovative Future,” is an apt description. Its supporters dream it will ultimately become an artists’ hub that features affordable housing.

johnMAYALL

by Skip Anderson

Blues Legend John Mayallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Artistic Expression Extends Far Beyond Music City Winery

March 8

Photograph by Cristina Arrigoni

n average, blues legend John Mayall, 82, has released more than an album a year since releasing his first in 1965. Members of his groundbreaking band, the Bluesbreakers, included Eric Clapton, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Mick Taylor, among many other notable musicians. Known as the Godfather of British Blues, Mayall was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. He released Find A Way To Care in late 2015. Mayall kicks off his 2016 tour March 8 at City Winery-Nashville.

Nashville Arts Magazine (NAM): Your music has evolved significantly since you released your first album in 1965. How would you describe the music you’re making now? John Mayall (JM): I think it’s a lot more assured now. The main thing is the intensity and the honesty should be uniform to the era; that’s the nature of the blues. And it’s my job to keep the integrity of that. NAM: In your 2013 release, A Special Life, and your latest album, Find A Way To Care, it feels like there’s a theme of looking back a bit. Would you agree? JM: When you’re searching around for subject matter for a song, obviously a blues singer is supposed to sing about things in his life. And as time goes by, it’s inevitable that you will draw upon life’s experiences and [offer] your up-to-date comments on the things around you.

NAM: That’s quite a statement, considering some of the people you’ve had in your band over the years. JM:

NAM: You significantly customize your guitars aesthetically, such as the Eric Johnson Strat on the cover of A Special Life. Where does that impulse come from? JM:

It’s the same with keyboards and everything else; I never learned how to read or write music. So my playing technique is not one of the great things about the way I play. It all comes out the way it’s going to come out, and I just do the best I can. I’m not bothered by it. I mean, John Lee Hooker never had much technique, but he had very much a distinctive sound. And I like to think my guitar sound doesn’t sound like anybody else. I think the individuality is much more important than the technique.

NAM: That’s an interesting point. When you listen to your records from 40 or 50 years ago and compare them to your more contemporary work, it clearly has evolved. But it very much sounds like you throughout. Do you approach music differently now than you did in the 60s? JM:

No, not at all. The main thing is that the music has to support what the song is all about. And I find a lot more excitement playing with the band I have now, because it’s the best band I’ve ever had. And everybody is very supportive of each other. In seven years, it’s just like yesterday when we started playing together. And that freshness is very apparent.

It’s an expression of my artistic taste, so I like to do that. I think the guitar is a very interesting shape, and I try to decorate it and cut it up and do whatever I have to do to make it match the music. It’s something I like to do as an expression.

NAM: When did you first do that? JM:

NAM: In 2010, you told Guitar Player magazine, “I’m such a limited technician on the guitar, but as time has gone on, I think I use it pretty effectively as a tool to express myself.” What did you mean by that? JM:

This is a magic combination I have now, and I will put it up against any band I’ve previously had.

I’ve always done it as far back as I can remember. The first one I did is on the cover of the Blues Alone album from back in 1967, when I did the engraving. Unfortunately, that one was lost like all the others in the big fire of 1978. At least it’s preserved on the cover of that album.

NAM: You seem to find ways to express yourself artistically through the objects around you. Painting a mural in your swimming pool in Laurel Canyon comes to mind. JM:

That was a great undertaking. I thoroughly enjoyed that. It was overfacing at times, but it was a lot of fun. I did all the work myself.

NAM: You famously have an ear for spotting talent early. Do you currently have your eye on any emerging artists? JM:

Not really. It’s usually if I’m putting a band together, that’s when it comes into play. And those gaps are very far and few between these days. The last band of Bluesbreakers was the same lineup for close to 15 years, and the one before that was ten years. It was only in the very early days when everybody was starting out that there was a lot of fluctuation. na

John Mayall will perform at the City Winery on March 8. For more information, visit www.citywinery.com and www.johnmayall.com.

36 nashvillearts.com

Jester Self-Portrait, 2013, Oil on canvas, 48” x 40”

38 nashvillearts.com

teresaOAXACA

by Elaine Slayton Akin

Victoriana Revisited Haynes Galleries | April 8 to May 28

Teresa Oaxaca with Patrick

“

Her career is proof that history bears repeating and remains relevant when in concert with authentic expression.

39 nashvillearts.com

robing the highly imaginative, inspired mind of Teresa Oaxaca is not altogether unlike having a present-day conversation with an Old Master. It’s also not altogether alike. What art enthusiast, whether smitten by the stable forms of the Renaissance or the punchy contours of Abstract Expressionism wouldn’t want to sit across a stylish, marbletop West Elm table from Rembrandt or Vermeer wearing their iconic tabbaardlike garments and casual bonnets; offer up a snack of Nashville hot chicken; and ask questions like, “What’s your secret to capturing light so radiantly?” or “Do you have a replicable formula for achieving flawless linear perspective?” Noteworthy, yes. Relevant, questionable. Where the slightly rotted orange peel of a seventeenth-century memento mori still life, for example, was once interpreted as a reminder of impending mortality, similar imagery now is just as easily a rotting orange peel—that’s it: a rotting orange peel, and the artist’s prerogative revels in the ambiguity; concept often trumps craftsmanship. Today, replicating Old Master techniques in any form of verisimilitude is arguably deemed, if not outright then subtly by gallery trends, unoriginal and lacking vision. Absolutes, however, rarely hold up in our post-modern society, begging the question of authenticity in contemporary art and how it’s defined.

Yule, 2014, Oil on canvas, 40” x 60”

I read an article from The New York Review of Books online titled “The Shame and Pride of Empire” by Jenny Uglow about an exhibition recently mounted at the Tate Britain of artists’ responses to England’s imperialism since the year 1500. While Oaxaca’s art does not hold nearly the same negative connotations as the visual documentations of centuries-long slavery and religious oppression, Uglow poses a brilliant question that transcends era: “. . . the question of how much one can appreciate an individual work of art, or indeed a genre, when the context is so dominant.”1 In the case of Oaxaca, the context is not so much the present day, but the Baroque world that decidedly influences her process. A closer look at Oaxaca’s oeuvre, while steeped in the elaborate composition of a traditional painterly style, reveals a refreshingly modern mode of expression, not withstanding every effort on the artist’s part to simultaneously champion the spirit of her pioneering Baroque forebears. A 2009 graduate of the Florence Academy in Italy and a longtime follower of Baroque art, Teresa Oaxaca currently works as a full-time painter and resides in Washington, D.C. Oaxaca teaches painting workshops across the United States and abroad, which is what brought her to Nashville in 2015—“The

Portrait in Charcoal” workshop hosted by Warehouse 521. She’ll be back in Music City this May to teach “Painting the Portrait in Two Stages.” To meet Oaxaca is to immediately identify her dedication to authenticity. Her physical appearance and dress are as elegant as and similar in style to the whimsically clad subjects in her paintings. According to Oaxaca, “I dress in modern clothing that’s . . . a mix of different eras, never before seen—a very modern way of dressing, I say, because it displays a complete freedom to decline adherence to what ‘should be done’ or what ‘everyone else does.’” Online she writes, “I want subject matter to always be at hand,” down to the very fabric of her daily environment.2 Her deliberate immersion in the self-created narrative of her paintings borders on the edge of the method technique often practiced in acting, yet here in painting. Oaxaca points to the Industrial Revolution as the catalyst for today’s homogeneity in products and, thereby, the necessity “to exercise a creative departure, to assume an individual way of producing something. You wouldn’t create your own art by buying a paint-by-numbers kit." In her Dolls series, for example, Oaxaca “[showcases] the best of [her] venerable 1800s doll collection,” a veritable homage to

40 nashvillearts.com

the artist’s “spirit” years—the Victorian Era. Jenna and the Steiner from the series portrays a Steiner doll, identified by its trademark lack of expression and presumably all-natural components such as wood and mohair, sitting on the lap of a young woman. Jenna’s “dolled-up” style teeters between 18th-century French and 19thcentury English courtier garb, but her forward gaze and immobile posture impart a contemporary sentiment: she is an imitation of the doll. Laden with a multitude of interpretations, this painting, for one, nods to Oaxaca’s study of dolls as “votives and effigies,” which symbolize humans and take the form of the human figure—a reminder that Oaxaca’s subject matter is, indeed, always at hand as life imitates art and vice versa. Moreover, many female subjects from Oaxaca’s Neo-Baroque series project the opposite effect of traditional allegory. Rather than assuming the guise of the Virgin Mary, Athena, or Vesta, the woman in Clowness, for example, wears the heavy makeup of a clown. Ironically, the mask and all propriety disappear as she reclines horizontally and extends her feet out from beneath her dress. There’s no effort to be something she’s not, emphasized by that which under usual circumstances should imply otherwise.

Plague Mask, 2011, Oil on canvas, 54” x 36”

“I like to immerse myself in art. That is the best way to live and to create,” Oaxaca writes. Admittedly “not big on naming movements,” Oaxaca still finds profoundness in the Baroque style, “that they were not constantly trying to justify the way they painted.” The apple does not fall far from the tree. Transparent and without regard to titles or trends, Oaxaca paints what feels right. Her career is proof that history bears repeating and remains relevant when in concert with authentic expression. na Teresa Oaxaca’s exhibit, Exuberance, will be on view at Haynes Galleries, April 8 to May 28. An art talk with the artist and Nashville Arts Magazine’s Paul Polycarpou will take place on Saturday, April 9, from 10 a.m. until noon. For more information, visit www.haynesgalleries.com. Teresa Oaxaca is represented by Haynes Galleries. To see more of her work, please visit www.teresaoaxaca.com.

1 2

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/26/shame-and-pride-artist-and-empire http://www.teresaoaxaca.com

Jenn and the Steiner, 2012, Oil on canvas, 54” x 36”

41 nashvillearts.com

Photograph by Joanne Berman

Cidny Bullens

Transforming through Transition

by Skip Anderson

Cidny Bullens to Explore Grief, Transgender Self in One Wo/Man Show

idny Bullens, a successful singer/songwriter formerly based in Nashville, sits at Bongo Java with his hands folded in his lap. He smiles patiently while listening to the next question. Short, blondish hair frames his head. Bullens has been known as “Cid” since 2011. But that doesn’t change the fact that he spent nearly 60 years of his life as a woman named Cindy Bullens, the birth mother to two children. Cindy Bullens first made a name for herself in the music industry touring with Elton John during the 70s. She got the dream gig after crashing an A-list party at Hollywood’s famed Cherokee Studios amidst the Brit’s white-hot ascent toward musical stardom. Soon thereafter, she would sing backup vocals on Sir Elton’s No. 1 duet with Kiki Dee, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Even as she sang and danced on stages around the world, she continued to suppress her long-held belief that she was a male born into the body of a female. “There’s an ‘M’ on my driver’s license now. But I still spent more than 50 years as a woman—I bore two babies,” Bullens says. “I still am a mother, and I will always be a mother, but I hated my breasts; they were foreign objects on my body, except for the year I breastfed

42 nashvillearts.com

Performing live at the Whiskey A Go-Go in Los Angeles in 1979

Bullens says it’s the only surgical step he’ll take to facilitate the transition. Prior to doing so, she spoke with Elton John, with whom she has maintained a close personal friendship. “Elton has a place in my heart that belongs only to him,” Bullens says. “He said to me, ‘You need to be happy, whatever that is you need to do.’ I [recently] saw him in Las Vegas, and we spent some time alone. I think he may have been a little nervous about seeing me because he hadn’t seen me since I transitioned. But Elton being Elton, he asked me every question in the book. He wanted to know how I was doing and what it was like.”

With Elton John in concert in 1975

each of my children. Being transgender is part of my life and part of who I am, but it does not define me.” Despite undergoing “top surgery” four years ago and outwardly identifying as a man ever since, he identifies more closely as a bereaved parent. His younger daughter, Jessie, died in 1996 at the age of 11 while undergoing treatment for cancer. In the years that followed, much of Bullens’s songwriting reflected profound grief. After she had written several songs about her daughter’s death—this was prior to Bullens outwardly identifying as a man—she then went to Nashville songwriting icon Rodney Crowell, who encouraged the former Green Hills resident to make an album exclusively about her daughter. From that, the powerful album Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth came into being. It was a collaborative effort that notably included the talents of Bryan Adams, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Crowell, Bonnie Raitt, and Lucinda Williams, among others. Bullens performed a private concert for parents who lost children during the unthinkable Columbine shooting in 1999 and soon thereafter began speaking regularly around the country to groups of bereaved parents.

In early 2016, Bullens returned to Nashville for the first time since publicly identifying as a man and plans to reconnect over time with many of the songwriters and artists with whom she previously worked prior to transitioning, including Matraca Berg, Radney Foster, Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt, Ray Kennedy, Bill Lloyd, Delbert McClinton, and Gary Nicholson. The purpose of his mid-January visit was to see the space at Bongo Java After Hours Theatre where he will stage a fourperformance run of his autobiographical multi-media musical production, Somewhere Between: A One Wo/Man Show, in March. The show is produced by Ken Bernstein, the venue’s founder and artistic director, and directed by Tanya Taylor Rubinstein. “It’s not a show about being transgender; it’s a show about my life,” Bullens says. “Being transgender is part of my life and part of who I am, and it’s a part of the story, but it doesn’t define me. My world is expanding, and that’s what this show is about. So much love has come back to me. This is a story about humanity, and I want to tell it for the story’s sake.” na Cidny Bullens will perform Somewhere Between: A One Wo/Man Show at 7:30 p.m. March 18, 19, 25, 26, April 1 and 2 at Bongo Java After Hours Theatre at 2007 Belmont Boulevard. For more information, please visit www.bongoafterhourstheatre.com or www.cidnybullens.com.

“I didn’t seek it out, but I found myself doing concerts for bereaved parents and doing hospice and palliative care conferences and workshops on death and dying all over the country,” Bullens says. “I didn’t ask for that; it just kind of happened. Being a bereaved parent probably defines me more than does being transgender. I don’t think I’ve ever said that in my life. But it has more emotional impact to me than being transgender.” With Freddie Mercury and Billie Jean King in a Los Angeles restaurant after an Elton John concert in 1975

She initially backed out of a scheduled “top surgery” in 2011, then eventually went through with it in 2012. “I had it done in Florida by a doctor who only does female-to-male top surgery,” Bullens says. “It’s the best thing I have ever done.”

43 nashvillearts.com

Trees of Life

Words by Stephanie Stewart-Howard

Amélie Guthrie Creates Art Inspired by Nature Gordon Jewish Community Center

Photography by Chris Cole

Opens March 9

mélie Guthrie grew up in New Orleans and surrounding South Louisiana, places covered in evergreen or “live” oak trees. The culture in that part of the country, says Guthrie, has a reverence for the trees that compares with the preservation of historic architecture. With those trees surrounding her through childhood, she too developed a passion and affinity for them.

Though she’s made a plethora of distinctive and wonderful pieces, Guthrie says her light sculpture is her favorite. Like the nature-loving beaux arts artists of the 19th century, she takes delight in making things both beautiful and useful. “Each of these pieces is a communication with God to me. We can be small lights in the universe. It’s a point of meditation.”

Additionally, she says she has always been drawn to fractal patterns—lightning, the human nervous system, within the veins of leaves—that echo in the patterns of roots and branches as well. Winter inspires her too, when branches are bare and the clean bone structure of wood is easy to discern.

It is exceedingly easy to meditate on the glories of the universe looking at Guthrie’s work, whatever your own philosophy. na You can see Amélie Guthrie’s art close up at the Gordon Jewish Community Center in March. The show opens March 9 and is open to the public. www.nashvillejcc.org or www.liflistudio.com

The artist says she felt drawn to art from the beginning, attending an art-friendly school. Her mother, a watercolor artist, painted the live oaks herself, and many family friends were also artists. “Art was always a big presence in my life,” she says. Sculpture started to inspire her curiosity while she was living in Spain her junior year in high school. Here she took her first art history classes and truly studied the medium for the first time. But it was after college, while living in Argentina and working for a non-profit providing art education to underserved kids, that she first tentatively thought to embody her love of trees and tree forms in her own sculpture. Encountering a local craft artist selling a very different type of metal tree sculpture at a street fair, she wondered how she might sculpturally embody her own beloved arboreal subjects. Later, living in New York, she made her own first efforts, working with wires bought at a hardware store. Slowly, she developed her own technique, twisting loops of wire in a multiplicity of sizes and gauges back upon each other to create tiny pieces of jewelry or epic twelve-foot tree sculptures—and now, each of those works is made of a single piece of wire. From there she began abstracting, trees into fractals and back again. “Some people see lightning when they look at my work,” she says. Unsurprising given her remarkable branching light fixtures. She began getting commissions, including from the Children’s Museum of the Arts (www.cmany.org) where she worked. She did a twelve-foot installation there and with her large pieces gradually mastered the way the wires needed to interact.

44 nashvillearts.com

45 nashvillearts.com

46 nashvillearts.com

Photograph by Anthony Scarlati

Fred Dusel

fredDUSEL

by Donna Glassford

The Arts Company

Now and then...

March 5–26

the Nashville arts scene is stunned to discover an artist hidden away, living and working quietly below the city’s cultural radar. Fred Dusel has emerged into the light with an incredible cache of unique carbon print photographs. The Arts Company is featuring an exhibition of Dusel’s photographs; images that depict the distinctive topography of Northern California, the High Sierra, and Pebble Beach. This will be the first and only art exhibition by Fred Dusel because of a life-ending illness, lung cancer, and his time is short. But even when a cure is no longer possible, healing can always take place. Psychiatrist Lawrence LeShan1 began working with cancer patients in the 1950s in New York City. He concluded that the traditional psychotherapeutic

47 nashvillearts.com

technique of asking what is wrong, what caused it, and how can it be fixed might not be the best approach for people facing life-threatening illness. Instead he asked the patients what is right with you? What makes you feel most fully alive? LeShan also asked, “What is your song? What do you want to do with your remaining time?” For many people, the answers often lie in the creative realm. Recently Fred Dusel was asked a very similar question by his longtime friend Nashville entrepreneur and healthcare guru Michael Burcham. The question Burcham asked: “What are your goals for this last chapter of your life?” Burcham is empathetic to the needs of those in the final stages of their lives. He has witnessed the healing power of art and believes that creative engagement can help place an emphasis on living while dying. A good friend and now muse, Burcham founded Narus Health, which may change the way we die. The goal of Narus Health is to “change the healthcare conversation for those facing life-threatening illness . . . listening first to understand and placing what matters most to our patients, their families, physicians, and our partners above all else.” Dusel surprised his friend as he presented newly created carbon print photographs and expressed a desire to exhibit his work before he died. Burcham was captivated by the photographs and recognized how exquisite the works were. He stated, “Philosophically each piece is something deeper than a picture. Dusel is a man whose life and art are worth knowing and remembering.” As an art collector Burcham knows the Nashville arts beat and thought Anne Brown, owner of The Arts Company, should see Dusel’s carbon print photographs and hear his story. Brown quickly rearranged her exhibition schedule to accommodate Dusel’s work with an exhibition to open March 5.

Metaphorically the photographs are a testament to Dusel’s life: Themes of strength, endurance, erosion, growth, and peace prevail. The chronology of his life follows the archetypal story of what the late American scholar Joseph Campbell would have called a Hero’s Journey. And so Fred Dusel is creating a significant body of artwork with his remaining time. In his West Meade home studio, Dusel prints his photographs using a nearly forgotten process. Only a small number of photographers around the world are willing to tackle this temperamental print method. The process is arduous, and a successful print possesses a threedimensional effect on the paper with a wide tonal spectrum. “None of my pictures includes people. But I make them so that people can connect with their spiritual nature through allegory and symbolism,” says Dusel. “I hope people will be able to find the quiet, contemplative part of themselves and by intently studying these images, in detail and at a distance, over time, to enhance their appreciation of our place in the world.” The strength and honesty of his images—the distinctive topography of Northern California, the High Sierra, and Pebble Beach near where he grew up—coupled with the sheer beauty of his finely crafted carbon print photographs, does speak quietly to something inside the viewer. Dusel did not come easily to this resting place. He grew up in the 1950s in a small Northern California town with dirt roads. His childhood home had art on the walls, prints and etchings that made an early aesthetic impression. When Dusel was 14, his father committed suicide, using his son’s rifle. Dusel quickly parted ways with formal education. As a teen, he worked in a lumber mill until the age of 17 when he enlisted in the army, serving for six years, two-and-a-half years in Vietnam with Special Forces, where he was a medic as well as a sniper. When he left the service, he became “an alcoholic drinker and a user of dangerous street and prescription drugs,” he says. Many years of alcohol and drug dependency followed as he bounced around working as a professional musician, a machinist, and a quality control supervisor. In 1985, at the age of 39, Dusel passed through the doors of a 12-step program. “Miraculously,” he says, “it worked the first time. I celebrated 30 years of continuous sobriety on May 17 last year.”

In his 40s, Dusel was moved to pick up his formal education. He enrolled in college, earning both a Bachelor of Science degree (College of Notre Dame) and a Master of Liberal Arts Degree (Stanford University). In 1998, admission into the Vanderbilt School of Law brought him to Nashville. He earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence Degree in 2001. A severe heart attack in 2012 convinced him to retire from the practice of law. He turned his energies back to photography. “After the war, I learned about the photography of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams . . . I have never developed the panoramic vision of Adams, but I was attracted to his style of expressive printing. Weston’s vision of detail, shape, texture, and light still informs my seeing the world. “Photography, as I practice it, is a contemplative exercise. Mine is a slow process. I use a slow, large-format camera and slow film to capture as much detail as possible. I photograph things that do not move much, or rapidly, and in low light to illuminate details that would be lost in the harsh shadows of mid-day. Still, I miss much more than I see . . .”

“

Three months after completing a tutorial workshop on carbon transfer printing technique, Dusel was diagnosed with stage III lung cancer.

In a life of loss, pain, struggle, recovery, and discovery Fred Dusel has explored and endured to arrive finally at the place where he started. What he has seen is distilled in his photographs.

“My lack of strength and stamina and the unpredictability of the carbon process will severely limit the number of quality prints I can produce. The images showing at The Arts Company represent about two-thirds of my total pictorial contribution to the art world, which I count at about 40 unique pictures.” na On March 4, Nashville Arts Magazine will host a conversation with Fred Dusel, Michael Burcham, and Paul Polycarpou at The Arts Company. The exhibition will open March 5–26. For more, visit www.theartscompany.com. To see more of Dusel’s art, see www.freddusel.photography. 1 Cancer As a Turning Point: A Handbook for People with Cancer, Their Families, and Health Professionals by Lawrence LeShan

50 nashvillearts.com

Photograph by Jerry Atnip

ASISEEIT BY MARK W. SCALA

Mark W. Scala Chief Curator

Frist Center for the Visual Arts

Economics and Political Theater: Guy Ben-Ner’s Video Stealing Beauty

“

Stealing Beauty evokes political spectacles in which narratives put forth by every candidate toggle freely between reality, fiction, and propaganda, and it is up to the viewer to determine which is which.

n this most unusual of political seasons, in which a selfdefined socialist is in the running for the Democratic nomination and a big-time capitalist is seeking the Republican nod, it seems appropriate to revisit discussions of class, money, and power that have been, to say the least, dormant in recent decades of American politics. Turn now to Guy BenNer’s 2007 video, Stealing Beauty (www.ubu.com/film/benner_beauty.html), for today’s lesson in socialist economics. Don’t worry, it’ll be fun! Parodying a sitcom, the video shows a family—mom, dad, son, and daughter—occupying an IKEA showroom as if it were their own home (anticipating the Occupy Wall Street movement by four years). Early in the video, we learn that the son has been caught stealing at school. The dad is tasked by the mom with explaining why stealing is wrong. While mom goes shopping, dad instructs the children about concepts such as theft in relation to property rights, labor, and compensation, the family as an economic unit, and even the price of love. The matter of exchange extends to time and the ownership of knowledge; dad charges the kids money before reading them a bedtime story or helping out with their homework. The only thing that has no price, he says, is love.

But then, the daughter points out, if love holds the home together, and the home is property, even love has economic value. The film is a spin on the “father knows best” trope of television history, in which precocious children do not simply accept pat answers from condescending adults, but through “innocent” questioning end up teaching the older generation a thing or two. The film echoes the Marxist argument that capitalism is built on economic, moral, and political foundations that impact all behaviors and beliefs, but are so deeply embedded that we hardly recognize them as artifice—as spectacles meant to keep people from realizing that they are not in control of their own lives. Ben-Ner’s illustration of economic theory as an ambiguous relationship between fiction and reality is compelling. In the IKEA showroom, cabinets, kitchens, and bathrooms serve as models for real homes, so we have the spectacle of a real family pretending be a TV family, which pretends to live within a spectacle of home furnishings pretending to be a home. With price tags still on all the cabinetry, commerce commingles with television to create a nether region in which life and its imitation are blurred, and real needs and implanted desires are indistinguishable.

52 nashvillearts.com

The theme of theft in relation to property is not simply a theoretical matter; it is central to the structure of the film. BenNer did not seek permission for the family to occupy the floor models, so he is in effect stealing their use. When discovered by management, the family would simply go to the next IKEA store to continue the charade, to the bemusement of shoppers looking on. Even if you are not a staunch advocate of the free market, you might consider the film to be propaganda. This should not keep you from appreciating its aesthetic qualities; as the Frist Center’s exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography and Film shows, propaganda can be artistically compelling. This underscores the problematic nature of Stealing Beauty. Early on, its comic dialogue and the device of the “theft” of the IKEA showroom make Ben-Ner’s points with a tongue-in-cheek quality worthy of Andy Warhol. As it progresses, the guerrilla intervention becomes simply a manifesto that tells us what to think—political poetry given over to pedantic prose. Still, the video is worth watching: you will never again walk past an IKEA showroom—or, for that matter, any other such aesthetically appealing commercial simulation—without seeing it as a reminder that happiness derived from ownership is an illusion, albeit one that is central to the functioning of our economic system. And in keeping with the silly season, Stealing Beauty evokes political spectacles in which narratives put forth by every candidate toggle freely between reality, fiction, and propaganda, and it is up to the viewer to determine which is which. na

ARTS&BUSINESSCOUNCIL

BY RICKY HERNANDEZ

Do You Need a Permit for That?

Whether it is a glass of wine at an art gallery or a beer at a concert, the consumption of alcohol sometimes goes hand-inhand with the arts. As an artist, it is important to understand how Tennessee laws affect what you can and cannot do with alcohol at your event. The main source of Tennessee alcohol law is Tennessee Code § 57-4-101. This section of the Code discusses what organizations are authorized to apply for a license to sell alcohol. Tennessee’s statute explicitly lists the organizations it deems worthy to sell “liquor-by-the-drink.” When serving alcohol at an opening reception, an artist likely falls under one of two categories. The first category is a “limited service restaurant,” which is a permit granted to an organization that has a kitchen and a menu of prepared foods but may not actually make any revenue off of food. However, the permit can be expensive ($2,000–$5,000), an overkill if the artist intends to serve alcohol at only a handful of events. The more-likely category for a situation like a gallery opening or show would be a “special occasion permit.” The permit allows qualifying organizations to obtain twelve permits to serve alcohol per year, each for a 24-hour period. This permit is more affordable, at $100 per instance; however, only nonprofits, charities, or political organizations can apply for this permit. There is one more very narrow section of the law that might be applicable to artists who intend to serve wine at an art gallery. Under the Tennessee law, an art gallery may serve (but not sell) wine to patrons of the gallery so long as it receives 90% of its revenue from the sale of artwork and it does not sell food or beverages. This is a very narrow exception but may apply to some artists. It is always a good practice to check with an attorney if you have any questions about the distribution of alcohol at your event. For more information regarding liquor licensing in Tennessee, please visit the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission website at www.tn.gov/abc or contact the Arts & Business Council at www.abcnashville.org. Ricky Hernandez is a legal intern with the Volunteer Lawyers and Professionals for the Arts. He is originally from South Windsor, Connecticut, but is currently in law school at Vanderbilt University. Before coming down to Nashville for school, Ricky was a Certified Public Accountant in Boston, Massachusetts.

55 nashvillearts.com

â&#x20AC;&#x153;

By revealing the roots I am emphasizing unseen power

Southern Roots Run Deep 56 nashvillearts.com

steveTOBIN

by Doug Schatz

Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art through September 4

nternationally acclaimed artist Steve Tobin will be exhibiting his sculptures in Nashville at Cheekwood beginning this February. In addition to his works there, one of his monumental sculptures will be on view at Riverfront Park in downtown Nashville. Tobin’s artwork has been seen in exhibitions around the world and is represented in many important sculpture collections. With equal deftness and success in each, Tobin has worked in glass, clay, bronze, steel, wood, and other media. This rare trait of mastery across media will be on display at Cheekwood in his Steel Roots series and a survey of his indoor works—including a new series never before shown.

Steve Tobin in his studio

Photograph by Kenneth Ek

Tobin’s personality is intense and charismatic, which follows, as his work is beautiful and accessible, yet deeply layered with meaning and reference. His intensity is clearly manifested in the work through his relentless pursuit of material and his imaginative use of metaphors. When talking with him, one gets the impression that despite his already-prolific art-making, he still has much more to say.

DS: You will be showing some of your Steel Roots series. They are originally inspired by Japanese calligraphy? ST: I was working in bronze roots, direct casting from nature, and I did the Trinity Root in New York, the 911 memorial on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. After doing that, I didn’t want to work in the naturalist style anymore; that was all I had to say. I reverted to a more modernist approach, which was inspired by Asian calligraphy.

material has a strong voice in the process. So for me, it’s only by changing the material you can understand what I have to say independent of that material and process. The challenge of this exhibition, because I am combining materials, is to find out what is the continuing essence of what I have to say that is independent of material and process. I think the fun of the exhibition is how could the same person make this in bronze and that in wood and still be consistent.

DS: Do they form words, or is it just a feeling you get from them?

DS: Where do you find inspiration? Is it through the materials or through an over-arching theme in your life?

ST: If you read Japanese or Chinese there are elements of language in the roots. In the pieces and in the shadows as well, there are literal elements of calligraphy.

ST: Inspiration is never the problem; too much inspiration is more likely the problem. In every breath I take, every movement I take, every leaf I see, every shadow, every cloud, patterns on the road . . . it all has something to say to me. My early training was in theoretical mathematics, and what led me to that was a talent I had for looking at patterns and distilling information. I would know the answers to complex math or physics problems without doing the math because the pattern communicated to me the location of the answer. In my work I am lifting or creating patterns that transcend the form. So the object is really the vehicle to many parallel events. As I move through the world I see leaves on a tree that, to me, has the same pattern as lungs, and they are functioning that way. I see too much.

DS: There is also a figurative aspect? ST: Yes. In calligraphy also, the symbol for mankind in Chinese and Japanese is an inverted ‘v’, like legs. Their language comes from pictures, so I expounded on that in some of the pieces. I have many references, like in Brancusi’s Kiss, or Klaus Oldenburg’s Clothespin, which is an inverted ‘v’ and makes figurative references as well. I have many sources of inspiration. DS: The scale is such that one looks up at the roots, which is very unusual. Is this perspective important? ST: Yes; by revealing the roots, it’s like the power of the unseen. Specifically, the underground ecology of the tree is more important than the above ground, or certainly you can’t separate them. But, in metaphor, the things that are not visually apparent are far more important than what you can see with your eyes. So by revealing the roots I am emphasizing unseen power. DS: Are the tree forms above the roots unacknowledged, or are they present but maybe in the past tense? ST: In the Steel Roots they are implied, and in the Bronze Roots they are roots from trees that have fallen over—so the tree is done. DS: Speaking of falling over, your indoor works in this show will include a new series of fallen trees? ST: I started working in wood, and I am using the table as my format. For me, that’s like a blank canvas. Any of the tables that I make are compositional and could go on the wall as paintings. I like the idea of taking something that we use, we eat around—the family distribution around the table affects the family and the conversation—so I’m working with asymmetrical shapes doing pearl and black geometric inlays into the organic grain.

DS: How do you keep your work simple in appearance but layered and complex in concept—how do you keep that balance? ST: I think there has to be an entry point for the public, and I’m not necessarily reaching for the art-going public. I think I’m trying to reach all cultures in all time periods when I make decisions. So I may edit myself if something is too culturally or time-period specific. I want my work to function like Easter Island or Stonehenge—how they still function, in a different way than they were intended, but they have so much layering of science, culture, nature, construction, and deconstruction through time that they function in a much larger arena when you take away the original context. na See Steve Tobin’s sculptures at Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art through September 4. For more information about the exhibit and the artist, visit www.cheekwood.org and www.stevetobin.com.

DS: You seem to work intensely through different materials and then move on from them. Do you ever come back to them, or are they over for you? ST: It’s pretty hard to chart my evolution. I think a lot of it is circumstantial; as materials and opportunities open up to me, I follow them. The changing of materials is very important to me. When you work in materials, the

Steve Tobin overseeing installation of Cathedral Root at Cheekwood

Aerial Root

Steel Roots

Cathedral Root

Art on the West Side Gordon Jewish Community Center

March 12 & 13

Art on the West Side returns to the Gordon Jewish Community Center (GJCC) with some 50 local and regional artists presenting a robust variety of art— paintings, sculpture, ceramics, glasswork, and jewelry. For the third iteration of this very popular event, co-chairs Rhonda Polen Wernick and Ron York have doubled the number of jewelers, added new artists to the roster, and expanded into an adjoining gallery space. “We are very excited about our new artists. Among them, Kim Phillips is exhibiting her paper cuts and Bebo his folk art. Tommie Rush, who used to show with the Temple Arts Festival, is coming on board as our second glass artist, and Ann Light is showing these amazing gourds. Just a few of the returning artists include Polly Cook, JJ Sneed, Marilyn Wendling, Paige Morehead, Emily Little, Vicki Shipley, Ginger Oglesby, Martha Nemer, and David Nichols,” York enthused. Nancy Rhodes Harper, recently featured in Nashville Arts Magazine, is this year’s headlining artist exhibiting her whimsical figurative paintings of women in everyday settings with exaggerated features and color aplenty. Proceeds from Art on the West Side support the GJCC’s art programs. “Throughout the year we hold a variety of art classes for all ages, workshops, and children’s art activities. Our goal is to make these programs as affordable as possible for all members of the community. Art on the West Side makes this possible,” explains Rhonda Polen Wernick. Art on the West Side opens with a lavish cocktail reception and preview sale on Saturday, March 12, from 6 to 9 p.m. A $15 donation is suggested. The show continues on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m, free of charge. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is providing activities for children. For more information, visit www.nashvillejcc.org.

Nancy Rhodes Harper, Hollywood, Oil on canvas, 40” x 30”

61 nashvillearts.com

SYMPHONYINDEPTH MARCH 2016

Jennifer Higdon

Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Higdon

Jun Iwasaki

Photograph by Susan Adcock

Robert Diaz

Photograph courtesy of Robert Diaz

Composer with Tennessee Roots and Legendary Viola Come to the Schermerhorn in March The Nashville Symphony ushers in spring with one of its most extraordinary programs yet on March 25–26, featuring a blend of old and new repertoire, a renowned soloist, the return of a celebrated American composer, and the Music City debut of one of the oldest and most valuable instruments on the planet. In addition to a rare performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, showcasing Symphony concertmaster Jun Iwasaki, and Ravel’s La Valse, the French composer’s colorful take on a Viennese waltz, music lovers will also be treated to two contemporary pieces by Jennifer Higdon, one of America’s most frequently performed composers. These concerts will mark Higdon’s second visit to Music City in 2016, following January’s performances of her Oboe Concerto, featuring Symphony principal oboist James Button. Higdon, a New York native with both a GRAMMY® Award and a Pulitzer Prize to her name, has worked with orchestras around the globe throughout her career. But Nashville and its resident orchestra hold a special place for her. “I always feel like I’m coming home when I come to Nashville, and I love working with the Nashville Symphony,” says the composer, who spent a large part of her childhood in the East Tennessee town of Seymour and still has family in the state. This time, Higdon will hear the orchestra perform two of her works, both of which will be recorded live for future release on Naxos, the world’s leading classical label. The first, All Things Majestic, is an exploration of Grand Teton National Park that reflects the composer’s own love and respect for America’s natural parks, which Higdon credits in part to growing up so close to Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. The second piece, Higdon’s Viola Concerto, promises to be a very special treat, as Roberto Diaz, the former principal violist for the National Symphony, will be the featured soloist. The work was co-commissioned by the Nashville Symphony and the Library of Congress in part to showcase an incredibly rare Stradivarius viola called the Tuscan Medici that Diaz will play for the two performances. Created in 1690 for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the viola was one of only a dozen or so that Stradivarius ever made. Now privately owned and on loan to the Library of Congress, its unique sound will be a perfect match for Diaz’s virtuosic ability. Higdon says she’s thrilled to be returning to Music City—and to be working with the Nashville Symphony. “To me, this is an orchestra that is doing what it should be doing. It’s an American orchestra in an American city, so they should be doing American music. And let me tell you—they do it well.” na Learn more at www.NashvilleSymphony.org. 62 nashvillearts.com

63 nashvillearts.com

THEBOOKMARK

A MONTHLY LOOK AT HOT BOOKS AND COOL READS

A Doubter’s Almanac: A Novel Ethan Canin Wow. People are talking about this one, saying it’s Ethan Canin’s greatest novel yet. (“Canin has soared to a new standard of achievement,” says Pat Conroy.) The book follows several generations of a family over seven decades, from California to Princeton to the Midwest to New York. At the center is Milo Andret, born with “an unusual mind.” Milo’s gift is also his curse in this gorgeously told story of genius, ambition, love, obsession, and grief. Expect to see everyone you know reading it.

Flight of Dreams: A Novel Ariel Lawhon Nashville’s own Ariel Lawhon (The Wife, the Maid and the Mistress) returns with another engaging page-turner. This time she turns her attention to the explosion of the Hindenburg, weaving a speculative version of what could have happened on the three-day flight between the “uneventful” takeoff in Germany and its fiery demise in New Jersey. Richly imagined characters and a big dose of suspense make this historical fiction into an entertaining mystery.

Duke Ellington: An American Composer and Icon

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life

Mercedes Ellington & Steven Brower

Edward O. Wilson

Duke Ellington, Jazz Age pioneer, gave the world such musical standards as “Solitude,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing).” In this beautifully illustrated book featuring more than 200 amazing images, Steven Brower presents Ellington’s life and work, from his humble beginnings to his historic success. Unprecedented access to the Ellington family archives was granted for this book, and Ellington’s granddaughter Mercedes weighs in to show us who the man behind the music really was. Tony Bennett provides the introduction.

The full title is Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, and that’s exactly what this book is about. Edward O. Wilson proposes a radical yet reachable approach to preventing the mass extinction of species (including humans): devote half the surface of the Earth to nature. You can feel Wilson’s sense of urgency as he clearly explains just how perilous a state the Earth’s organisms are currently in and how they got that way. The world does not belong to humanity, he says; yet we have wrought so much destruction upon it. The good news, he proposes, is that if we act swiftly and decisively, we can save it.

Creative Collaboration Sets Nashville Apart In historically renowned creative cities, artists, galleries, and other artistic entities oftentimes collide and compete. Like these other urban centers, Nashville is home to a variety of creatives. In contrast to many art communities, however, Nashville’s artists and arts-centric organizations embrace collaboration that fosters the growth of the city’s fine art scene. While our music community continues to attract national attention and acclaim for its collaborative spirit, several upcoming visual arts collaborations showcase what differentiates Nashville from other creative cities. In the next few months, Tinney Contemporary will collaborate with a variety of organizations and guests to expand the reach of Nashville’s visual arts community. In April, the gallery will partner with the Nashville Ballet on First Call, an event that will precede the Nashville Ballet’s performance of Carmina Burana at Tennessee Performing Arts Center, which is itself a collaboration. Tinney Contemporary artist Kuzana Ogg’s work will form an engaging backdrop for First Call with delicately layered paintings that feature drips, splashes, and abrasions to create an implied texture. The Nashville Ballet’s decision to hold Carmina Burana at 5th Avenue of the Arts’ partner Tennessee Performing Arts Center reinforces the collaborative spirit of 5th Avenue. In May and June, as part of its annual guest-curated exhibition, Tinney Contemporary has invited Brian Greif and Tova Lobatz, formerly of White Walls Gallery in San Francisco,

Kuzana Ogg, Maidyoshahem, 2015, Oil on Canvas, 36” x 60” x 1.5”

to collaborate with them and many of the city’s developers in welcoming a group of internationally renowned street artists to Nashville. Greif and Lobatz’s Tinney Contemporary exhibition will complement Greif’s citywide Nashville Walls project. In a city that continues to develop artistically, shows like this diversify artistic offerings and open up the community to a more modern, urban aesthetic. Greif plans to host a series of private events introducing these international street artists to collectors. Tinney Contemporary continues to foster these types of partnerships and welcomes new opportunities to engage the community. www.tinneycontemporary.com

5THAVEUNDERTHELIGHTS

BY SUSAN TINNEY | TINNEY CONTEMPORARY

Metro Arts Announces Learning Lab Artist Training Program Metro Arts is committed to investing in artists and believes that artistic excellence drives community excellence. Therefore, with funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Metro Arts will conduct an artist training program for emerging Nashville artists. The Learning Lab is for artists who are interested in bringing their creative practice into the public realm and engaging with community and neighborhoods in an authentic way. The training will explore civic, public, social, and placemaking practices, and the curriculum is designed and will be presented by national art leader and artist Michael Rohd of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice based in Chicago, the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville, and local subject matter experts. Metro Artsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Strategic Plan and Theory of Change gives the opportunity to reimagine public art as a tool for creative community investment, citizen engagement, and neighborhood redevelopment. Through this program, we hope to help artists deepen their knowledge around community-based work.

Artist Jamal Jenkins stands in front of his mural, part of The Norf Wall Fest, which consists of several large-scale murals that relate to pressing social issues like materialism and race and can be found at several locations throughout North Nashville.

Up to 25 Nashville-based artists will be selected through a competitive application process to participate in multiple training sessions throughout summer 2016. Artists who are selected and complete the Learning Lab program will

be eligible to compete for up to $5,000 of funding for the development and installation of a temporary neighborhoodbased public artwork. For more information about the program and how to apply, please visit www.nashville.gov/Arts-Commission/Learning-Lab.aspx.

PUBLICART

BY VAN GILL MARAVALLI, PUBLIC ART PROJECT COORDINATOR, METRO NASHVILLE ARTS COMMISSION

noraSTURGES

by Annie Stoppelbein

Fictional Spaces David Lusk Gallery Through March 26

Development, 2012, Oil on MDF, 8” x 9” 68 nashvillearts.com

“

Consistently small in dimension, Nora’s intimately scaled pieces invite the viewer to get up close and enter the painting. The scenes depict imaginary things and invented areas, sometimes appearing so remote they could conceivably be of another world.

Burning Cat Tree, 2015, Egg tempera on MDF, 7” x 6”

t present there are eighty-two people moving to Nashville each day. But Nora Sturges’s paintings in Fictional Spaces at David Lusk Gallery are devoid of the human figure. Though they are abandoned, to Nora her works are all about people. Traces of humanity are evident throughout, from the obvious trash left on the ground to a subtle look-out cabin, pushed to the back of an icy arctic-scape. These fictional scenes tell the story of what humans have left behind. The impact of humanity is immediately apparent, and it is somewhat unsettling to not see the culprit. They raise questions about the balance between humans and nature and what that looks like as we coexist. Nora says, “For me they connect to environmental issues, in America and beyond.” They draw attention to our innate desire to harness the resources around us. “Certainly mankind has damaged nature, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes through ignorance, sometimes selfishly. Our relationship with our environment is complicated and often contradictory.” Wigs half buried in snow, a space heater blasting near an unoccupied throne, and a remote development of bright-yellow buildings against a stark grey terrain are all part of this collection of fiction. There is strength in the simplicity of her work. The straight lines of man-made construction are softened by the smooth forms of natural growth. The vestiges of human inhabitants are humbled by nature. Planks of wood are a recurring image and a symbol of humanity’s manipulation of nature. Even Forest depicts flimsy trees, tied to the ground by humans.

69 nashvillearts.com

Signs, 2015, Egg tempera on MDF, 14” x 18”

Nora is a professor and head of Painting and Drawing at Towson University in Maryland. During the school year she paints as much as she can but finds that she is most creative during the summer months when she can work uninterrupted. Ideas come to her from every direction, even walking on her way to work. She has several “art heroes” but does not tie her work to any one art movement. “I feel lucky to be working today and have the whole of art history to draw from.” She regularly looks to the art of Giotto di Bondone for inspiration and uses his imagery to complement what she pulls from her imagination. Titles of Nora’s work make reference to the Italian Renaissance painter, and her tight brushstrokes mirror his style and technique. She sometimes uses egg tempera, a medium popular during the European Medieval and Early Renaissance period. It yields a smooth, seamless quality that supports a naturalistic effect. With her great attention to detail and elaborate imagination, Nora’s paintings expand on our notion of reality and humanity. Consistently small in dimension, Nora’s intimately scaled pieces invite the viewer to get up close and enter the painting. The scenes depict imaginary things and invented areas, sometimes appearing so remote they could conceivably be of another world. “So it seems appropriate that they be head-sized (almost a physical extension of the head) rather than body-sized,” Nora explains. There is no intended message, and the viewer is invited to discover their own meaning and connect to their own experience. Fictional Spaces delves into the many facets of the human condition, a subject which Nora will continue to explore. “I do think we are the most interesting animal.” na Fictional Spaces by Nora Sturges is on view at David Lusk Gallery through March 26. For more information, visit www.davidluskgallery.com. To see more of Nora’s work, visit www.norasturges.com.

70 nashvillearts.com

Throne, 2015, Egg tempera on MDF, 7” x 8”

Chance 020, 2015, Mixed media on canvas, 60” x 50”

KJ Schumacher Fragments and a Game of Chance David Lusk Gallery

Through March 19

David Lusk Gallery-Nashville presents its first solo exhibition of work by popular Nashville artist KJ Schumacher. Fragments and a Game of Chance showcases three related working processes pertaining to found mark manipulation. These works are about recycling marks, with the understanding that each mark is a singular building block within a process of creation. “Fragments and a Game of Chance speaks to the discovery of raw material (appropriation), the methodology of production (chance), and the spirit in which these things come together in the studio (the game),” says KJ Schumacher. “It’s hard for me to say which part is the most important because I consider the whole process to be organic. A fundamental belief in my work is that the physical mark holds an intrinsic importance in human experience.” The exhibit is comprised of three series: tape collages over photographs, chance-based paintings, and facsimile works. KJ continues by saying, “It was initially conceived as a new way to deal with found marks, but it developed into both a unique way of working in and of itself, as well as a springboard to other works.” Schumacher received a B.A. in Fine Art from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and studied at Parsons School of Design in Paris. He is currently engaged in an M.F.A. at the Transart Institute in New York and Berlin, to be completed in the summer of 2016. The exhibit will be open through March 19. David Lusk Gallery is located at 516 Hagan Street in Wedgewood/Houston. Gallery hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www.davidluskgallery.com.

New Abstract Paintings by Doris Wasserman Pop Rock Café | March 4–April 29

Hoot, Acrylic, graphite, charcoal, paper on Venetian plaster on canvas, 30” x 48”

by Jarred Johnson Pop Rock Café’s summer 2015 exhibition featuring the works of Nashville abstract artist Doris Wasserman was a huge success. Now, six months after that show’s closing, Pop Rock will host another Doris Wasserman exhibition with the artist’s new abstract paintings. Wasserman’s first art was representative. She translated medical procedures into accessible illustrations for patients at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Though her art is no longer representative, Wasserman feels she is still doing translation. “Abstract art is ideas you don’t know translated into the physical,” the artist said. She communicates her messages through a symbol system that she describes as “rooted in the past.” Wasserman paints with two brushes at a time, applying paint with one, removing it with another, building layers and scraping back into those layers. “Scraping is a natural instinct we have,” Wasserman said, speaking of a time she used a dime to scratch the walls of her childhood home. Wasserman’s waiflike pastel forms seem to suggest a relation— even a dialogue—between spiritual and corporeal realities. The artist hopes her works can spark this same type of dialogue among patrons. “In many cases, people interact with abstract art more than representative art,” the artist said. The venue certainly encourages this. Pop Rock is an alternative space—a coffee shop, café, and gallery in an eleven-story office tower on the Music Row Roundabout—that values a casual atmosphere and open conversations about art. Enjoy Doris Wasserman’s new paintings at Pop Rock from March 4–April 29 with openings on Friday, March 4, from 5 to 7 p.m. and Saturday, March 5, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. To see more of Doris Wasserman’s work, visit www.doriswasserman.com.

Arts Worth Watching

We’ll preview the last episode of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece during A Finale Affair at the Noah Liff Opera Center on Sunday afternoon, March 6. The event includes food and beverages, photo opportunities with life-sized cutouts of Downton Abbey characters, live music, and a trunk show by Fabu. There will also be a silent auction of items ranging from the character cutouts and castle backdrop to a Viking River Cruise. For more information about A Finale Affair, go to wnpt.org/afinale-affair. Tune in Sunday, March 6, at 8 p.m. for the conclusion of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece followed at 10 p.m. by BAFTA Celebrates Downton Abbey, a program of clips and cast interviews presented by the British Academy of Film and Television and Film Arts. Season 3 of Finding Your Roots also wraps up this month. On Tuesday, March 8, at 7 p.m., actors Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow learn how tragic deaths in their families shaped later generations in the season finale.

American Masters’ 30th season continues in March with another impressive music biography. Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl premieres Friday, March 4, at 8 p.m.—the day Lynn releases Full Circle (Legacy Recordings), her first studio album in a decade—with an encore presentation Wednesday, March 9, at 7 p.m. The numbers on Lynn’s career tell part of the story of how she became a cultural icon. She has sold more than 45 million records worldwide and been inducted into more music Halls of Fame than any female recording artist to date. Lynn is also the recipient of four Grammy Awards, a Kennedy Center Honors, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Lynn’s life story was the subject of Coal Miner’s Daughter, the Oscar-winning film based on Lynn’s 1975 autobiography of the same title and starring Sissy Spacek. This new documentary includes neverbefore-seen home movies, performances, and photos as well as footage of Lynn recording her new album with producer John Carter Cash at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville. There are also insightful interviews with Jack White (producer of Lynn’s Grammy-winning Van Lear Rose album), Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Reba McEntire, Miranda Lambert, and Bill Anderson.

Still of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

BONUS FOOTAGE David Bowie: Five Years looks at five points in the late musician’s career when he changed his music (and appearance), altering rock and pop music in the process. The documentary premieres Wednesday, March 16, at 8:30 p.m. and features unseen footage and interviews with a number of Bowie’s collaborators. na Make a donation to NPT this spring and see what programs bloom with your support. Simply go to www.wnpt.org and click the donate button or phone during our March Membership Campaign. Don’t forget to watch NPT2, our secondary channel, for encore presentations of many of our programs as well as other favorite shows.

For a number of years the Annie Moses Band headlined Lipscomb University’s Fourth of July celebration. Now the sibling band stars in The Art of the Love Song, a PBS special filmed at the Grand Ole Opry House last year and airing Thursday, March 10, at 7 p.m. In the show, the band performs classic love songs with the Summer Pops Young Artist Symphony, a group of talented young musicians who participate in the Annie Moses Band’s annual summer arts program. Downton Abbey on Masterpiece concludes March 6 on NPT

Mia Farrow 74 nashvillearts.com

Courtesy of © Studio Canal

THAT’S A WRAP

SOUNDS OF NASHVILLE

Courtesy of Mia Farrow

Spring is a time of renewal, but for fans of Downton Abbey it is also the time to say goodbye to some of the most beloved characters in public television. So we’re throwing a party!

75 nashvillearts.com

Photograph by Ron Manville

ANDSOITGOES BY RACHAEL McCAMPBELL

Rachael McCampbell is an artist, teacher, curator, and writer who resides in the small hamlet of Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee. For more about her, please visit www.rachaelmccampbell.com.

Miniature Portraits Are Back! ge or Ge ward Savage, Waterc o fter Ed l o r o n Ivo on a rine ngt shi , 2 ” Wa x1 .75 ”

Historically, miniature portraits sprang from the tradition of miniature illuminated manuscripts and were painted for the upper classes. Later, small portraits with braided hair, visible from the back side of the frame, were worn as remembrance lockets. But with the invention of daguerreotypes in the 19th century, the miniature portraitists all but faded away with a brief revival at the end of the 19th century. Since Brad paints entire portraits about the size of a quarter, a microscope is mandatory. Non-antique ivory is illegal to purchase, so he repurposes damaged portraits or paints on old piano keys. “Because of the slick substrate,” he said, “modeling is achieved by fine stippling or thin crosshatching—keeping in mind that leaving the ivory exposed helps the portrait glow. I paint with original Reeves 1790s watercolor cakes with gum arabic as binder. My palette is limited, as theirs was, using around five colors. Although you can use a razor to remove mistakes, for the most part, the medium and technique are very unforgiving.” And how does this fit in with the songwriting? “I need to be challenged creatively. A great songwriting mentor once told me the only way to get from writing bad songs to writing great ones is to write all the ones in between. I think maybe it’s the same with painting miniature portraits.” In a time when people crave the old fashioned ways, I suggested Brad bring the miniature portrait back in vogue. “I would love to paint commissions and even retire to Colonial Williamsburg and be the official miniature painter—complete with 18th-century costume.” na

ave you ever attended a party where a successful songwriter shares that he is a miniature portrait painter and restorer? Me neither. Painting miniature portraits is a lost art that does not come up in casual cocktail party conversation.

For more information, visit www.tbcportraitminiatures.com.

Brad Crisler, never formally trained in either art or music, is a renaissance man who picked cotton outside of Muscle Shoals to pay for his first keyboard, yet was a double major in finance and management in college. He later came to Nashville where he wrote hits for Brooks and Dunn, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, and Brett Eldredge, and penned the Southern anthem “Sweet Southern Comfort” for Buddy Jewell. But his passion for treasure hunting is what led him to the world of miniature portraits. After he unintentionally bought his first portrait as part of an antiques lot, he said, “I began to study ones painted from 1760–1845 in order to attribute them. Then, using their same materials, I began to paint my own.” Over the past four years, Brad has purchased and sold over 1,500 paintings, including some by renowned American masters. To educate himself, he has read treatises and correspondence between the portraitists about their process.

78 nashvillearts.com

Artist’s paint box from the 1790s

Opportunity Knocks at the Nashville Symphony Accelerando Initiative Speeding up Diversity and Opportunity by Jake Townsend

Set to launch in September 2016, Accelerando will engage students in grades 5â&#x20AC;&#x201C;11 over a multi-year period with extensive instruction, performance, and learning opportunities, and also counseling and assistance in applying for collegiate music programs. All services are provided free of charge to participating students. Students must fill out an application and perform a live audition, during which they will have ten minutes to demonstrate proficiency on their instrument before a panel of five symphony orchestra members. Accelerando seeks students with high levels of aptitude, family support, and musicianship. Though the deadline to apply is March 4, auditions will take place Saturday, March 12, noon to 6 p.m., at W.O. Smith Music School, 1125 8th Avenue South. Visit www.NashvilleSymphony.org/accelerando for complete information about the program, eligibility, and requirements for auditioning, along with application forms. The same information may be found in Spanish at www.NashvilleSymphony.org/accelerando-espanol.

Photography courtesy of Nashville Symphony

The Accelerando Initiativeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vision has finally been realized: a program for gifted young musicians from underserved communities who want a chance to make their dreams a reality. The Nashville Symphony values diversity in our nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s musicians and directors, and this initiative is their way of upholding that ideal. This past January, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the program a $959,000 grant, which will contribute to the instruments, lessons, and performance pathways provided to accepted students.

OPENSPACES

Words of War, Cindy Marsh and the Clarksville community

Photograph by Courtney Adair Johnson

Socially Engaged Art Cindy Marsh and the People’s Art of Printmaking Nashville, home of Hatch Show Print, now boasts several independent print shops and co-ops, so many, in fact, that they coordinate an annual print crawl. But long before Nashville’s printmaking renaissance took hold, Cindy Marsh was helping Clarksville locals to tell their stories with hand-carved wood letters and antique printing presses. The Austin Peay State University professor and former chair will retire in May, and the university featured a retrospective of her printmaking in January and February. But unlike many such exhibitions, the bulk of the artwork on display wasn’t made by Marsh, but by people young and old who have lived in Clarkesville in the last 18 years.

In 2009, teachers, students, and community members printed President Obama’s Inaugural Address on 100 white t-shirts and wore them around Clarksville. The shirts have shown around the country, strung up on clotheslines. Marsh went to libraries and senior centers and set type about where people were and what they were doing on 9/11. In spring 2015, students in the art department culled quotes from essays by veterans participating in Treatment Court. One reads, “What does the future hold for me? To be old & stupid or to be old & wise?” The projects invite people into conversations in a way that Marsh hopes opens up understanding between them.

Marsh’s work is as much social practice as it is art making. She travels around the city with a printing press and some of the 60,000 wood blocks that make up the Goldsmith Press & Rare Type Collection, the sale of which she coordinated for Austin Peay at the start of her tenure. Its bold, boxy letters recall everyday printmaking in the 1800s. “The collection we have of wood type doesn’t have fancy letters,” Marsh says. “It’s very pedestrian. I look at it as a further extension of the democratic process.” This idea is at the center of Marsh’s work—that every person has something to say and has the right to a public forum, and printmaking can create that forum anywhere.

“I believe in conversation, and I believe in people expressing their ideas,” Marsh says. “I feel like I’m a writer and a coordinator, creating an autobiography of this small town. I love that I’m part of that.” To learn more about Cindy Marsh and Goldsmith Press & Rare Type Collection, visit www.goldsmithpress.artapsu.com.

Erica Ciccarone is an independent writer. She holds an M.F.A. from the New School in Creative Writing. She blogs about art at nycnash.com.

Photograph by Courtney Adair Johnson

Photograph by Tony Youngblood

The dozens of projects Marsh and others of Austin Peay have organized range in subject matter. In 2003, she coordinated with the creative writing department on “Words of War,” in which community members from across the political spectrum considered the invasion of Iraq: What is a just war? What would you say to a young person who wants to join the military? What would you say to an elderly person who has served in the past? The project tapped into private, individual attitudes, and the resulting portfolio is a bi-partisan meditation not just on war, but on being American.

Narratives of Hope and Recovery, Cindy Marsh, people in the Veterans Treatment Court in Clarksville, and Austin Peay printmaking students

ARTSMART

A monthly guide to art education

STATE OF THE ARTS

“

Sonia Sanchez At press time, more than 20 young people have died via homicide in the last 12 months. Much of the violence is concentrated in communities with high rates of infant mortality and low rates of high school graduation; in neighborhoods where three jobs but no day care and no car is the norm. It is easy to stereotype this as the landscape of scarcity and rage; to extrapolate that the young people who grow up in these communities are prisoners of our own projections. But they are not. They are important and beautiful. They face something most of us do not; what author Ta-Nehisi Coates consistently describes in his work Between the World and Me as constant destruction of the body, a “lack of safety that cannot help but constrain your sense of the galaxy.” What drives through the weight of poverty? Of the violence that tumbles forth from systemic inequity? What has always been the root of reclaiming space and power? Words. Those who learn to use their words share anger and injustice and beauty and joy. Those who learn to weave prepositions and adjectives like bell hooks, such as James Baldwin and Kiki Roderiguez and Kendrick Lamar, turn their words into voice. Because words are free. They hurl insults or open minds. Melissa Gordon understands words; they are her currency. She is an author and performance artist and social worker. She has performed across the Southeast and internationally in Belize and Mexico. She’s taught creative writing at Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital Adolescent Unit and helped men and women with reentry from prison at Project Return, Inc. Her creative practice is the transformation of words, the transformation of lives.

Youth Violence Summit workshop at Rocketown

Boxing center, and Juvenile Court, Melissa dares kids living with daily violence to share their words. She has hosted three workshops and worked with dozens of students to create original word works—poems, stories, songs. In March, a handful of these kids will share their words about violence with others at the Mayor’s Youth Violence Summit while others will have their words featured in MTA buses as part of Poetry in Motion® during the month of April. She hopes the words will name the threats to the body, the opportunities for the soul. Words like church and iris and gun and sister and officer and neon and tomorrow. Melissa knows this might not stop the violence, but she just hopes we listen to the words.

Photograph by Jerry Atnip

Since January, she’s led the Youth Word Box project in partnership with Metro Arts and the Mayor’s Office of Community Engagement. Through a series of collection boxes and public prompts at eight Metro high schools, the Bridges Youth Program for Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Music City

Youth Violence Summit workshop at Rocketown

by Jennifer Cole Executive Director Metro Nashville Arts Commission

Photography by Lonnell Matthews

I don’t believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets Will echo me.

ARTSMART Teaching –The Best Job to Have Recently I was chatting with my first grade artists and a revolutionary notion for both them and myself occurred. It happened when I said, “On my way to work this morning . . . ” which was interrupted by a small voice asking, “Where do you work, Mrs. Stephens?” At first I laughed because the question caught me so off guard. “Here, sweetie! I work here!” I noticed that the other children looked just as perplexed as the inquirer. Suddenly a light bulb went on above one child’s head: “Guys! She DOES work here. She helps us make art!” Boy, am I glad these kids aren’t in charge of payroll. I shared this story with my colleagues because I thought it was funny yet strange. I mean, I’ve been hanging out in my art room doing this art teacherin’ thing for nearly 20 years. How could they not know that I’m their teacher and that’s my job? When I posed this question to one of my friends, she put it to me quite simply: They don’t think this is work for you because you are having so much fun. I thought back to that day, how the kids and I had been acting silly and laughing about something or another. So when I mentioned my “work,” of course they didn’t see what we were doing as anything other than pure fun.

Self-portraits by first grade students

But not all days in the art room are a barrel of laughs. Like the time a kid dropped a cup of dirty purple paint water that made such a splattery mess it looked like Barney the Talking Dinosaur had been slaughtered. Or the time I found the remains of a child’s clipped hair on a table and worried all night about the angry parent phone call I’d have to answer. It’s times like those that I think back to that little innocent first-grade conversation. And I remind myself that my “work” is to make art class not appear to be work at all but something creative, fun, happy, and exciting. And, seriously, doesn’t that sound like the best job to have?

Photograph by Juan Pont Lezica

Zailin Segoviano and Aeryn Hurt

by Cassie Stephens Art Teacher, Johnson Elementary

ARTSMART Words by Rebecca Pierce Photography by Tiffani Bing

MAPLEWOOD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS CHANGE PERCEPTIONS THROUGH ART

This Is Our War Exhibit at The Red Arrow Gallery If you don’t like the conversation, change it, and if you don’t like what people think of you, change their perceptions. That is exactly what Art Teacher Mike Mitchell and Dr. Ryan Jackson, Principal of the Academy of Energy and Power, at Maplewood High School are showing their students how to do through art. “Maplewood High School is in East Nashville, in an intense area of poverty, so there are mediocre to low expectations of our students, and we don’t buy into that,” explained Jackson. Last year, Jackson, Mitchell and their students worked on a project-based learning exercise to investigate what it would take to colonize Mars. Nashville designer Amanda Valentine joined in on the collaboration. “We had such success and realized increased innovation across curriculum. We created a whole-brain approach, and that motivated us to ask what’s next.”

matter for some time and has aggressively combined new media and conceptual work with her traditional practice. Her work with the students was done via Skype, but she was able to attend the opening of the exhibit when she came to Nashville as a Visiting Artist for the Vanderbilt Artist Lecture Series. The Red Arrow Gallery Director and Curator Katie Shaw and Communications Director Sara Paul serve on the advisory board for Maplewood’s Academy of Energy and Power. They worked with the entire team throughout the project and helped them create an exhibit, which opened February 13. The exhibition, This Is Our War, fills the entire gallery. Numerous paintings on paper and canvas ranging in size from six by six inches to six by six feet and larger line every wall of the gallery. Mahwish Chishty’s video installation Reaper is projected on an upper wall. On the floor is a very large tile installation in the shape of an RQ170 drone, which is the one Chishty most often uses as reference for imagery. The two- to four-inch tiles were donated by Turnip Green Creative Reuse and designed by the students. “I figured out that we could have the students do these individual pieces, and then we could put them together in community. I work with symbols so I wanted them to do

The two dynamic educators decided to do something with drones. According to Mitchell, the question that has driven their project has been: “In a world where perception can very well be reality, how can using a drone as an artistic tool help initiate a paradigm shift about the negative perceptions of not only drones but also the eclectic students who use them to create not destroy?” Two hundred students bought into the concept and the project. They made drawings about how they would modify a drone to make art and wrote about why using a drone to paint was different than painting by hand. A Donor’s Choose grant funded a brand new Parrot Bebop drone, and as soon as it arrived they started implementing their schematics. To achieve optimum results, they revised their techniques a number of times with input from each other and from New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz. During his research Mitchell discovered Mahwish Chishty, an adjunct professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was initially trained as a miniature painter from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan. She has been using drones as her subject

84 nashvillearts.com

Art teacher Mike Mitchell, visiting artist Mahwish Chishty, and student artist Ivory Shutes, III

ARTSMART something with iconography, something that spoke uniquely to them,” Chishty explained. According to Mitchell, this project gave students “a voice and a choice. It helped me to get across to the students that they can change the community’s perception of them, and thus Maplewood, through their actions. Every time they make a positive choice for themselves, it affects the whole school and what the community sees.”

Detail of the drone-shaped tile installation

This Is Our War remains on view at The Red Arrow Gallery, 919 Gallatin Avenue #4, through March 6. Nashville Arts Magazine will host a conversation with Mahwish Chishty on Saturday, March 5. For more information, visit www.theredarrowgallery.com.

Belmont’s 8th Annual Middle Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition Showcases Works by Young Talents Through March 18 the art department at Belmont University proudly presents the works of 190 budding artists from grades 6–12 across the region for the Middle Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition. The artists apply from public, private, and home-school backgrounds, and their submitted works are juried by a group which varies year to year in the categories of painting, sculpture, computer graphics, drawing, photography, ceramics, printmaking, mixed media, and video production. Katie Boatman, Director of Galleries and Exhibitions at Belmont who facilitated this year’s competition, says they “reach out to art teachers in Middle Tennessee through email, and the prospectus is posted online through the TAEA website (tnarteducation. org). Flyers are distributed directly to teachers at the TAEA state conference.” The teachers in turn encourage their students’ active participation, with a limit of 25 students entered per teacher. Students entering compete for scholarship monies in each category, with all best in category winners exhibiting at Belmont over the summer with East and West Tennessee regional winners. The jurors this year included Christine Rogers (Belmont University), James Dodson

(East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition Coordinator), Matthew Higdon (Belmont University student), Lauren Cochran (OZ Arts Nashville), and Megan Hardgrave (Watkins College of Art, Design & Film), with Boatman and Dr. Justin Makemson facilitating the jurying process. “The show includes works in a variety of media taking over the Leu Center for the Visual Arts’ Gallery 121 and lobby area,” says Boatman. “The exhibit was originally held in Dickson at the Renaissance Center. Last year, Belmont University had the fortunate opportunity to take over its care, and it has since been incorporated into Gallery 121’s annual schedule.” At a reception on February 25 at Leu Gallery, awards went to students Rachel Weaver (USN), Kathleen Collins (St. Cecilia), Sophia Lauer (Brentwood Academy), Ella Roche AnMei Little, Sorrow, Mixed media (Pope John Paul II), and Huy Nyugen Teacher: Andy King (Hillwood High). AnMei Little (Pope John School: Pope John Paul II Paul II) took Best of Show. Their works and many more can be seen at this remarkable show, now open at Belmont. Come see budding artists begin their careers and help support community talent. The prospectus for teachers is posted online at the TAEA website (www.tnarteducation.org). Any art educators interested in future participation may contact Katie Boatman, Director of Galleries and Exhibitions, at katie.boatman@belmont.edu for details.

85 nashvillearts.com

ARTSMART by DeeGee Lester

ON THE HORIZON

Scholastic Art American Vision Nominees On Saturday, February 6, Cheekwood hosted, for the 25th consecutive year, the Scholastic Art exhibition and awards ceremony. This year, 632 students from 40 public and private schools submitted 1,394 works of art in competition for gold, silver, and honorable mention awards in various artistic categories. The following five students also received nominations for the prestigious American Vision Award. Nashville Arts Magazine was proud to be a part of jurying this outstanding exhibition.

Will Burruss, Argile D’orange, Ceramics & Glass Friendship Christian School The artistic technique is called trompe-l’oeil, meaning “fools the eye,” and in the creative hands of Will Burruss, a senior at Friendship Christian School, a ceramic orange can look so realistic and succulent the viewer expects juice to squirt out. Argile D’orange, the first ceramic piece ever created by Burruss, captured a Gold Award and American Vision nomination. “It took about a week to create [the piece],” Burruss says. “I started with one circular hollow ball (to avoid explosion in the kiln) and a second piece of clay rolled out like dough and pulled up around it for the outer skin. I thought it would be cool to peel back the top of the skin to reveal the orange inside and make it look real.” Hannah Chen, Woman, Painting Hume Fogg High Academic Magnet When Hume Fogg freshman Hannah Chen submitted her painting Woman to the Scholastic Art competition, she never imagined it would grace the front cover of the printed awards program.

It was the first-ever submission to the prestigious competition for the second-year art student. “I was shocked and didn’t expect to win,” he says. “When I got here, I realized [a Scholastic Arts win] was a pretty big deal.” Burruss plans to combine creativity and math skills in pursuit of a degree in architecture at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

While she enjoys both still life and portraits, she prefers the challenge of portrait painting and the slow dry time of oils. “It makes working in oils more relaxing, and you can take your time,” she says. “With portraits, you really have to pay attention to the person’s features and get the variations of colors in the skin right. Right now, I’m focusing on those details, but you also have to try to capture the expression in the face and eyes.” As she considers the next three years of high school at Hume Fogg Academic Magnet, Gold Award winner and American Vision nominee Chen is excited about pursuing her art and submitting to future competitions. “It’s fun to get your work out there and let people see it.”

American Vision Nominees Ingrid Komisar, Will Burruss, Hannah Chen and Erin Riley (not shown Priya Patel)

Photograph by Tiffani Bing

“I just found out the day before the ceremony that my painting (as an American Vision nominee) would be featured on the program cover, but I didn’t realize my painting would be the whole front cover! I was really surprised, really happy,” Chen admits.

ARTSMART

Erin Riley, Just a Scratch, Drawing & Illustration University School of Nashville An artist’s tool as simple as a graphite pencil can be a powerful device for showing larger truths. Erin Riley’s Gold Award and American Vision nominee Just a Scratch startles the viewer with a black-and-white image of a teen’s battered face contrasted with his resolute pride not to show pain or fear. Although she has taken art throughout her high school years, this, along with a second piece, was Riley’s first-ever submission to the Scholastic Arts Competition and part of a series focusing on abuse, created by the University School of Nashville senior who is looking at a possible English/Art double major in college. In the tradition “no model was injured in the making of the art,” Riley says makeup was applied to a friend for the proper effects. “I wanted the title of the piece to drive home the concept of how men, when abused, often try to hide their pain or make it seem like it is no big deal,” Riley says. “The use of the pencils gives more emphasis and a harsh, rough edge that I wanted to convey. Sometimes the use of color can take away from the message.”

Priya Patel, Imprisoned, Drawing & Illustration The Harpeth Hall School Sometimes art can become the voice of the voiceless. That is the power and impact of the drawing by Harpeth Hall senior Priya Patel, winner of a Gold Award and American Vision nomination. The blank gazes and haunting expressions of the three imprisoned men speak volumes for the imprisoned throughout history— slavery, the Holocaust, or, as in the case of the central figure (Hitler), imprisoned by hate, ignorance, and bigotry. “I originally pursued the subject of imprisonment for my senior APR concentration theme, which has since changed,” Patel says. “I think imprisonment includes efforts to silence the voices of others in any way, including bullying and physical abuse, and is an important theme today. But the effort to silence their voices can make them stronger and gathers people around them who will speak up. I feel like the contrast of the black litho crayon with the white affects the piece and makes it stronger by reflecting the black and white of the prison uniforms and the bars and empty spaces of the prison.” Although she has not yet made her college selection, Patel believes a business major, combined with the creativity of a minor in art, will prepare her to contribute innovative ideas in the business world.

The photographer’s eye sees the world differently. As part of her photo series Things That Don’t Belong, Ingrid Komisar’s intriguing image Knee Deep captured a Gold Award and American Vision nomination, while three other submissions by the University School of Nashville senior captured a Silver Award and two Honorable Mentions. Visually beautiful, Knee Deep pulls the viewer’s eye to the delicate lace hem of a model’s blouse poised over the waters of Radnor Lake. “The series of photos focuses on things you normally would not see—the odd juxtaposition of a fish in the bathtub, a pineapple in a pool, or celery emerging from a cigarette pack.” Participation in Scholastic Arts since the eighth grade is just one more example of Komisar’s devotion to her future career as a photographer. It’s a future she’s not willing to delay. As a high school sophomore, she started her own business and marketing website, www.ingridkomisarphotography.com, and began networking and securing an internship with a California fashion photographer, which she completed last summer, giving her the opportunity to experience both the creative and the business side of fashion photography. Her plans include college and a career as a fashion photographer, but she is already living that future. Ingrid Komisar, Knee Deep, Photography University School of Nashville

La Ciudad de la Música: Mexican Music Invades Nashville It all started January 29 in a concert by the Nashville Symphony at Schermerhorn, where Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá was a highlight in a program predominantly devoted to film music. The piece is quite reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky’s primitivism and features a rhythm that Revueltas derived from an Afro-Cuban chant, deploying it in intense and largely unusual meters. These are set against an interesting orchestration, quite heavy on the brass, suggesting a primal Mayan civilization. In their performance, the NSO’s brass performed admirably, bringing much excitement to the score. Having acquired a beachhead at the center of Music City’s classical culture, the Mexican artistic invasion continued across town at Casa Azafrán, with Intersection’s second concert of the season, titled Mariachi–A Family Concert. This concert featured compositions from two 20th-century Mexican composers, Revueltas’s Homenaje a Federico García Lorca and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez’s M.E. in Memoriam, as well as a Mariachi-inspired premiere from contemporary composer Cristina Spinei titled New Work (2016). Between these performances were bi-lingual introductions to Mexican culture and Mariachi music presented by the vibrant Mariachi Internacional de Glencliff H.S. and its director, Gabriela Fuentes. Intersection’s family concert format is fun. The instrument workshops, speaking instruments (petulant violins and introverted oboes), and all the children in the audience make for an enjoyable and refreshing concert experience. In performance, the Revueltas, especially in the faster, outer movements, was brought off very well. The slower inner movement, however, with its mournful trumpet melody, required the patience of a parent. It was difficult to tune out the distractions of the youthful audience in order to hear this beautiful but rarely performed masterpiece—this was, after all, a family concert. Speaking of families, father and son trumpeters Jeff and Preston Bailey (a Nashville institution) deserve special mention for their performance here and the night before at the Schermerhorn. The highlight for the audience, apart from the absolutely marvelous “La Bamba” and the lyrical and beautiful “El Rey” performed by the Mariachi Internacional, was Spinei’s New Work. Set in a much more accessible minimalist language, her work seemed to enchant the entire audience—an audience made up of Intersection’s regular fans, their children, and the parents of the many high-school kids in the Mariachi ensemble. It is extraordinary that Intersection has found a way to grow its audience and celebrate diversity within the setting of a classical music concert. ¡Muy bien! For more about Intersection, visit www.intersectionmusic.org.

SOUNDINGOFF

Photograph by Alex Ferrari

BY JOSEPH E. MORGAN

Glorious Jumble: Conversations with Nature and Thoreau in Billy Renkl’s Field Notebook

by Megan Kelley

Cumberland Gallery through April 9

lowers erupt into anatomical hearts; hands are mechanical explorations of the skeletal frame, questioning the conditions of humanity; tight diagrams of fruit and flora are freed from human order and reconsidered in a riot of growth across a field of mineral pigments. The works of Billy Renkl shift the viewer from the structure of the everyday and lead them instead into a clearing of quiet, sensitive collage works whose contents are both universally felt and deeply personal. As a conversation between Renkl and the journals of Henry David Thoreau, the works form point and counterpoint, explanation and exclamation to the ideas Thoreau explored over nearly thirty years. “I expected to find in his journal big ideas with which to think about the troubles that face our world. Instead, I found intimate ideas that pertained to my own life and work. “The works in this show are inspired by the private language Thoreau used when talking to himself,” Renkl explains, “the vital and fierce interest in which Thoreau approached something as simple as watching a turtle sun itself on a sunny afternoon.” Thoreau’s openness to wonder is reflected in Renkl’s visual engagements, in which a similar process of observation, October 11, 1840: mechanics in the hand (second version), 2016, Collage, 12” x 9” curiosity, and intention is fundamental to the vitality of the collage itself: Renkl harvests his images from a variety of sources in antique and found papers. His visual elements pull from a surplus of botanical images for their illustrative nature, planting them within base papers whose origins are diverse as reclaimed maps, baptismal certificates from Budapest, or legal

90 nashvillearts.com

manuscripts from Basel. Choosing what to work with becomes an intuitive, open-ended process, one that responds as much to the tactile possibilities of the material as it does to the literary content that serves as duet. “A guiding principle for me is that I must acknowledge the previous life of the collage element—I can October 10, 1851: as if they were newly blossoming, 2014, Gouache, acrylic, watercolor, and shellac with gold leaf, 20” x 18” cooperate with it or I can contradict it, but I have to respectfully acknowledge it.” The collaged materials sometimes then stand on their own or may evolve through the rampant growth of gouache markmaking, gold leaf, mineral pigments, or shellac. The result becomes a poetic and restrained edit, engaging the nuance and specificity of borrowed image in the expressive context of the contemporary visualist. “These botanical images were originally intended to be carefully objective. Liberated from that context, though, they are free to do other things, be evocative of something more than a rational description.”

July 16, Wednesday, 1851: I was all alive, 2014, Collage on found paper, 18” x 12”

The works form a series of considerations, small moments that build into a larger chapter: a process of assembly that relies as much on instinct and atmosphere as it does structural elements and composition. Renkl’s process “echoes how poets use language,” combining visual phrases in ways that open up specific meaning and carry it into the realm of ambiguous memory and personal connection. “Collage often works by metaphor, and those are most exciting when they operate with reciprocity. To say a tree is a river (as Thoreau did on July 25, 1838) tells us something about trees and about rivers.”

Billy Renkl’s Field Notebook is on view from February 27 through April 9 at Cumberland Gallery, located at 4107 Hillsboro Circle, Nashville, TN 37215. View the work from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, or visit online at www.cumberlandgallery.com. View more of Renkl’s works online at www.billyrenkl.com.

91 nashvillearts.com

August 19, 1851: no sooner grown, 2014, Collage with cyanotype and watercolor on found manuscript, 12” x 8” Photograph by Greg Sand

Renkl acknowledges Thoreau’s own uniquely expressive style as a writer—“Thoreau operated at a perfect place: the intersection of science and poetry”—and how this authentic, characteristic voice lends itself to his own understanding of the naturalist’s work. Rather than mere illustration, however, Renkl’s process is closer to “a correspondence.” Phrased in clippings of images of grass or diagrams, and daubed with embellishments and notations, the pages serve to intimately converse Renkl’s own observations with the thoughts Thoreau recorded. “It was as if Henry sent me a letter, and after thinking about it, this is my letter back.” na

Billy Renkl in his studio

POET’SCORNER ARNE WEINGART

Nashville native Arne Weingart has been awarded the New American Press Poetry Prize for his debut collection, Levitation for Agnostics. Levitation for Agnostics has received high praise from Academy of American Poets award winner Jillian Weise and numerous other acclaimed poets. It represents over 40 years of work by poet Arne Weingart, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2013 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Poetry Contest.

Giacometti Nail I found you under some gravel I was raking into something less unlevel than gravity demands a tenpenny nail eaten away at by what you no longer hold together not one smooth circular surface remains only a near infinite set of ridges and planes and sometimes nearly nothing connecting you to yourself the only thing inarguably left is a kind of nailish intent a proposition about what it might mean to be a nail although it’s clear

meeting with a hammer you have become merely beautiful absolutely essential completely useless this is what I want to be

Photograph by Jerry Atnip

you wouldn’t survive another

Anne Brown and Frank Conner at The Arts Company

ARTSEE

Photography courtesy of The Frist Mandy and Marcus Floyd and Suzanne Kessler at The Frist

Dr. Susan H. Edwards, Carlos Fitz-James Stuart, the 19th Duke of Alba and Jack F. Stringham II at The Frist

Photography courtesy of The Frist

Clayton Weber, Donna Glassford, Ellen Pryor and Doug Regen at The Arts Company

Photograph by Tiffani Bing

A & G Chairmen, Amy Liz Riddick and Elizabeth Coble

Photograph by Madge Franklin

Debbie Best, Kate Ezell, Jane MacLeod at The Antiques & Garden Show

ARTSEE

Tina and Coby Esponge at Corvidae Collective Amelia Lant, Hannah Keith at The Arts Company

Michael Aurbach and students at Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery

At Tinney Contemporary

Jane Braddock at Tinney Contemporary

Bridget Berger at Julia Martin Gallery

Carissa Riccardi, Harper Riccardi-Dennis, Chris Allen at The Rymer Gallery

At Zeitgeist Gallery

Jesus Vip at Mickenzie Smith Studio and Gallery

At COOP Gallery

Heather Hartman at Channel to Channel

At 444 Humphreys Pop Up and Galleries

Dana Olsen Pettit, Heather LeRoy at Fort Houston

PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN JACKSON

ARTSEE

At Julia Martin Gallery

ARTSEE

Zeryus Hall at Tinney Contemporary

Gabriel Greenlow, Natalie Novak at Fort Houston Robert Morgan at The Arts Company

At Ground Floor Gallery

Bobby Calabrese at David Lusk Gallery

Mickenzie Smith at Mickenzie Smith Studio and Gallery

Photograph by Ron Manville Photograph by Jerry Atnip

APPRAISEIT BY LINDA DYER

inner D g n i e Com m o H

Linda Dyer serves as an appraiser, broker, and consultant in the field of antiques and fine art. She has appeared on the PBS production Antiques Roadshow since season one, which aired in 1997, as an appraiser of Tribal Arts. If you would like Linda to consider appraising one of your antiques, send a clear, detailed image to info@nashvillearts.com. Or send photo to Antiques, Nashville Arts Magazine, 644 West Iris Dr., Nashville, TN 37204.

– Box k r o Y ”D , Newx 5 ¼” W x 2 ½ e r o m e Bilt gilt paper, ¾” H h T , 14 al, 7, 19 Wood, met h c r Ma reaching the West Coast, the players, accompanied by promotors, a few wives, and the press, set sail to demonstrate their athletic talents in 13 nations and travel over 30,000 miles, mostly by water and rail.

actually found this object in a Tucson thrift shop, cost three dollars and purchased with no particular reason in mind. It had a certain charm and could make a cool gift box or package decoration for a baseball-loving friend.

The tour’s first stop on foreign soil would be in Tokyo, and, going from east to west, the last one would be in London. In between, the travelers would visit cities in China, the Philippines, Egypt, Ceylon, France, and other countries with at least a basic ballfield, playing exhibition games against local teams and against each other.

It has remained with similarly sourced items, all gathered with the same general lack of intention. Then a purging binge took hold; it reappeared, and my history detective kicked in.

The baseballers were very well received along their way. At that last stop on the tour, the Sox defeated the Giants 5 to 4 in 11 innings in front of 20,000 spectators, including King George V.

Well, what a story it tells. It is a memento from a dinner held in 1914. The box, which once held cigars, was one of those given as favors to approximately 600 men in attendance at a black-tie event that celebrated the culmination of an international professional baseball tour that featured the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox.

They headed home on February 28 in style—aboard the Lusitania—and a banquet welcoming the players home was held at New York City’s opulent Biltmore Hotel on March 7.

The tour, a marketing opportunity packaged under the guise of a celebration of American baseball, was the brainchild of the New York Giants’ John “Mugsy” McGraw and Charles Comiskey, then owner of the Chicago White Sox.

There is a photograph that can be found on the Internet of that evening, black-tie attendees standing in the dining hall, all facing the camera. Showing approximately 600 men, the photo is captioned “Dinner In Celebration Of The Home Coming Of The World’s Tour Players, Hotel Biltmore, March 7, 1914, Players & Baseball Men.”

It would begin as a barn-storming trek across the country right after the 1913 World Series. The tour roster was augmented from the start with additional players—Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson, and Jim Thorpe, to name just a few.

I was able to find another box, in lesser condition, that sold at auction. Its hammer price was $400. That comparable would put a pre-sale estimate on this box at $400 to $600. There are plenty of baseball metaphors for this find, and I will be rethinking its future place. na

The 27-city American leg of the tour alone drew 100,000 fans as the teams played 31 games in 34 days. Upon

96 nashvillearts.com

To wear, or not to wear . . . I’ve never been big on clothes. I’m not talking about fashion here. But clothes. The things that cover our bodies. I am especially leery of clothes that constrict in any way. When I was a child growing up in South Carolina, a print of Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women hung on the wall in our breakfast room. Bare-breasted women holding mango blossoms? On a remote island in Tahiti? My five-year-old mind took careful note. About that same time, my grandfather had begun taking home movies. In one, my sister Mary and I are positioned together in brand new, matching, two-piece sun suits. Mary poses like a model, while smiling at the camera, looking happy as can be. I, on the other hand, look miserable, as I scowl at the assembled adults, while trying with all my might to pull the bottom of my sun suit down. The elastic in the waist band was annoying me no end. Perhaps that sun suit is to blame, but the truth is . . . I haven’t owned a swim suit in over thirty-five years. One time I was at Pawley’s Island with three women I grew up with in South Carolina. This was in 1991. The four of us were staying at Snug Harbor, a rambling old beach house owned for generations by the Harrelson family from Sumter. Lucy Harrelson was our host. While there, I had taken to nude sunbathing every afternoon on a second-floor deck that faced the ocean. To ensure privacy, I draped a couple of bedspreads along the railing that faced the house next door. Okay. So one afternoon I’m lying there in a state of bliss, soaking up the sun’s rays, when suddenly my reverie is shattered by the voice of an angry woman yelling at the top of her lungs—PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!!! When I told Lucy what had happened, she immediately went up to the deck and removed her bathing suit top, then proceeded to vigorously shake her ample bosoms at the house next door. “Damn renters!” she spat under her breath. I recently played a nun in a movie called Novitiate. My character is Sister Louisa, an older nun who loses her mind, then walks naked through the refectory where all the other nuns are having dinner. “Please make way for my untouched, virginal body!” Sister Louisa shouts, as diners gasp, giggle, and cross themselves. A part of me was waiting for someone to yell, PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!!!, but it never happened. na Marshall Chapman is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter, author, and actress. For more information, visit www.tallgirl.com.

BEYONDWORDS

Photograph by Anthony Scarlati

BY MARSHALL CHAPMAN

MYFAVORITEPAINTING LESLIE B. JONES CHEEKWOOD | VICE PRESIDENT OF MUSEUM AFFAIRS & CURATOR OF DECORATIVE ARTS

ARTIST BIO: John Singer Sargent John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) is considered one of America’s greatest painters; however, Sargent was not born in the United States. His parents, Mary and Fitzwilliam Sargent, set off on an extended European vacation in 1854, but along the way they decided to stay indefinitely. Their son, John Singer, was born in Florence in 1856. Surrounded by a culture saturated in art and by artists, Sargent took to painting at an early age. He studied in Florence and later Paris, where he was under the instruction of Carolus-Duran—a revered French painter. With Duran’s instruction, Sargent honed his skills and garnered great attention. Sargent’s career blossomed as a highly soughtafter portrait artist beginning in the 1880s, and he went on to receive major commissions, including the official portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. On a personal level, Sargent found great joy in painting places and spent a considerable amount of time traveling around the world to do so. John Singer Sargent spent the majority of his adult life in London, where he passed away in 1925. John Singer Sargent, Falconieri Gardens, Frascati, 1907, Oil on canvas, 21”x 28”

Since my very first encounter with the work of John Singer Sargent, he has

Photograph by John Jackson

remained, to my mind, the unquestionable champion of the canvas. I have been favorably overexposed to his work as a portrait artist and his landscape studies, but I was unfamiliar with Falconieri Gardens, Frascati until 2015 when I arrived at Cheekwood. In acquainting myself with the institution, I surveyed the permanent collection and came across this work by Sargent in our paintings division: a trisect composition of a garden located outside of Rome. The coordination of colors creates a palpable evening atmosphere in Falconieri Gardens, Frascati. Sargent draws the viewer down the right side of the composition with a Cypress-lined, lush green pathway while also luring one’s attention to a discrete spouting fountain located in the left middle ground. Before long, one can feel the warmth of the descending sun dissipate and the soft repetitive sound of falling water harmonizing with the rustle of trees as night falls. As a master of the impressionistic style, Sargent transcends in this painting the action of simply mimicking a view; he evokes an environmental experience. The capturing of hues and tones by paint is complemented and enhanced by the atmospheric sensations Sargent employs in every brush stroke. What more could one ask for from a painting? I am very pleased that this work is in the Cheekwood Permanent Collection, and I look forward to sharing it with visitors as part of the American Artists at Home and Abroad exhibit, opening summer of 2016. na

98 nashvillearts.com

Leslie B. Jones

99 nashvillearts.com

100 nashvillearts.com