MarÃa Magdalena CAMPOS-PONS Richard GREATHOUSE Matthew RYAN Harry WHITVER J. Todd GREENE Karen SEAPKER
SMILE Debuted Statewide in Nashville New and Minimally-invasive Surgery for Myopia (Nearsightedness) is First Major Advance in LASIK Technology in 25 Years, Reducing Dependence on Glasses and Contacts which causes the corneal shape to change, permanently changing the prescription. SMILE has a proven track record of success. It has been used internationally since 2011 and more than 750,000 procedures have been performed worldwide. Dr. Wang noted that currently, the procedure has not been approved to treat large amounts of astigmatism and cannot treat farsightedness and that LASIK is still a better option for a majority of the patients seeking laser vision correction.
The first major advance in LASIK technology in 25 years, the SMILE procedure, was performed in Nashville recently at Wang Vision 3D Cataract & LASIK Center by its director, internationally renowned ophthalmologist Dr. Ming Wang, Harvard & MIYT (MD, magna cum laude); PhD (laser physics). “We are extremely very excited to be the first again to introduce the next generation laser correction procedure to the state, helping out patients with this new and minimally invasive procedure,” said Dr. Wang. Myopia is a common eye condition in which close objects can be seen clearly but distant objects are blurry without correction. LASIK and PRK have been the main stay treatments for myopia for over two decades. But SMILE, which stands for SMall Incision Lenticule Extraction, has unique advantages over LASIK. The SMILE surgery is minimally invasive as the surgeon needs only to create a small, precise opening to correct vision. No flap is needed. The laser incision is smaller than 5 millimeters for SMILE, compared to approximately 20 millimeters for LASIK. This helps the cornea to retain more of its natural strength and reduces
the risk of rare flap complications. Dry eye after SMILE is also reduced compared with LASIK, as nerves responsible for tear production during the cornea remain more intact in SMILE. One of the state’s first SMILE patients was Margaret Coleman, 34, a manager of the world-famous Bluebird Café, in Nashville, which was prominently featured in the ABC TV drama Nashville, among others. Ms. Coleman has had poor eyesight all of her life, legally blind in both eyes without correction. Ms. Coleman’s 3D Laser SMILE procedure went beautifully and she is thrilled to have her crystal clear new vision and newly gained independence on glasses or contacts and being one of the first patients in the state to receive SMILE! “I am so happy!!!” exclaimed Margaret at her postop visit. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the VisuMax Femtosecond Laser for SMILE procedure for -1 to -8 D myopia with up to 0.5D astigmatism. During a SMILE procedure, a femtosecond laser with precise short pulses is used to make small incision in the cornea to create a discshaped piece of tissue. This tissue is then removed by the surgeon though the opening
Dr. Ming Wang, a Harvard & MIT graduate (MD, magna cum laude), is the CEO of Aier-USA, Director of Wang Vision 3D Cataract & LASIK Center and one of the few laser eye surgeons in the world today who holds a doctorate degree in laser physics. He has performed over 55,000 procedures, including on over 4,000 doctors. Dr. Wang published 8 textbooks and a paper in the world-renowned journal Nature, holds several US patents and performed the world’s first laser-assisted artificial cornea implantation. He established a 501c(3) non-profit charity, Wang Foundation for Sight Restoration, which to date has helped patients from more than 40 states in the U.S. and 55 countries, with all sight restoration surgeries performed free-of-charge. Dr. Wang is the Kiwanis Nashvillian of the Year. Dr. Ming Wang can be reached at: Wang Vision 3D Cataract & LASIK Center, 1801 West End Ave, Ste 1150 Nashville, TN 37203, 615-321-8881 drwang@wangvisioninstitute.com www.wangcataractLASIK.com
THE RYMER GALLERY presents
Nashville Street Artists: Local Walls to Canvas
MOBE, Fireflies, oil on canvas, 20” x 40”
February 1–28, 2018 The Rymer Gallery / 233 Fifth Avenue / Nashville 37219 / 615.752.6030 / www.therymergallery.com
5 T H AV E N U E O F T H E A R T S DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE
PUBLISHED BY THE ST. CLAIRE MEDIA GROUP
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Columns HUNTER ARMISTEAD FYEye MARSHALL CHAPMAN Beyond Words ERICA CICCARONE Open Spaces LINDA DYER Appraise It RACHAEL MCCAMPBELL And So It Goes JOSEPH E. MORGAN Sounding Off ANNE POPE Tennessee Roundup JIM REYLAND Theatre Correspondent MARK W. SCALA As I See It LIZ CLAYTON SCOFIELD Pocket Lint
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 $6.65 a copy. Email: All email addresses consist of the employee’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 credit card number.
TINNEY CONTEMPORARY
©Carol Mode
SEQU ENC ES NEW WORK BY CAROL MODE January 6 - February 10, 2018
237 5th Ave N . Nashville 37219 . 615.255.7816 . tinneycontemporary.com
5 T H AV E N U E O F T H E A R T S DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE
HISTORY EMBR ACING A RT
Oil on copper
G L E N DA
B ROWN
top: Standing Tall, 24” x 36”; bottom left: Copper Valley, 16” x 20”; bottom right: Another Road, 14.5” x 17.5”
202 2nd Ave. South, Franklin, TN 37064
•
www.gallery202art.com
•
615-472-1134
THE
arts
COMPANY
“Soldiers Outside a Cabaret” from Paris at Night Series, 1945 from The Ed Clark Collection
FRESH. ORIGINAL. CONTEMPORARY.
MASTERS OF LIGHT Three Never-Before-Shown Series by Ed Clark Also featuring photography by Bill Steber & Don Dudenbostel
February 3-22
2 15 5th Ave of the Arts N. Nashville, TN 37219 • 615.254.2040 • theartscompany.com
5 TH A V EN UE OF T H E A RT S • DO W N T O W N N A S H VI L L E
On the Cover María Magdalena Campos-Pons
February 2018 Features
86 Sentinels Karen Seapker’s Guardians in Painting
28 LORI PUTNAM Across the Board
90 Nashville Nights A Photographic Essay
33 Violins of Hope Historic Violins Give Voice to a Generation Lost in the Holocaust
118 Snapshot Warhol’s Life and Work at Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
36 New Modernism: Carol Saffell
28 40
46
Warrior Reservoir (detail), 2011, Watercolor and ink on cotton fiber and amate (bark) paper with African totems, 96” x 144” See page 54.
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40 Cynthia Brewer Timeless Wearable Art 44 Q&A with Milton White Fashion Editor, Stylist, Dog Dad, and a million other things
Columns
46 Richard Greathouse Connecting Across Time
24 Fresh Paint Barry Buxkamper
54
32 The Bookmark Hot Books and Cool Reads
María Magdalena Campos-Pons Through the Fire Internationally Acclaimed Artist Puts Down Roots in Nashville
54
16 Crawl Guide
70 Arts & Business Council 84 And So It Goes by Rachael McCampbell 98 Pocket Lint by Liz Clayton Scofield 100 Art Smart by Rebecca Pierce
66 Matthew Ryan Feels Like Rain 72 Voluntary Disorientation Harry Whitver at abrasiveMedia
72
104 Studio Tenn 105 Poet’s Corner 106 Theatre by Jim Reyland 107 Sounding Off by Joseph E. Morgan 110 ArtSee
78
112 FYEye by Hunter Armistead 114 NPT 78 J. Todd Greene In the Future, Everything Is Free
121 Beyond Words by Marshall Chapman 122 My Favorite Painting
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KIRTLAND RESIDENCES - 4 GATED HOMES - IN GREEN HILLS
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LAURA BAUGH 615.330.3051
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CHERYL FLEMING 615.202.4466
GOVERNORS CLUB ON THE GOLF COURSE
28 GOVERNORS WAY | $3,999,000 Stunning estate on 18th Fairway. Open floorplan. Beautiful hardwood floors. Outdoor living with gunite pool, hot tub and kitchen. Theatre. Billiard. Safe room.
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291 JONES PARKWAY | $3,750,000 European style home on private lot. Cooks kitchen with Calcutta Gold marble. Walnut hardwoods, theater, resort pool with slide, cabana, outdoor kitchen, fireplace & bath.
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LAURA BAUGH 615.330.3051(M) | 615.250.7880 (O) LAURABAUGH3@GMAIL.COM
A Fine-Artisan Gallery Located in the Historic Village of Leiper’s Fork, TN 4136 Old Hillsboro Road 37064 www.thecopperfoxgallery.com (615) 861-6769
YORK & Friends fine art
KoAloha
JADE REYNOLDS
Valentine Special $1,055
Concert Ukelele
Nashville • Memphis
PhotoArt 707 Online PhotoArt Gallery Unique Market Place
Fine Art Photography Digital PopArt Exquisite Product Lines Free Domestic Shipping
www.photoart707.com 615-787-7071 Model KCM-00C
Factory Authorized Dealer
Best Friends, Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 36”
A fresh approach to buying original art online.
Family Portrait, Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 36”
107 Harding Place • Tues-Sat 10-5 615.352.3316 • yorkandfriends@att.net www.yorkandfriends.com Follow us on
at York & Friends Fine Art
nashville.artistcollectives.org
BENNETT GALLERIES introducing
Stephanie Ho Frozen Planet 52 oil on linen 27 1/2” x 39 1/2”
2104 Crestmoor Road in Green Hills, Nashville, TN 37215 Hours: Mon-Fri 9:30 to 5:30 • Sat 9:30 to 5:00 Phone: 615-297-3201 • www.bennettgalleriesnashville.com
Jennie Schut, Williamson County Archives
Franklin Art Scene
Buddy Jackson, O’More College of Design
Friday, February 2, from 6 until 9 p.m. Experience historic downtown Franklin and see a variety of art during the Franklin Art Scene. Enjoy an opening reception for What’s Love Got to Do with It!, a collection of artistic interpretations, at O’More College of Design’s Robert Moore Gallery. Co-curated by art consultant Sara Lee Burd, Doug Regen of O’More, and Paul Polycarpou of Nashville Arts Magazine, the show features work by Andee Rudloff, Ashley Doggett, Delia Seigenthaler, Emily Holt, Greg Decker, Brenda Stein, Buddy Jackson, John Jackson, Julia Martin, Marleen De Waele-De Bock, Mary Mooney, Britt Stadig, Jack Spencer, McLean Fahnestock, Liz Clayton Scofield, Lanie Gannon, and Vadis Turner. Poetry reading will be provided by Southern Word. CJ’s Off the Square is exhibiting abstract paintings by Jason Carter, whose current series entitled Aplomb explores the complicated nature of humanity and the transition from brokenness to healing. Academy Park Enrichment and Performing Arts Center is featuring large-format expressionistic paintings by Jude Remédios. Historic Franklin Presbyterian Church is showcasing mixedmedia work by Carey Haynes. Moyer Financial Services is hosting artist Amber Franklin. At Imaginebox Emporium see paintings by Cory Basil as well as sculpture and prints. Savory Spice Shop is presenting paintings by Southern artist Tifny Miller. Work by Cody Taylor is on view at Bagbey House. Jennie Schut is showing at Williamson County Archives. For more information and the trolley schedule, please visit www.downtownfranklintn.com/the-franklin-art-scene.
First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown
Saturday, February 3, from 6 until 9 p.m. Enjoy an evening of art under the lights on 5th Avenue. The Arts Company is unveiling Masters of Light, never-beforeshown images from the collection of LIFE Magazine photographer Ed Clark, x-ray and wet-collodion prints by Don Dudenbostel, and selected prints from Bill Steber’s Mississippi Blues Series. Tinney Contemporary is exhibiting Sequences,
Ed Clark, The Arts Company
Arden Bendler Browning, Tinney Contemporary
February Crawl Guide new work by Carol Mode, in the front gallery and All at Once, new work by Arden Bendler Browning in the rear gallery. The Rymer Gallery is featuring work by street artists Buko, Mobe, Sam Dunson, Emily Miller, Zidekahedron, Nathan Brown, Troy Duff, Herb Williams, and Brian Wooden. The Browsing Room Gallery at the Downtown Presbyterian Church is hosting an opening reception for artist Jennifer Pepper’s show Stigmergy. For this exhibit, Pepper combines handwriting, imagery, and recycled bee keeping equipment to create mixed-media works influenced by her experience as a beekeeper. In the historic Arcade Blue Fig Gallery is showing a new silkscreen series from Mike Martino’s sketches of the rose hips and dunes in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. “O” Gallery is featuring work by artist and teacher Lindsay Griffin, who tackles the controversial “Take A Knee Movement” in paint to bring awareness to racial profiling and police brutality. Enjoy abstract art by Carol Saffell at L Gallery (see page 36). Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery is displaying Restrikes, an exhibit of art inspired by the printmaking process, as well as iconic advertising art of the last century. For parking and trolley information, visit www.nashvilledowntown.com/play/ first-saturday-art-crawl.
Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston
Saturday, February 3, from 6 until 9 p.m. From Hagen to Houston to Chestnut and beyond, Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston offers a broad range of artistic experience. David Lusk Gallery is hosting an opening reception for painter Maysey Craddock’s exhibit suspended terrains, which showcases Craddock’s distinct and ephemeral gouache paintings on found and stitched paper. abrasiveMedia is opening Allusion and Analogue: Painting as Exploration featuring new work from Harry Whitver (see page 72). Fort Houston is presenting Selected Memory, a new Maysey Craddock, David Lusk Gallery exhibition featuring the photography of Angelina Castillo. Open Gallery is exhibiting the work of Kaylan Buteyn in her solo show bear | burden | become. Experience Cheers by Brett Douglas
Brett Douglas Hunter, Julia Martin Gallery
Friday, February 9, from 6 until 9 p.m. The Boro Art Crawl takes place on and around Historic Murfreesboro’s Downtown Square. In celebration of the Murfreesboro Festival of Chinese Arts, MTSU Center for Chinese Music and Culture is performing a dragon dance in front of the courthouse and holding an exhibit at the Center for the Arts. Since 2018 is the year of the dog, several artists will show pet-themed work. Participating venues include Beth Moore, Boro Art Crawl Bella’s Boutique, Boutique at Studio C, City Rotunda, Earth Experience, Funtiques, L&L Contractors, Let’s Make Wine, Liquid Smoke, Moxie, Quinn’s Mercantile, Reed and Embry, ReVintaged Lemon, Sugaree’s, The Exchange Boutique, The Write Impression, Trendy Pieces, Veda’s Flowers and Gifts, and Vibe in the Boro. For more information, visit www.boroartcrawl.com.
East Side Art Stumble
Saturday, February 10, from 6 until 10 p.m.
Georganna Greene, Red Arrow Gallery
Maddie Pierce, The Green Gallery
Take a drive down Gallatin Pike to Red Arrow Gallery to see Adagio, a solo show of new work by Georganna Greene. Primarily working with oils, Greene creates a beautiful flow of
Germantown Art Crawl
Saturday, February 17, from 6 until 9 p.m. Tour the non-traditional art spaces of Germantown to see an array of artworks by a variety of artists. As you make your way through the neighborhood, stop at these key art spots: 100 Taylor Arts Collective, Abednego, Wilder, Bits & Pieces, Bearded Iris Brewing, and Alexis & Bolt. For updates and more information, visit www.facebook.com/ germantownartcrawl.
Jefferson Street Art Crawl
Saturday, February 24, from 6 until 9 p.m. One Drop Ink and Norf Art Collective made a call for local artists to participate in an art exhibition to commemorate black Heroes, Legends and Queens. The exhibition is a continuation of the Black Panther Art Immersion events and a celebration of Black History Month. During the crawl, participants are encouraged to visit One Drop Ink Gallery to see the work dressed in cosplay. Woodcuts Gallery and Framing is having a group show titled Remember, original art and prints that focus on the African American experience including works by Ludie Amos, twins Terry and Jerry Lynn, Greg Ridley, Charly Palmer, Omari Booker, and Thaxton Waters. Continuing their theme “Diversity through Art,” Cultural Visions Art is presenting an exhibit featuring artists from around the world. The show includes work by artists Ephraim Urevbu, Essud Fungcap, HC Porter and Eric Jones, Sir Shadow, and Alice Gatewood Waddell. Garden Brunch Cafe is showing new selections from resident artists James Threalkill and Jordan Carpenter, as well as work by other local artists. Stay updated on the JSAC at Facebook.com/ JSACTN. Charly Palmer, Woodcuts Gallery and Framing
Boro Art Crawl
pastels into her abstract expressionistic colorscapes. Southern Grist Brewery is showing photorealistic paintings by Kimberly Fox. The Green Gallery at Turnip Green Creative Reuse is presenting Shadow Play: Abstract Photography, digital photography created by Western Kentucky University student artists Cortney Ballard, Devan Aislynn Barnes, Travis Cox, Erika Denning, Sydney Dheel, Hannah Duckett, Alyssa Guidugli, Kaylynne Jones, Timothy Keen, MacKenzie Kristufek, Leo Fengyan Liu, Lillie Neitner, Maddie Pierce, and Yang Xiao. For updates on the East Side Art Stumble, visit www.facebook.com/ eastsideartstumble.
Alice Gatewood Waddell, Cultural Visions Art
Hunter at Julia Martin Gallery. Titled after his grandmother’s pronunciation of the word chairs, his newest series explores the world of functional sculpture with a focus on furniture. States of Matter featuring sculpture created by women and Sentinels by Karen Seapker (see page 86) are on view at Zeitgeist. Channel to Channel is featuring Knoxville-based painter Austin Pratt. At the Silo Room in Track One, enjoy an opening reception for Together, Let’s Change Our Names, a group show featuring work by David Onri Anderson, Matt Christy and Terry Thacker. In the Track One Garage, catch a one-night-only performance by Third Voice, a new performance program incorporating newly composed music, video installation, and dance in the spirit of the collaborative work done at Black Mountain College. For more information, visit www.artsmusicweho.wordpress.com.
1577 MORAN RD $9,500,000 1577moran.com
Rick French 615.604.2323
5850 N LICK CREEK RD $3,990,000 5850northlickcreek.com
21 NORTHUMBERLAND $5,500,000 21northumberland.com
Rick French 615.604.2323
Rick French 615.604.2323 Co-listed with Tim Thompson 615.207.3296
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TIM KING 615.482.5953
289 DUNN RIDGE RD. $450,000 Tim King 615.482.5953
FRENCH K I N G . C O M 615.292.2622 office
HM SAFFER
Water Study, oil on canvas, 20” x 16”
4304 Charlotte Ave • Nashville, TN 615-298-4611 • www.lequiregallery.com
PRESENTS
Painted Lyric
FE ATURING THE WORK OF MARC POTOC SKY & R AY STEPHENSON MARC POTOCSKY
RAY STEPHENSON
COME AND HEAR THE ART! Grammy Award winners Ray Stephenson, Billy Falcon and Dan Shafer, winner of The Voice season 11, will play every half hour.
e Everyone is welcovment ! at this f ree e
Ray Stephenson
Billy Falcon
Dan Shafer
February 16 – March 15, 2018 Performing Music & Art Reception: Friday, February 16, 6-8:30pm Pryor Art Gallery • Waymon L. Hickman Building 1665 Hampshire Pike, Columbia, TN 38401 (931) 540-2883 • mwilkinson2@ColumbiaState.edu
Phoenix Art Gala February 15
Brenda Gray, The Way of the World, 2016, Mixed media, 9” x 12”
|
Laura Hudson, Morning on the Farm, 2016, Colored markers, 11” x 14”
Deborah Hanson, Weaving, 2016, Natural materials and yarn, 11” x 9”
Hilton Garden Inn at Vanderbilt
by Amanda Dobra Hope
Many of us know at least one person who has struggled with mental illness or addictions. Art aficionados of all kinds know that a creative practice can go a long way towards giving people back the vitality they had before their illness or addictions. The Healing Arts Project, Inc. (HAPI) of Nashville serves as a resource for people in recovery from mental illness and art patrons alike. HAPI is a conduit for people to reconnect to their brilliance through art, as well as for those who love art to connect with the artist, acquire a beautiful new piece, and contribute to the program. HAPI was founded in 2004 by a group of people who had a tie to someone in mental recovery. The group felt that because people with mental illness can sometimes disappear into the background of society, they wanted to shine a light on them and their contributions to the community. As art is beautiful and engaging as well as expressive, the group decided to use art to attract positive attention to these contributions. One of the original founding members, Jane Baxter, was inspired to volunteer for HAPI by her eldest daughter, who experienced a mental breakdown during her medical residency training. Baxter, who serves as Project Director of the group, is passionate about the difference she sees in the artists who have benefited from their services.
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“The whole point is promoting the individuals so they see themselves as somebody and that they matter. Many people don’t have a strong support system, and they need something to help them after recovery,” Baxter explains. “I saw that support and advocacy for my daughter helped her get back to her life,” she continues. Baxter stresses that the artists have shared with her that without this support, their lives didn’t have hope, and now they’re doing something they never thought they could do. HAPI offers art classes based out of fourteen national Peer Support Centers in Middle Tennessee. Sponsored in part by funding from the Tennessee Arts Commission and Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the project serves more than 500 artists per year. You can support HAPI, now in its eighth year, by attending the Phoenix Art Gala on Thursday, February 15, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn at Vanderbilt. Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and weaving from more than 50 HAPI artists will be on exhibit and for sale. For more information, please visit www.healingartsprojectinc.org.
Intuition & Memory John Fraser and Robert Treat
Thursday FEB 8th 6:30pm
4107 Hillsboro Circle | 615 297 0296 | www.cumberlandgallery.com
Man with Plane and Running Dog, 2017, Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 43” x 39”
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WORDS Barry Buxkamper
FRESH PAINT
Barry Buxkamper The Artist’s New Work Reveals the Artist in His New Work
Waking Man with Audubon’s Thrashers Attacking a Snake, 2017, Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 26” x 36”
T
hree and a half paintings and seven months into this series I finally admitted to myself that these are myself. I could no longer maintain the whoppingly delusional fiction that the figure was an anonymous model who coincidently bore a striking resemblance to the artist; no portrait intended; just some poor dope requiring no remuneration or model’s release form; who was always available; and who’d honor the artist’s every whim without complaint, mostly. You can get away with one painting using yourself as the model and thinking it’s a “figurative” painting representing humanity in general—make that white, male, old, American humanity. But two or three of these and we’re talking selfportraits—a term I was unwittingly avoiding. Forget the fact that they all featured me; the “duh” moment came when I realized that all four were the same
environment. Well that, of course, was just a matter of convenience, right? It’s just a spare room that is now storage space—in reality much more organized and uncluttered, but less visually interesting than represented in the paintings. Did the fact that this was the self-same room that my wife was going to use as her personal space in our new house, but never got the chance because she died, not figure into the equation? Were the images of flight and fleeing also just coincidental? Do the answers to these questions make the paintings any better? Probably not, but I think seeing the paintings in total changes the effect of each, whether you know the questions or not. And for me, the realization that they are connected by a common thread, regardless of the viewers’ knowledge of the origin of that thread, serves as an impetus to paint more of them. Now I’m consciously owning the origin,
NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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Man with Empty Chair and 43 Birds, 2017, Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 31” x 41”
realizing the appropriateness of the empty chair in the latest painting as a metaphor for a missing person. Chairs are profoundly human. Imagine a line of empty chairs around the walls of a dance floor, around a dinner table, in a theater. In each case we see people, not inanimate objects—a realization that returns me to the issue of portraits, in this case self-portraits. The image of the chair, actually virtually any object, is not thought of as a portrait—though it certainly could be. Objects, natural and otherwise, seem to lend themselves to metaphor and universality. Are portraits too individual to express the universal? Does their very specificity create a tantalizing barrier between them and us? Like seeing your neighbor through a window? Or does the very specificity of a portrait draw us closer; make us feel a stronger connection; create a singular reality far greater than a generalized, iconic representation? Do we know, feel, think more about our common bond to one another from the very specific or from the universal?
Sleeping Man with Plant and Egret, Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 37” x 39”
And how dumb do you have to be to finish three paintings and start a fourth and not realize you’re making self-portraits? na Barry Buxkamper is represented by Cumberland Gallery, www.cumberlandgallery.com.
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This summer, create a new universe.
Register for comic illustration and other summer camps online at
watkins.edu Use discount code EARLYBIRD18 at checkout before March 1st and receive 10% off.
W.
LORI PUTNAM
Route 66, 2015, Oil, 30” x 36”
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Her emphasis is not on recreating the world as the rest of us see it. Her challenge is to communicate a subject to the viewer with as little information as possible.
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LeQuire Gallery
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February 10 - March 31
WORDS Margaret F. M. Walker
Across the Board
Lori Putnam painting in Ireland
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here is a long tradition of painting en plein air—out of doors—that begins with Claude Monet in the 1870s. The advent of portable paint made it possible, but the airy and vibrant brushstrokes we now call “impressionist” are what made plein-air popular. Lori Putnam is an internationally recognized painter in this plein-air tradition, and this month, one can study and enjoy her work in Lori Putnam: Across the Board at LeQuire Gallery. While other recent shows have focused on a particular theme, such as her paintings of national parks, this one showcases her wide-ranging interests. Visitors will enjoy looking for both consistent and nuanced elements from one painting to the next, even as the subjects depicted may be quite different. For instance, both Day Hike and Be Mine have a characteristically impressionist facture, lending energy to the natural world. Yet, they diverge compositionally. Day Hike draws us into a scene featuring a craggy mountain surging into the sky as water tumbles down over its rocks. Be Mine, a close-up of a rose bouquet, provides so little context beyond the flowers, pushed out toward the viewer, that it verges on the abstract.
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Motherlode, 2017, Oil, 16” x 20”
This diversity within Putnam’s oeuvre has come over time, and I particularly enjoyed learning about the start of her career and process of growth into her current working style and methods. Putnam came to art in her 30s, taking weekend and evening classes as a hobby from her day job running a graphic design company. She says of a career in art, “If you do not grow up around it, you do not realize it is something you could do.” She said that those art classes had her hooked “like your first taste of sugar, you just have to have more.” After some time, she sold the business, allowing full-time devotion of her energies to being a student, apprenticing and studying under others such as Dawn Whitelaw, Quang Ho, and Scott Christensen. Stylistically, she spent some time painting in a more contemporary realist style, producing highly rendered still lifes, practically devoid of any brushwork. She reflects that this period improved her drawing skills and gave her the knowledge it was something she could do. She recognized that many see the loose brushwork of impressionist painting and wonder about the actual skill of the artist. Plein-air drew her in for many reasons, not least because there is a strong community and market for it.
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I asked Putnam about the relationship between her smaller works—painted out of doors—and her larger canvases done in the studio. This, too, has been an important balance to maintain. She had always been told that you learn from the natural world and found that painting outside became less about perfection and more about learning, growth, and fact-finding. She did not want to become a slave to a bad photograph and for quite some time, while working on large canvases in the studio, referenced her sketches primarily, glancing at photographs only when necessary. And yet having time to work in a studio, not hampered by wind and changing daylight, allowed her to experiment more and develop strength in composition and color mixing. This symbiosis means “you can actually create because you are in charge, rather than your resources at hand.” Now, with an eye more honed to seeing pattern and light than a particular scene, she has found that the range of what interests her has grown, too. Works such as Snow Mass, Bright Spot, and Be Mine verge on abstraction. Putnam tries, in her painting process, to forget the “what” and focus more on shapes, patterns, colors, and rhythms before her. It is still clear from across
Snow Mass, 2016, Oil, 6” x 8”
a room what these paintings are about, but her emphasis is not on recreating the world as the rest of us see it. Her challenge is to communicate a subject to the viewer with as little information as possible. Similarly, some works are of subjects few would call beautiful. Motherlode, for instance, with its mass of geometry and color in an industrial setting is something the artist found interesting more for its visual harmonies than what it actually was. These offer a nice balance to the more traditional plein-air vistas such as Down to the Sea and Looking at Canada. Day Hike, 2015, Oil, 24” x 18”
Putnam is now greatly focused on the next generation of artists, much in gratitude to those who mentored her. She shared that “especially in this day, as art is often cut from schools, I find it important to foster start-up artists, often those who come to this career later, as I did.” Working to keep the tradition of plein-air painting alive, she teaches all over the world and mentors those now in the shoes she formerly filled. na Lori Putnam: Across the Board is showing at LeQuire Gallery February 10 through March 31. A guided tour with the artist is scheduled for March 17 from 1 until 3 p.m. For more information, visit www.lequiregallery.com. See more of Putnam’s work at www.loriputnam.com.
Be Mine, 2017, Oil, 18” x 14”
Down to the Sea, 2015, Oil, 20” x 24”
THEBOOKMARK
A MONTHLY LOOK AT HOT BOOKS AND COOL READS
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden Denis Johnson The literary world mourned Denis Johnson’s death last year, a blow that was somewhat lightened by the impending release of this story collection. These stories represent the final works of a brilliant author who will live on as one of the most important writers of our time through his singular storytelling chops.
The Monk of Mokha
An American Marriage
Dave Eggers
Tayari Jones
Dave Eggers has become something of a household name. His latest book weaves together the true stories of a coffee farmer, the history of coffee, and the Yemeni civil war to shed light on political injustice and the American dream of one Muslim man. The Monk of Mokha is both suspenseful and uplifting and, with its compulsive narrative pace, will keep readers glued to the page (and reaching for a cup of strong black coffee).
An American Marriage is a highly anticipated novel for anyone who loves being swept up in a beautiful story. It is both a love story and a story about racial injustice, and the subtlety and magic of Jones’s prose will keep you up reading way past your bedtime.
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death Maggie O’Farrell I Am, I Am, I Am creates its own center of gravity and sucks the reader into its atmosphere. The word memoir doesn’t quite capture the universality of this book. Maggie O’Farrell’s brushes with death are gripping and electrifying and are conveyed in stunning prose. This is the most life-affirming book about death ever written.
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Violins of Hope Historic Violins Give Voice to a Generation Lost in the Holocaust
WORDS John Pitcher
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n 1986, Mark Freedman paid his first visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. Located in the heights of western Jerusalem, the museum is a sacred place filled with old sorrows. As he left the building, a deeply affected Freedman began composing a poem in his head.
“There are six million songs lost / in the hills of Jerusalem,” Freedman mused. “We are here in search / of these melodies. Each note a generation gone / every phrase dispersed among the heavens.” Freedman, who’s now executive director of the Jewish Federation of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, spent the better part of three decades wondering about the true meaning of his words. Then he heard about Violins of Hope. The name refers to a community-wide, interfaith project that will dominate Nashville’s arts and culture scene for the next several months. The centerpiece of the project is thirty-six historic violins that belonged to Jewish musicians during the Holocaust. These instruments, lovingly restored and on loan from Israeli luthier Amnon Weinstein, will be on display at the Nashville Public Library’s main branch March 26 to May 28. Twenty-four of those instruments will also be played and recorded in various concerts around town.
Auschwitz violin, front
In all, about two dozen Nashville arts, educational, and religious organizations will participate in the project. Some, like the library, will present programs directly related to the Holocaust. Others, like the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, will stage exhibits dealing with tolerance and social justice. All programs promise to be spiritually uplifting events that will serve an important civic purpose. “We’re hoping our events drive a community-wide discussion about hope, diversity, civil rights, and censorship,” Nashville Symphony chief operating officer Steven Brosvik tells Nashville Arts Magazine. “We want there to be a serious interfaith dialogue in Nashville.”
Photograph by Felix Rettberg
Krongold violin, Star of David
No doubt, much of the conversation will center around the violins themselves. Weinstein began researching, collecting, and restoring these instruments in 1996. Some of those in the exhibit, like the Barns Violin and the Yaakov Zimmerman Violin, are decorated with Stars of David. A few are known for their especially tragic histories. The Auschwitz Violin, for instance, was once owned and played by an unknown musician in that concentration camp’s orchestra. Musicians in this ensemble were forced to play for newly arrived inmates as they were herded off trains and marched into the camp. The ensemble also played in the mornings as prisoners were led out of the camp to do forced labor, and it was sometimes required to entertain their Nazi captors. “The first time I saw the Auschwitz Violin, I could feel its energy,” says Nashville Symphony President Alan Valentine. “It speaks without even being played.”
Violins of Hope creator Amnon Weinstein
The Nashville Symphony played a leading role in bringing the Violins of Hope to Music City, and it will take full advantage of these glorious instruments while they are in town. To celebrate these violins, the orchestra has commissioned a new work by American composer Jonathan Leshnoff. His Symphony No. 4 “Heichalot” will receive its world premiere at the Schermerhorn March 22–24, with the NSO’s violinists performing on the Violins of Hope. “We’ll be recording Leshnoff’s symphony for future release on the Naxos label,” Valentine says. “We’re honored because this will be the first time these violins have been featured on a professional recording.” The NSO will present several other events related to the Violins of Hope this spring. On April 12, it will host along with the Jewish Federation a Holocaust Memorial Day at the Schermerhorn. This will be followed by a performance
Feivel Wininger violin, front
Krongold violin, front
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We’re hoping our events drive a community-wide discussion about hope, diversity, civil rights, and censorship.
featuring famed Israeli conductor and violinist Pinchas Zukerman, who will join NSO concertmaster Jun Iwasaki to perform Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. (This concert repeats April 13–14.) On May 9, violinist Joshua Bell will appear with the NSO to perform Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Bell will perform on the Huberman Stradivari, named for the noted Jewish Polish violinist and conductor Bronislaw Huberman, founder of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra. The season will end May 31 to June 2 with a performance of Verdi’s Requiem, a work that the Nazis had once required inmates to perform at the Terezín concentration camp. Nashville Ballet’s contribution to Violins of Hope will be a staging of Light: The Holocaust and Humanity Project at TPAC’s Polk Theater. This was initially staged in 2005 by Ballet Austin and recounts the life of Holocaust survivor Naomi Warren. The work is divided into five sections arranged to music by contemporary composers Steve Reich, Evelyn Glennie, Michael Gordon, Arvo Pärt, and Philip Glass. Light is an abstract piece and not a literal retelling of the Holocaust, so it can relate to all forms of injustice. “Light is a reminder of the fragility of human rights,” says Nashville Ballet artistic director Paul Vasterling. “[It’s] incredibly relevant for the times in which we live.” The Frist Center for the Visual Arts had already planned to present several exhibits this winter and spring related to diversity and civil rights. “We thought these themes dovetailed nicely with Violins of Hope,” says Katie Delmez, a curator at the Frist. Exhibits will include Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex, a photography exhibit at the Frist Center from February 23 to May 28. This exhibit was created by photographers Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, who spent more than thirty years documenting conditions at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Other exhibits include We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press (March 30 to October 14), a compilation of photographs from the Tennessean and Nashville Banner documenting the civil rights movement in Nashville; and Nick Cave (through June 24), an artist whose sculptures, installations, and performances examine issues of identity and social justice.
Heil Hitler violin, front with swastika
Nashville took a leading role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, becoming, among other things, the first city in the South to desegregate its lunch counters. That tradition of tolerance has continued into the 21st century, with Nashvillians, for example, rejecting the English Only Amendment to the city charter in 2009. So it’s not surprising to see so many Nashville groups participating in Violins of Hope. Other organizations include the Blair School of Music, Tennessee State Museum, Intersection, Congregation Micah, Christ Church Cathedral, and more. na
For a complete listing and more information, go to www.violinsofhopensh.com.
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Photograph by Kristine Potter
New Modernism:
Carol Saffell
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What you see is what you see. –Frank Stella
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WORDS Audrey Molloy
Carol Saffell
Art Is, 2017, Graphic art, 36” x 54”
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he state of contemporary abstract painting and the extensive recurrence (or recycling) of minimalism has been subject to much postulating and criticism in recent years. Verbiage such as “genius” and “inspiration” as well as discourse which relegates an artwork’s origin to the internal self are common points of contemporary art dialogue which indicate the return of Greenbergian ideas and laconic appearances. In the famed words of artist Frank Stella, “What you see is what you see.” This subjective return to modernist formalism—given the various contemporary monikers, critical and otherwise, of Modest Abstraction, Neo-Modernism, and Dropcloth Abstraction—does not directly
engage in the ideas and work of those avant-garde progenitors heralded by such nomenclature but, rather, their surfaces. Carol Saffell, a self-taught painter best known for her highly charged expressionist works, has embraced this shifting inversion in painting aesthetics liberated by a greatly expanded art world and market. The Nashvillebased artist and owner of L Gallery— where she commercially exhibits her work—has comprehensively hitched her artistic practice to the modernist giants of late as part of a continued investigation into hallmark abstract stylizations. Saffell’s most recent works discursively deploy signs and signifiers of process art, modified action painting,
Minimalism, color field painting, Italian Arte Povera, and Abstraction, all of which gesture towards artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, and Norman Lewis. This artistic simulacrum is readily apparent in two works from 2017. In these new works, Saffell employs the wide, sweeping brushstrokes of Expressionism but with the cautious constraint of reductive design. In Untitled (2017), grand, loose markmakings bisect the picture plane in mustard, black, and peachy-taupe—an active horizontality which is minutely reaffirmed by the repetitive grid of squares which pattern the canvas’s surface. A solitary splatter of dripped red paint ornaments the center of the picture plane. Optical Illusion (2017)
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Optical Illusion, 2017, Graphic art, 64” x 48”
is a starkly minimal regression from all color and action. A near monochromatic save for a formal lightblue rectangle, the work figures sparse black and white lines, ovular shapes, floating graphically in an expanse of middle grey. Stylistically disparate, the two paintings share the lexicon of recognizable abstraction.
euphoric,” said Saffell. “I may have a moment when some shapes and forms are intentional but most are not.”
Stylistically, Saffell interprets this artistic anointment through an efficient arrangement of modernist forms and techniques. As in Reality Check (2012), sweeping brushstrokes in brash, bold hues cauterize the picture plane amid drips and drops of slashed paint. Roughly applied swaths of acrid yellow, green, orange, and the purest blue float atop a lateral field of murky red, revealing the depth of the picture plane as a pre-modern
It comes as no surprise that Saffell’s paintings resemble the drip-andslash paintings of Jackson Pollock or the biomorphic forms of Wassily Kandinsky; their works fulfill a nearly identical role. Those early abstractionists, like Saffell, employ expressive gestures as a type of formalism pre-slotted into a post-war art-historical genealogy. This formal abstraction conflates process and content, relegating the former to
fallacy. Upon further consideration, various numerical groupings, letters, and fragmented words which have been scratched into the paint à la Basquiat become apparent. Untitled (2016) proceeds similarly in hue and composition, with Saffell confining her painterly brushstrokes behind rectangular color fields in black, yellow, red, and blue. The compositional resemblance to Piet Mondrian’s Ohne Titel (1921) is unmistakable.
the latter. “My creativity comes from within,” says Saffell. “It’s more of an internalized spontaneity with no subjectivity or outside influence.” While abstraction fulfills a romantic celebration for the externalization of individual emotions, it is a genre and style wholly dependent on the notion that all persons share a common human experience which may be distilled in paint by a single gifted individual. As Carol Saffell continues to embrace the subjectivity and aesthetic language of new modernism, she is ever more conversant in producing art which is unequivocally familiar. na
Perception, 2017, Graphic art, 28” x 54”
Invariably, Saffell’s use of paint denotes an aesthetic emphasis derivative of 1950s Abstract Expressionism, an art movement which called for an interpretive model based on the analogy between a work and its
which is the ability to take a blank space and turn it into an extraordinary interpretational piece of art.”
maker.1 In this manner, the work’s surface is conceived of in terms of its “depth” much like the way an individual is understood to relate to his internal or “truest” self. Historically, abstraction has relied on this model to assume formal choices, medium specificity, and intent as an expression of the artist’s internal emotive landscape. Saffell also positions her artistic practice formally and ideologically in this regard, saying, “I express through my paintings in the form of abstract expressionism because it’s the path that I was given. I didn’t choose it, it chose me. We all have a path, and it is up to us whether to actually choose it or not . . . I [am pushed to] never stop expressing my God-given gift,
1
“When I paint I have no preconceived idea of what I will create, no sketches or drawings—seeing that I can’t draw. As any creative will tell you, there is a creative space you are in where time is lost during your creative process, which, for me, also includes thought of what is actually happening. It’s almost
Some paintings referred to in this article may be seen at www.nashvillearts.com. Saffell’s paintings can be viewed at L Gallery at 11 Arcade Alley in downtown Nashville and at her website www.carolsaffellart.com.
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 3 NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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Timeless Wearable Art
Photograph by Nancy Lee Andrews
Cynthia Brewer
WORDS Missouri Ellerd
“I never had a design class,” Cynthia Brewer said to me during our first meeting. Looking around her stunning home, I could hardly believe her, but seeing her surroundings presented with such style and taste made me wonder what it must be like to have such a creative outlook. Cynthia Brewer possesses a style and fashion sense that is its own kind of wonderful. Having been brought up with an artistic background, Brewer has always had a flare for fashion, particularly hats, and she exemplifies it best through upcycling clothing and accessories into beautiful hats befitting any type of person. “I believe everyone is beautiful. It is just about accentuating it!” she exclaims with pure gusto. For years, Brewer worked in various professions but all the while with a mind and spirit that would always return to her love: fashion. “I worked at various leading department stores in a management capacity, and I also worked as a tech analyst for a major wireless company. The company eliminated the tech analyst positions and gave the analysts the choice of staying with the company in a different job or taking a buyout. I chose the buyout.”
From there, Brewer visited numerous countries, including Greece, Germany, and Israel, but as a lady of keen observation, she had a clear sense of what it was to be a leader in her field of art and knew it was time to return to her passion. In 2015, Brewer attended Nashville Fashion Week where she met many individuals who are now close friends and colleagues. For the past almost three years, she has been creating her wearable art. “I have always wanted to be a leader. No one else wears hats, so I did,” says Brewer. She looks to everything from old to new for inspiration. “Really anything I see inspires me.” Throughout our time together, the subject of models came up. She explained that when choosing models to wear her art, she pursues individuals of a wide age range, anywhere from 15 to 79. “I choose to do it this way because I want to reveal the beauty in everyone and show that age is most certainly just a number.” Brewer believes that, when it comes to fashion, people tend to judge others whose style choices may be different than the norm. “People need to be confident and bold in their clothing, no matter their age. It serves as a mirror to what is inside.”
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Among her many interests, one that lies near to Brewer’s heart is philanthropy. During our visit, Brewer shared a touching memory that showed her compassion for people and the humanity that she conveys to society. “I did an event for a nonprofit charity organization where we had a fashion show,” Brewer says, noting that attendees and models from several states and countries participated. “I can remember that at one point during the event a silent auction was held and things were moving slowly, so I asked to present it as a live auction, and within minutes, clothing and accessories were sold, quickly raising money for this charity. It was wonderful.” Brewer revealed that an elderly woman, wearing one of the charity’s dress coats, approached and said that she had never owned a dress coat before. This touched Brewer in more ways than one. “We take for granted what we have when there are those who have nothing,” she said with a tear in her eye. “What gives me great joy is to bless others. It is the best thing I can do.” Brewer recently had the opportunity to show to the public her collection of wearable art through the Ageless Style Event at Monthaven Arts and Cultural Center where several notable women showcased her hats complementing vintage wearables. It was, according to Brewer, truly a timeless evening. “We had all sorts of distinguished people there and wearing my art! It was such a remarkable evening, and I believe a truly divine appointment. God is so good.” When asked what is to come in the near future, Brewer smiles. “I can’t confirm anything, because nothing is yet set in stone, but things are in the works. Let’s just say some events are definitely on the horizon for Ageless Style,” she says with a knowing grin. Brewer believes that no matter what happens, in the grand scheme of things “beauty is timeless and style is ageless.” na For more information on Cynthia Brewer’s Ageless Style, visit www.agelessstyledesigns.com, Facebook@AgelessStyle123, Instagram@AgelessStyle123.
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SPONSORED BY
PLEASE SUPPORT ALL OUR SPONSORS LISTED AT NASHVILLEFASHIONWEEK.COM
WORDS Paul Polycarpou PHOTOGRAPHY Hunter Armistead
So why fashion?
What would you tell the young Milton?
I like the idea of being able to change everything with what you wear. Putting on a suit does one thing, putting on jeans does another.
Start lying about your age earlier.
If you weren’t involved in fashion, what would you be doing?
I talk too much. The last great film you saw?
I would probably be producing films or trying to take over a small country.
The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro, and I’m looking forward to Phantom Thread with Daniel Day-Lewis.
Who are the designers you most admire?
Which artists do you like in Nashville.
Karl Lagerfeld is a genius; Stella McCartney is great; Tom Ford is amazing and sexy. Oscar de la Renta is always classic. I admire what our local designers have done to elevate Nashville’s presence. Whose shoes would you like to fill? Grace Coddington. I’m not saying I could fill her shoes, but I would love to try.
I like Herb Williams and Ed Nash. I love those crayon dogs that Herb does; I’d love for him to do one of Spanky. What are you most proud of? That I have been able to work consistently in fashion. Fortunately, I can do several different things well, and that has helped keep me busy. What’s a treasured possession?
So, I understand you grew up thinking you were related to Snow White, right?
My dog Beanie’s remains.
Yes, my mother told me that Snow White was my cousin. Since we have the same last name I believed her.
Oh God, it’s so vain and shallow. I would be younger, taller, and thinner. I also do not take criticism very well.
What’s your greatest extravagance?
Describe a perfect evening?
Clothes and Spanky, my little dog, and my sixteen nieces.
I love the ballet. Simple things, nothing too complicated.
What brings you to Nashville?
Why should we care about fashion?
I was born here. Grew up on the East Coast and came back fifteen years ago to take care of my grandparents. Things have changed a great deal.
We don’t care enough. Whether we recognize it or not, we all assess people by what we see. You form impressions based on what people are wearing. Fashion changes our mood; that’s a fact. If I dress sloppy, I feel sloppy.
What music do you listen to? Depends on what I’m doing. In the office I listen to the soundtrack from The Seven Deadly Sins from Nashville Ballet. I like runway-inspired music. Where do you like to eat out?
What one thing would you change about yourself?
What talent would you most like to have? I want to be able to sing. I’m so bad I don’t even sing to myself. It’s embarrassing. I would also like to be able to sew and be more hands-on regarding clothing design and creation.
I like Epice, Le Sel, Moto, Saint Anejo; they have great margaritas. I love Etch and Chauhan. I don’t go out to eat as much as I should.
Is black still the most important color in fashion?
How does the Nashville fashion scene compare to other major cities?
Are you a night person?
I try not to compare it to other cities anymore. We have so many options now, more choices. It’s pointless to compare. Are you optimistic that Nashville can become a vital international fashion center? Yes, I am hopeful. There are some things that have to happen first, and I think they will. Who’s a living person that you admire? Joan Collins. She’s like a phoenix. Beautiful, glamorous, sexy. She proves that success can come at any time in life. What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? My dogs and my nieces. They have given me the most pleasure. 44
What annoying habits do you have?
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Like Wednesday Adams said, “I’ll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.” Totally a night person. I’ve been called a vampire my whole life. When the sun starts to go down, I come to life. What are you afraid of? I hate flying. Absolutely hate it. I’m very motion sensitive, and I have a very vivid imagination—not a good combination. What would most surprise us to know about you? That I don’t work at Jamie or The Private Label, although I am at those stores a lot of the time. Is Nashville a tolerant city? Oh yes, things have changed. Our mayor has always been a supporter of Nashville PRIDE. There are far too many creative people here for it not to be a tolerant place. It’s definitely gayfriendly.
W ILTON HITE W
Fashion Editor, Stylist, Dog Dad, and a million other things www.thefashionoffice.com
RICHARD
Photograph by Rob Lindsay
GREATHOUSE
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There’s this connection across time. And it gives us immortality.
WORDS Karen Parr-Moody
Portrait of Marty, 2017, Oil on panel, 14” x 12”
Connecting Across Time
Haynes Galleries through March 17
H
is life was a brief flame snuffed out, almost certainly, by the bubonic plague that ravaged Italy in 1510. He is believed to have died around the age of 33 on an island, Lazzaretto Vecchio, which was then a hellish place of quarantine surrounded by the placid Venetian lagoon. He lacked the longevity of Titian—88 years—so his body of work is paltry, and hardline critics will attribute only a handful of paintings to him. Yet Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, or simply Giorgione, remains a reverential figure and retains a cult following among painters. Elusive yet influential, Giorgione left us landscape paintings that exist on a dreamlike plane. By virtue of sfumato—the fine-spun type of chiaroscuro used by Leonardo da Vinci—he created the masterpiece Young Man with Arrow in which a delicate youth, rendered in gossamer brushstrokes, remains suspended in time. Painter Richard Greathouse, 31, is only slightly younger than was Giorgione when his body was placed in a mass grave. While a modern-day portrait artist, Greathouse is a spiritual contemporary of the Italian painter he admires, but is largely unknown today. “There’s a certain soft poetry happening in Giorgione’s work that conveys both mystery and sensitivity,” Greathouse says “There’s just something about his work that is very enigmatic and draws me in.”
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Conversation with Mitch, 2016, Oil on panel, 16” x 14”
Enigma is intrinsic to Giorgione’s paintings, and the works of Greathouse possess a similar tone. This is not simply due to the atmosphere created by his tender brushstrokes or the absence of hard edges, what Greathouse dubs “a strong softness.” Rather, it exists within the sitters themselves, for the artist sees no replacement for the phenomenon that occurs when he sits with a subject, painting for hours.
“When you’re working from life, there’s something quite intense and somewhat uncomfortable in a good way,” Greathouse says. “When you’re sitting in a room with one person and there’s just silence, and you’re looking at them for hours, the intensity of that situation just comes out in the painting, whether you want it to or not. Not to be too extreme here, but the miracle of every moment when someone’s in front of you, there’s such beauty in that. “Trying to experience the fullness of reality is what gives you beautiful work,” he adds. “I’m not trying to make my work beautiful; I’m trying to experience it as sincerely and fully as I can, and the fact that something might come out beautiful or not is sort of a by-product.” It follows logically that Greathouse should be represented by Haynes Galleries, that bastion of esteemed, even famous, classical painters, including Andrew Wyeth, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer. It is a gallery filled with works that are expressive by way of an impassioned whisper.
Portrait of Jess, 2015, Oil on canvas, 24” x 18”
Just as logically, Greathouse graduated from and continues to teach at Florence Academy of Art, an art academy in Florence whose roots reach back to 1563, when one of the de’ Medici patrons of the Italian Renaissance, Cosimo I de’ Medici, developed a nascent academy with Giorgio Vasari. It counted among its early members the Italian artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Giambologna, and Bartolomeo Ammannati. Currently ensconced at this esteemed university, Greathouse hails from Nashville. He was introduced to oil painting by his Montgomery Bell Academy art instructor Rosemary “Rosie” Pascal, an Oxford graduate who also taught at St. Andrew’sSewanee School and Harpeth Hall School. Greathouse couldn’t have known it then, but his beloved medium of oil paint was preordained when she gave him a copy of a Lucian Freud painting.
Camilla II, 2017, Oil on canvas, 20” x 17”
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Male Torso, 2017, Oil on canvas, 20” x 16”
“That was the one of the first times I realized how much I love the materiality of paint,” he says. “Oil painting is a visual art, but it is also a very physical art in the sense that you have to understand the materiality of the paint to get the best results. For me, the tactile quality of moving the paint around the surface of the canvas is every bit as important as what that painting ends up looking like in the end. In fact, I think those things are sort of inextricably linked.” His recent paintings result from his foray into a technique called indirect painting, by which he builds up multiple layers of paint to create a surface that is alive on its own. In the painting Camilla II, Greathouse captures what he calls the “inscrutable shyness” of the model by brushing smoky layers of paint onto the canvas. For Self-Portrait with Palette, half of Greathouse’s face is enshrouded in nebulous shade; it is a piece made compelling through the careful use of materials.
Fabio, 2017, Oil on panel, 16” x 14”
For Conversation with Mitch, Greathouse chatted with a friend in his Florentine studio, watching the sun stream through a small window into the subject’s eyes as he painted. “That was very fitting, because he’s such a deeply thoughtful guy,” he says. “It was as if the light were a visual representation of his thoughts, and I wanted to capture that look.” The skin of Mitch is comprised of a subtle patchwork of tones built up with a palette knife, creating a texture that gives the surface vibrancy. The paintings by Greathouse suggest a romantic mind that understands human beings’ sameness of spirit. It comes as no surprise that, in addition to admiring Giorgione, he admires the timeless quality of Fayum portraits, which flourished in Roman Egypt. Sometimes placed atop the faces of mummies, they are evidence of the universality of portrait paintings, regardless of time or space. “It’s the feeling of empathy,” Greathouse says. “You sort of simultaneously know nothing about them; you just see their visage. Yet you also somehow know everything about them. Because they are what we are; we are of the same stuff.” As with Giorgione’s figure paintings and the Fayum portraits, oil paintings by Greathouse retain the coexisting distance and intimacy of a prehistoric dragonfly preserved in amber, which we can examine closely but never touch. “There’s this connection across time,” Greathouse says. “And it gives us immortality.” na An exhibit of the artist’s art, The Work of Richard Greathouse, is on view at Haynes Galleries through March 17, 2018. For more information, visit www.haynesgalleries.com.
Female Torso, 2016, Oil on panel, 21” x 16” NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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A L L
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B E S T
I N
F I N E
J E W E L RY
5101 Harding Road s Nashville, Tennessee 37205 s 615.353.1823 s cindiearl.com
M
arĂa agdalena Campos-Pons Through the Fire Internationally Acclaimed Artist Puts Down Roots in Nashville WORDS Sara Lee Burd
M
oving to Nashville from Boston where MarĂa Magdalena Campos-Pons taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is quite a leap geographically, culturally, and perhaps in other ways that will be uncovered as time passes. What is constant is her ability, as an artist and educator, to move people. Internationally accomplished, she is known for her fluid use of media and experimentation. Often taking an autobiographical approach, she also employs ethnographic imagery and objects to process cross-cultural and crossgenerational themes.
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
Beginning Spring 2018 students in Campos-Pons’s Vanderbilt University classes will explore the practices of drawing and installation. Her teaching methods mirror her way of thinking. With her vast knowledge and courageous drive, she pushes herself beyond singular definition as an artist and inspires students to do the same. Campos-Pons encourages them to engage ambiguous ideas. “In my class we explore the possibility of why drawing is so persistent and is necessary to create. What is the meaning of drawing? What can it be?” The basis for this complex discussion: “The boundaries and the language of visuality have expanded and are malleable. If you look carefully through history, you will see it’s not that art is totally new, it is how it is refreshed or culturally understood.” In a January 2018 exhibit in Milan’s Galleria PACK, Estado de Tiempo-Weather Report, Campos-Pons created a series of mixed-media drawings to push the boundaries of what drawing should do in the 21st century. As the artist explains, “I see it as more expansive than the practice of drawing with a model and traditional materials.” For her it is more holistic and evolutionary. The materials used to make a drawing offer a space for creativity and relevance. She explains, “I would never say there is material that is too old; it is how they function. A pencil drawing is one of the most beautiful things that can happen.” The skills of seeing and thinking garnered through her classroom methods of creative thinking shape the way
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students see the world whether they continue studying art or not. “I’m excited to have the privilege to teach at Vanderbilt and the opportunity to work with these great thinkers.” In 2011 Campos-Pons was invited for a solo exhibition at the Frist Center which resulted in a collboration between the Frist and Vanderbilt through an invitation by the Center for Latin American Studies. In a mission to collaborate, the center invited Studio Arts, the Fine Arts Gallery, History of Art, and the Curb Center so that early interactions with Vanderbilt students, when she came to campus, provided opportunities to work with the visiting artist. Creating a performative installation piece with art and art history majors, Campos-Pons invited the students to put on white coveralls and plant bulbs in existing marked-off areas. The artist explains, “The students wore working coveralls to protect clothing but also to unify the experience as we planted the garden. There was no distinction between our appearance.” This aesthetic leveling of the group allowed the artist to permeate the hierarchical boundaries related to the traditional student/professor relationship and also disrupt the notion of the unique hand of the artist. As Campos-Pons explains, “We were all working together to make art.” For this work entitled Imole Blue (Blue Earth), the group planted 4,400 grape hyacinth bulbs in the shape of her home state Matanzas and indicating the streets of her town Manguito, Cuba. It was an interactive experience of literally
Photographs by Toshiki Yashiro, www.tyashiro.info
Campos-Pons in the performance Habla La Madre at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, 2014
Warrior Reservoir, 2011, Watercolor and ink on cotton fiber and amate (bark) paper with African totems, 96” x 144”
working in the soil while conceptually closely tending to the artist's endemic roots. While the work is an installation on the Peabody campus and the students participating were contributing to the performance of the art, the artist asserts that it is fundamentally also a sketch. As she explains, “The garden is as much a drawing as a living organism that becomes blue. Inspired but tracing from Google Maps, the blue lines of the hyacinths' blossoms trace a remembrance of architects' blueprints.” The complex levels of communication the artist employs provide territory for interpretation and curiosity.
container, which Mella explains references the sugar and rum production in Cuba. He notes, “The tip is like a sword red from blood but dripping from the tip instead is green paint. This goes back to nurturing and nature and the complexity of what it means to be human.” The work includes a woman, most likely the artist, sitting within the backdrop imagery of her origins. The figure’s hair appears animated, climbing above her head like a living creature out of nature. In essence this work, which is currently on display at Prospect 4 in New Orleans, makes an impact through scale, imagery, and inventive cultural indicators that inform her identity.
At that same time of Imole Blue’s installation, CamposPons had concurrent exhibitions at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery and the Frist Center. In the former, an assortment of large-scale drawings were organized into MAMA/ RECIPROCAL ENERGY, a show curated by Gallery Director Joseph Mella. The mixed-media drawings focused on identity and displacement as a woman with Afro-ChineseCuban heritage living in the United States. Mella’s poignant explanation reveals the layers of meaning packed within Campos-Pons’s art: “I think that like a lot of her practice, it’s rooted in a deeply close, self-reflective perspective she maintains.” Speaking of a work now part of the Vanderbilt collection, Warrior Reservoir, he continues,”It looks at the yin and yang of her being a powerful black woman. It points to her Cuban roots on the right and her African roots on the left. It brings together strength and nurturing.” A spear-like drawing extends across the work and goes down to a clear
The Frist Center’s exhibit Journeys featured an installation of commanding sculptures that appear like objects for ritual or warfare. The structures have visual links to her familial lineage—the violence of being torn from Africa, slavery and indentured servitude in Cuba, and now her own life in the United States. The exhibition at the museum included a performance that evoked a healing act in collaboration with her husband, composer and saxophonist Neil Leonard. A common theme Campos-Pons approaches is the body within traditions and rituals. She explains the impetus for keeping a range of communication methods is that she believes connecting with a work of art can be a curative experience in and of itself. It can heal the viewer in ways that cannot be explained but can be perceived. Another lesson Campos-Pons relays in her work and in the classroom is that all art-making is performative at its core.
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Nesting II, 2000, Triptych. Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs, 24" x 72"
Captiva - Jungle, 2016, Mixed media on Arches archival paper, 106.5 x 75.5 cm
Captiva - Reflection, 2016, Mixed media on Arches archival paper, 141 x 106.5 cm
Nesting IV, 2000, Composition of 4 Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs, 24" x 80"
Captiva - Felix G.T. & Cuba & Florida, Mixed media on Arches archival paper, 106.5 x 75.5 cm
Her performance Habla La Madre, co-authored with composer/saxophonist Neil Leonard at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2014, provides another example of a powerful corporeality-based artwork. She recalls, “My body became the building by the form of the dress. I positioned myself in the center of the atrium, and in that moment I became a member of the audience as it relates to form, my position.” The circular shape of the dress echoed the concentric circles that compose the architectural wonder. The structure, designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, supplies a dynamic experience itself—one that signals the progressive art that occupies the galleries and attracts attention to the museum in contrast with its Upper East Side location. The space provides an inherent sense of movement with visitors navigating curved ramps with inclines or declines, depending on approach, to walk the spiral-shaped edifice. Campos-Pons reminisces, “With the centrifugal force of my spinning body, I became the centerpoint of reference to the building.” Viewers encountered Campos-Pons's performance on the ground and from the museum balconies within the context of Carrie Mae Weems’s exhibition Three Decades of Photography and Video and music by the band Textualizing. In connection with that energy, Campos-Pons began collaborating using her body. “In that particular moment I was thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright. I was thinking of this as an homage to him. I wanted to continue with the idea of what was really in his mind. I don’t know that he would ever think that a woman like me would be there doing that.
Classic Creole, 2003, Composition of 9 Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs, 110" x 72"
Continuing her idea more broadly, Campos-Pons states, “Every artist in every history in every culture has always involved their body in their art. Different artists in different moments have different rituals by which they live in their studios. When an artist is completely alone, he, she, or they have an entire immersion of their body in the making of the work. The proximity of the body permits a performance process.” Adding a charming example she says, “When I saw Botticelli in Florence I thought, oh my god, it is like he is working with Photoshop, and with Raphael’s School of Athens I could feel in myself the pressure he was applying to the material to make the line.” The ultimate lesson for artists and viewers from Campos-Pons is: “When you see a painting, all that you see is the remains of the body of the artist there. This is my perception, and this is what good art does. It hits people profoundly in the body.”
Bin Bin Lady, The Papaya, 2005, Compostion of 4 Polaroid Polacolor Pro 24 x 20 photographs, 48" x 40"
In her practice of installation and performance, she uses her body as a material and her movements as a means to exchange information. She explains, “Sometimes I don’t feel I can completely communicate with just the visual items on display, whether a drawing, a painting, a sculpture . . . I need the physicality of my body to complete that particular gesture.”
In her January 2018 show If I Were a Poet at San Francisco’s Gallery Wendi Norris, Campos-Pons continues ways of engaging nature and her hybrid roots. In a work entitled Nesting II she bridges a human/animal connection in a triptych featuring a large-scale Polaroid of herself with flanking photographs of carved wooden owls. The artist playfully obscures her face with her hands, revealing only her eyes through her fingers. Patterns in paint surround her orbital bones, highlighting her penetrating, otherworldly gaze. One of a Santeria priest, a shaman, an African warrior, it’s not specific. The birds seem to relate to the artist’s journey, perhaps the future and present ungrounded movement, wisdom, and vision, and the search for the comfort.
With time and gathering associations, much more meaning can be squeezed from Campos-Pons's conceptually ripe works. In La Llamada/ The Calling she presents herself in what appear to be tribal patterns enshrouded in diaphanous textile that hides her hair and envelops her body. The bundle of flowers she extends over her arched upper torso conveys tension between disciplined and improvised movement. It commands attention and speaks to her interests in nature, ritual, and hybrid identity. In part for motivation to do her best work, Campos-Pons withholds an immediate sense of accomplishment and success from herself. “The beauty and scary part of making art is that you always risk something . . . everything really: ridiculing yourself, worried about being totally dismissed, fear of not making the point, if it is communicating and brilliant. It takes a lot of effort and energy to make those moments. It’s very intense.” While she relies on herself to make the art, external response indicating that she has communicated and touched her audience is her real reward. Matanzas Sound Map, 2017, Video, audio, cast glass, blown glass, handmade paper, coconut tree bark, coconut shells, and Calea stone of Matanzas
There was humor, but I was serious in my reverie of the privilege in that moment to be in such an iconic place,” she recalls. Referring to her conversation with the exhibition and music from her experience she says, “I was not alone, and it created a new way to look at that space.”
Photographs courtesy of the Vanderbilt University Department of Art, photographer Diane Acree
Imole Blue (Blue Earth), Vanderbilt University
Photography by Stephen Petegorsky, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Grateful for the warm welcome she has received from the university and the art department in particular, CamposPons is arriving with a celebrated reputation. Former Chair of Studio Arts Department Mel Ziegler thanks his former dean, Lauren Denton, saying, “She understood the vision was to continue strengthening the department’s standing on campus and among other universities.” He continues, “The opportunities Magda brings to develop new connections for our students and Studio Arts are definite. She is a brilliant addition to our faculty.”
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
Installation of Sugar, 2010
The role of professor inspires María Magdalena CamposPons personally and creatively: “I was very lucky to have people who affected my life in a positive way. I believe a good professor can be somebody who can do that. They can leave a mark in the heart and mind of an individual.” It seems likely she will find rewards in teaching and making/ doing in Nashville. Her presence here will provide an infusion of new ideas and ways of seeing, which she is ready to share. “I am here and want to learn the city and the people. Once I know the temperature of the community, the arts, and the vibe, then I would like to share what I think I could give.” na Nashville Arts Magazine would like to thank Galleria PACK, Milan; Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Vanderbilt University Department of Art, Nashville; and Toshiki Yashiro for their help with this article. Campos-Pons is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris, www.gallerywendinorris.com.
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NeLLie Jo
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“
Surely it hasn’t gotten worse But trust it always did It’s the creek that swallows the mountain It’s the raindrop that topples the bridge
Photograph by Jack Spencer
—from Ballad of a Limping Man
Photograph by Jack Spencer
RYAN
MATTHEW
Feels Like Rain
WORDS Joe Pagetta
“T
here is so much in our culture that is designed for speed and not getting lost,” says the singer and songwriter Matthew Ryan from his Nashville home. “I think that so many of the good things that we experience are the result of getting lost. That you have to allow that. You have to engage your instincts and your sense of being a tourist.” He’s talking about the beauty of Columbus, the 2017 film written and directed by Nashville’s Kogonada. It’s a film where the mise en scène, pacing, and score share equal billing with the superb, and often understated, acting and storytelling. The film was scored by Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, better known as the ambient duo Hammock. Next month, Byrd, Thompson, and Ryan will release a new album together under the moniker The Summer Kills. It’s a project they began working on more than six years ago.
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on, releasing record after record on different indies to continuing acclaim and a growing fan base. By the end of the decade, however, the weight of navigating the “gap between mythology and real beauty,” he says, was starting to take a toll. He was “lost and feeling phantomous. For me, rock ‘n’ roll and folk and punk rock were great connectors to some experience that I wanted to be intimate with,” he says, thinking back to his early days growing up in the economically depressed post-manufacturing boom town of Chester, Pennsylvania. “I really did give in to the mythology of music. It felt like some other more generous, more truthful, more lit-up community. When I signed with the major labels, while there were some people who had that energy and that vibe, the majority of it wasn’t. And so, for me, that was incredibly discouraging.
Photograph by Geoffrey Tischman
“I felt like I was shot from a cannon believing one thing and in mid-air realized that there are no soft landings. Then I had to decide after I landed, where did I land?”
He’s also talking about that, and the album’s gorgeous and cinematic title track “Last Night We Became Swans.” But before he can do that, it’s helpful for Ryan to also talk about how he got here, back to this place where he’s collaborating with Hammock again. And that’s where getting lost comes in. In a career that has spanned more than twenty years, Ryan has released at least a dozen albums, not to mention singles, EPs, and collaborations with other artists. In the mid-to-late 90s, Ryan was one of the forebears of a thriving, emerging Nashville rock and folk-rock scene that included Daniel Tashian, Joe Marc’s Brother, David Mead, Josh Rouse, Lambchop, Venus Hum, Farmer Not So John, Atticus Fault, Sixpence None the Richer, and many more. Ryan was signed to A&M Records in 1996 and released his first record, May Day, to considerable acclaim. East Autumn Grin followed in 2000 before label consolidation forced Ryan to go the indie route. Discouraged but not completely disenchanted with what led him to pick up a guitar to begin with, he soldiered
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Wherever he landed, he believes he started withdrawing from the means to achieve something. And while he’s quick to heap accolades on those who gave a lot of themselves when he was lost, by 2011 he was ready to hang it up. He left Nashville for Pittsburgh—in an effort “to see how quiet it can get; to see who I was then”—and released what was to be his final record, In the Dusk of Everything. “Music had become too lonely,” he says in recent press materials. And he means that literally. He started to make records alone. But then a few things happened that in many ways saved Ryan’s musical life. He got a call from Paul Weller, the legendary frontman for The Jam, to open up some shows, beginning with a gig at the legendary Apollo in Harlem. Not long after, he learned that Brian Fallon, the leader of the New Jersey-based rock band The Gaslight Anthem, had been tweeting out some of Ryan’s lyrics. He was a fan. They started communicating and struck up a friendship, with Ryan opening up for The Gaslight Anthem and Fallon encouraging Ryan to make a new record with Fallon playing guitar. The result was 2014’s Boxers, produced by Kevin Salem of Dumptruck and other projects. It’s a record American Songwriter wrote was devoted to “bittersweet toasts to those who either escaped the dead-end scene or were claimed by it,” before adding that listeners should be “glad such an insightful songwriter stuck around long enough to keep such a memorable scorecard.” “Being with those bunch of guys lit me up,” says Ryan. “There was no cautiousness, no aspiration beyond what are
“
All our heroes had no choice Some busted chords and a broken voice
Photograph by Geoffrey Tischman
—from Boxers
we going to do right now when we press record. That record was beautifully received; we did a lot of wonderful stuff; and it was really neat to experience that, where whatever was dogging me before seemed gone. And it’s still gone. The funny thing about Fallon is that it would never be his intention to light me up; he didn’t come into my life thinking he was saving somebody, and the weird thing is, in some way he did.” With the Ryan-Fallon collaboration a boon for Ryan’s creative energy, the two doubled down on 2017’s Hustle Up Starlings with Fallon producing. “Always count on Matthew Ryan to come in quietly and leave you knocked out on the floor,” wrote Paste Magazine when revealing the album’s lead single “Bastard.” “When Fallon confided what my work meant to him and how it contributed to his creative ethos,” adds Ryan in an email later, “that was some kind of proof that I had contributed to the continuation of that very thing that lit me up when I was a kid. And that lit me back up somehow. It made me wanna seek out more people that I suspected shared that kind of lighting, that notion that these things we create contribute to
something outside of ourselves, that there’s a humanitarian cause entwined with the arts.” With Fallon, Ryan had essentially found the mythological community he had been searching for when he first started making music. It was that comfort, with both community and collaboration, that helped Ryan get back together with Hammock and finish that project they had started six years earlier, just as Ryan was considering ending his music career. “What I found through collaboration is that the work becomes a dialogue,” says Ryan. “I’m just as lit up by what Mark and Andrew of Hammock do as I am by the guys I made Starlings and Boxers with. These are all people that are fearless in their creativity. And I think at the end of the day, when I see people doing what they love at a high level, without any impositions, then that circulates back to me.” Last Night We Became Swans, the debut release from the Ryan-Hammock collective The Summer Kills, is due out in March. It includes a remix of their 2011 collaboration “Like New Year’s Day.” na For more information, visit www.matthewryanonline.com.
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ARTS&BUSINESSCOUNCIL
BY MEGAN LIGHTELL
Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training The Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training program by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville is an intensive training opportunity that empowers working artists to see their vision through an entrepreneurial lens. The program gives artists the tools to organize, plan, and find strategies to thrive economically, with the goal of preparing artists to take their careers to the next level.
is seeking to grow both the practical aspects of their work and their sense of community to apply and contribute to this program. Ready to take your creative career to the next level? Applications for the Arts & Business Council’s Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training program are now open. Learn more and apply now at www.abcnashville.org.
Participants meet weekly for business seminars and group mentoring sessions tailored to address the needs of arts professionals. At the conclusion of the program, each artist is paired with a business mentor to continue defining their goals and has the opportunity to present their work at the public “Pitch” event. I applied to Periscope hoping to refine the business aspects of my studio practice. Though I had been working professionally as a painter for nearly two decades, I needed to make the studio practice more financially consistent. The program provided benefits far beyond spreadsheets and entrepreneurial advice, however. Periscope changed the way I thought about how my work relates to the wider community and the way I talk about and share my work with others. Setting aside regular time with other artists and mentors to discuss goals in a structured way is powerful for many artists who are accustomed to the isolation of the studio. For me, Periscope brought clarity in setting priorities and created a renewed sense of community. Since completing the Periscope program, I exhibited Saving Space, a series of pieces based on sites protected by the Land Trust for Tennessee that was shown at Zeitgeist Gallery in late fall 2017. Through sponsorship by Southwest Airlines, I was able to travel to Colorado on a painting trip and to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. I also reached a goal set during the program of completing a National Parks artist residency and recently began a residency locally at the Downtown Presbyterian Church.
Beeman Park (Winter), Oil on canvas over panel, 48” x 48” x 2.5”
Photograph by Alexandra Miller-Knaack
The greatest benefit from Periscope has come from the connection and input from other artists as we create a more vibrant city through the arts. I would encourage anyone who
Megan Lightell
Megan Lightell is a Nashville-based visual artist whose work explores the complex, personal relationship humans have with land. Megan is a 2016 graduate of the Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training program and received the Pitch Perfect award at the culminating Pitch event. Find out more about Megan and her work at meganlightell.com Cornelia Fort Evening, Oil on canvas over panel, 48” x 48” x 2.5” 70
NASHVILLEARTS.COM
Terra Cotta Sculpture by Alan LeQuire
Janelle Reading, 14 x 7 x 11, terra cotta, unique
4304 Charlotte Ave • Nashville, TN 615-298-4611 • www.lequiregallery.com
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
Harry Whitver
VOLUNTARY
John Colter’s Hell, Oil on canvas, 24” x 48”
DISORIENTATION
WORDS Noah Saterstrom
Harry Whitver at abrasiveMedia February 3–March 3
H
arry Whitver’s second exhibition of abstract paintings at abrasiveMedia, Allusion and Analogue, opens on February 3 amidst the First Saturday crush in Wedgewood-Houston, bringing his particular amalgam of creative and commercial to the monthly art crawl. For decades, Whitver has been an accomplished trade designer specializing in technical, airbrush, and expository illustrations. All those years of handling a brush and pen are evident in these abstractions, different though their intentions may be from those of technical renderings. Whitver’s marks are confident and familiar, as if a descriptive line left the Design building to visit the Art building. The paintings appear trustworthy and competent and challenge the eye to find something recognizable from the "real" world that will help the brain decipher what these precise colors and urgently chiseled marks are rendered to say. The artist refers to the “distinct graphic signature” in these pieces,
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Skipping Hole, Oil on Canvas, 36” x 24”
and in some works, there is a clear reference, such as a landscape. Others are non-objective: all color and shape and shimmery movements. Arguably, Whitver’s show should be seen on its own merits, without the viewers’ foreknowledge of the artist’s lineage. However, I find myself speculating about the presence of his decades as a designer apparent in these images. I think: How are technical illustration and abstract painting alike? Or different? Are they opposites? Or siblings? In the work of a technical illustrator—work that necessitates, say, highly detailed cutaways of machinery—gestural improvisation is not welcome. Things need to be exact; no wandering off script. Variance is not only undesirable but treacherous. Precise visual description is required while painterly selfexpression is shown the door. Some of that rigid specificity is visible in these canvases. Commercial design projects involve stakeholders, clients, and investors, who need to see the images in stages of development and to understand the finished paintings. But get a group of abstract painters together and conversations about understandability don’t really come up.
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Radnor 4, Oil on canvas, 36” x 24”
There is an odd sharp, urgent quality to Whitver’s paintings; viewing them is like listening to someone having a conversation in a new language. He is already fluent in the language of precise and illustrative image-making—the visual idiom most like the way words are used for their descriptive power. But switching dialects so dramatically as to begin using paint more for its poetic peculiarities leaves the result almost rendered as though painted with an accent. The descriptive line is still present: There is a repeating arcing motion and parallel lines at a certain angle, which appear practiced, even unconscious. Other aspects are halting or meandering, and the effect is a bit like watching a pianist play the trumpet or a tennis player shoot pool. The fundamentals are understood, some gestures even carry over; but mastery has been (happily and intentionally) traded for the playful unknown. For the commercial designer, the vast majority of choices are made by the client and the scope of the project. Accomplished illustrators are able to let individuality come through even as they are in service of the client, but opportunities for self-expression are purposefully limited. In
abstraction, self-expression is primary. Decisions are made not by a client, but by the artist’s own temperament, influences, impulses—all those murky indescribables. Simply put, it’s easy to tell if an illustration of a machine part is right or wrong; it’s not so straightforward with abstraction. Whitver shared that when he retired from his illustration career he regrettably lost his critical community. From 1979 to his retirement, he worked in a room of other artists who shared ideas, praise, and analysis. They were on the same team, pointed in the same direction, helping each other make better images. But studio artists are often on their own, with their own motivations, changing direction suddenly. As Willem de Kooning said when the art world turned on Philip Guston when he returned to painting figures in a time of vehement abstraction: “What do they think, that we are all on a baseball team? Art is about freedom.” Amen. But sometimes freedom is disorienting.
Lauren / Golden Tree, Oil on canvas, 20” x 16”
“When there’s a linear process, you know where you are,” says Whitver. He describes creating illustrations for such clients as the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and National Geographic in a way that sounds almost relaxing. The trajectory is, and needs to be, predictable. The clients, the concept, the research, the development of an image, the revisions, the delivery of the final product. All the elements are controlled and understandable. After decades, those constraints become, in their own way, liberating. But the abstract painter decides while the process is underway, not only what is being made, but how to make what is being made. Not only that, both the how and the what are fluid and changeable. Of his current studio practice, Whitver says, “Working this way is not scary, but it is disorienting.” Is voluntary disorientation the same joyful curiosity that makes you want to travel, pick up a new instrument, try a new restaurant, learn a new language, move to a new town? This show of medium-scale oils on canvas looks like the work of an artist who is following that impulse. Or in the artist’s own words: “A guy having a hell of a good time doing abstract paintings.” Amen. na Allusion and Analogue: Painting as Exploration opens at abrasiveMedia on February 3 during Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston. A closing reception is slated for March 3, and after that the show will be on view for private showings until March 16. For more information, visit www.abrasivemedia.org. See more of Whitver’s work at www.whitver.com.
Good Vibrations, Oil on canvas, 36” x 36” NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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GUITAR LOVE FIND IT AT If I Perish, I Perish 2 | 51 x 57 inches | 2016
J. Todd greenE In th e fu ture , eve ryt hing is f ree A P a y W h a t Yo u Wa n t E x h i b i t T h r o u g h M a r c h 2 3 rd, 2 0 1 8 Galerie Tangerine is free and open Monday through Friday, 9 AM - 5 PM 615.454.4100 Located at 900 South Street, Suite 104
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J. Todd Greene
In the Future, Everything Is Free at Galerie Tangerine through March 23 WORDS Kathleen Boyle
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n February of 1918, artist Richard Huelsenbeck orated “The First Dada Manifesto” in Berlin, Germany, stating, “The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day.” A radical and demanding movement whose artists favored methods of appropriation to deliver sociopolitical critique, Dada thumbed its nose at the notion that civility motivated civilization via tough imagery—human forms cut from periodicals, contorted and fused with mechanical debris, became catalysts who question the effects of technological progress, while the montage medium nodded to post-consumer waste. Fast-forward exactly 100 years later and consider the work of Nashville artist J. Todd Greene. His paintings, sculptures, assemblages, and video that populate the solo exhibition In the Future, Everything Is Free channel the ethos of a similar rebellious Dada vein. Greene’s work, on view at Galerie Tangerine through March 23, is political without being overt, satirical without being obnoxious, as it investigates an interconnectedness between culture and individual. “Of great concern to me is the lack of humor in our nation’s current political climate,” Greene stated as he waxed poetic about the motivations behind his artistic practice. “I don’t want to name names [of specific politicians], but it is clear how attitudes affect the decisions of people who are not wholly cognizant of their own actions.” Organized into two series titled Accidental Exorcist and Harmony That Remained, Greene’s recent work channels observations and reactions to national and Nashville-specific events. They are accompanied by selections from a third collection titled Paw Paw Sermon, a series Greene completed years prior that was inspired by his late grandfather’s pictograph sermon aids. You Are Everyone in Your Dream, 2016, Mixed media on canvas, 42” x 33”
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One of the most striking qualities about the work of In the Future, Everything Is Free is its lack of readily available narrative despite the fact that Greene employs accessible abstraction. Meaning, the majority of his work is not nonrepresentational. He incorporates a number of recognizable elements—whether painted or affixed—throughout the surfaces of his compositions and heavily alters the appearances of said elements without disseminating original form. Greene isn’t interested in giving his viewers replicas of the various materials he selects for his artwork. That would be too absolute. Too easy. Rather, the necessity for observation and contemplation becomes clear. Greene’s art requires engaged, difficult, cognitive looking in order for the elements to gel. And perhaps the most satisfying reward from such exercise is the likely conclusion that no one interpretation will be the same. “If [the idea behind the work] is too obvious, people stop listening and/or retreat into their corners,” Greene stated. Thus, by establishing a platform for laborious visual concentration, Greene paradoxically celebrates the individual through the widespread relatability of recognizable images.
The Power to Charm, 2017, Mixed media on canvas, 37” x 37”
But this is not to assume that Greene had blind inspiration when making his art. On the contrary, one need only review the titles of his collections to confirm that explicit intent fueled the creative process. Sociopolitical on many levels, the artwork that Greene produces stems from a multitude of questions and concerns that he harbors for humankind’s present civil and spiritual state. Like Dadaists who turned discarded materials into art as commentary for war, industrialization, economic disparity, materialism, and influx of media inundation, so too does Greene’s mixed-media artwork combine a plethora of images and materials into singular compositions that posit concerns for the human condition. “When people have bad dreams, for example, they need to recognize that the mind is producing thoughts that are consequences of interactions,” Greene explained. “All of it is connected; all of us are connected.” Thus, works such as Is This Your Card, a large mixed-media composition that features the silhouette of a caricature bunny and highlights timeless childhood games, may at first appear to be playful—and it is!—but it also coveys elements of nostalgia, sadness, a sense of loss. Is This Your Card is dense in its layers of paint and objects. The previously mentioned silhouette is the result of negative space—a wash of green brushstrokes that fill the rabbit’s form indicates the surface prior to an application of white impasto. An accumulation of small toys—stray puzzle pieces and goodie-bag prizes—peppers the surface, the majority also camouflaged by a smattering of thick paint. It’s as though youth and the act of play become covered, hidden but not forgotten. “The ‘white trash’ assemblages are nods to artists like Rauschenberg and Thornton Dial who use what people throw away to both redeem materials and shine a light on
A Harmony That Remains (Lain York), 2017, Mixed media on canvas, 30” x 40”
our self-destructive ability to abuse resources and remain calm about it,” explained Greene. Greene has been living in Nashville for the past 43 years. He has witnessed the rapid population influx, surging development, increased living costs, and decreased number of weird local businesses. Not only does he see Nashville transforming into a city that is losing its character, but he also views it as a city whose changes exemplify the embrace of homogenization by the American populace, their consumer choices made out of convenience often at their own economic expense. Such observation also informs his creative process. “What could be more patriotic than conserving the very land we love and live in?” he asked. “Paying a fair wage for goods and services and supporting
Opposite page: A Harmony That Remains (Rusti Anne), 2017, Mixed media on canvas, 32” x 32”
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Strange Negotiations 2, 2016, Acrylic on paper, 48” x 48”
local communities by shopping local?” The Harmony That Remained series directly addresses the notion of local economy via the evolution of Nashville’s creative community, a community that also is experiencing increased hardship as affordable studio spaces are eliminated for profitable commercial and residential properties. Recognizing film writer and director Harmony Korine who had been a long-time staple in Nashville’s arts scene prior to relocating to Miami, the Harmony series is a collection of portraits of various Nashville artists—Rusti Anne, Myles Maillie, Lain York—who have maintained significant contributions to the city’s visual art footprint. Furthering this support of decorum within a local economy, Greene has also given all of the artwork in the exhibition a price of “pay what you want.” “There have been so many times when people have wanted to purchase one of my artworks, but the conversation ended when they found out the price,” Greene explained. “I don’t want money to be the reason why someone can’t own a work of art that they really want.” na In the Future, Everything Is Free by J. Todd Greene is on view at Galerie Tangerine through March 23. For more information, please visit www.galerietangerine.com. See more of Greene’s work at www.jtgreene.com.
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Strange Negotiations 1, 2016, Acrylic on paper, 48” x 48”
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ANDSOITGOES BY RACHAEL McCAMPBELL
Rachael McCampbell is an artist, teacher and writer who resides in Franklin, Tennessee. For more about her, please visit www.rachaelmccampbell.com.
Preliminary drawing
This is the first blocking in of acrylic color to get an idea of the composition of the painting.
At this point, I’m trying to figure out what sort of clouds will look best with the marshes.
Now that I have decided on the color scheme and types of clouds I’m going for, I switch to oils and begin finessing the final layers.
Commissioned Paintings
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Since I couldn’t show the client a final rendering, they had to have faith in me – that I would create a painting they would love.
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here are many things to consider when hiring an artist to paint your vision, but first and foremost, choose an artist because you like the way they paint. It’s probably not the best idea to hire an artist who paints classical portraits for an impressionistic landscape. Some artists can paint in many different styles, but as a general rule, I would advise working with an artist where you can see strong examples of their work and hire them for that. To protect both the artist and the client, there needs to be a clear contract outlining the expectations on both sides regarding size, medium, substrate, subject matter, colors, and style along with price, date of completion, and who is responsible to frame, transport, and install the art. I always ask for half up front and half upon completion. Now you can get to the fun part of creating!
Final: Whispered Prayers, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 52” x 76” x 1.5”
Know your own desires. Artists are perceptive but not mind readers. Offer samples of artwork that you like and elements of paintings that interest you. For example, I recently painted a 5’ x 7’ canvas of a marsh scene for a client in South Carolina. I asked them many questions; for instance, what is their favorite season and time of day? Do they like misty, monochromatic landscapes or bright sunsets? What is their color scheme? What room will the art hang in and how will it be lit? And most important, what sort of mood or feeling do they want to evoke? My clients understood how important it is for an artist to study their subject matter and flew me to Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina, to photograph the marshes at different times of day and to experience their environment. We talked a great deal about what they envisioned, and I showed them examples of my work and photographs to discuss what elements they liked. That trip helped me immensely to see and understand my clients’ world, their home where the art will be hung, and their vision. Since I’m a process-oriented painter (meaning I make decisions as I go as opposed to planning the whole painting in advance), I gave them a rough idea of the layout and
emailed them pictures of my progress at different points of completion. They responded that they liked where it was going. There needs to be a foundation of trust with art commissions. Since I couldn’t show them a final rendering, they had to have faith in me—that I would create a painting they would love. I painted the base of the painting in acrylics (to work out all the compositional issues and color palette) then moved on to finesse it with oil paints. After a few months, I was ready for a client visit. As an artist, all you can do is pray that your clients will approve what you’ve done, because to reverse all the hours you have put into the painting would be disheartening to say the least. I lit the painting, asked them to stand far enough away to see it properly, and waited. They immediately proclaimed, “We love it!” Whew . . . a sigh of relief. Painting a commissioned piece can be stressful or delightful. In this case it was a joy to paint something I loved and for clients who became friends and who were appreciative and understood the artistic process. I cannot wait to visit them and see our mutual creation in their gorgeous new home by the water, where I hope my art will be enjoyed for many years to come. na
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WORDS Sara Lee Burd
Karen Seapker Guardians in Painting Zeitgeist through February 24
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Photograph by Hunter Armistead
estled within a secret cluster of studios in East Nashville, Karen Seapker created her latest series of paintings on exhibit now at Zeitgeist Gallery. Sentinels is the result of the artist’s dedicated search for solutions to visual and conceptual issues she has wanted to resolve in her art. This series began with seeds of ideas she had while living in Brooklyn after graduate school at Hunter College. They have sporadically grown since she moved to Nashville nearly five years ago. Applying tremendous effort intellectually and technically, she arrived at a new visual language to make Sentinels. The content of the work comes from a more urgent place within the artist. Seapker’s art can be viewed in numerous ways, providing ample space for her biography, technique, feminism, politics, and theory to arise. Referencing Georges Didi-Huberman’s Confronting Images as the basis for considering art engagement and art making, Seapker explains the idea of approaching painting with a sense of “not knowledge.” She begins, “It’s this space of mystery, wonder, and what-if. I think I utilize that when creating a painting. Like, what is that? Oh, this could be this. It allows the work to just become.” She continues talking about reception: “I would love for viewers to be comfortable to allow their body and eyes to slowly derive meaning. People want to know why to like it, and I think that’s a shame.” Sentinels are those who keep lookout. A position often associated with knights and soldiers in warfare, Seapker’s guardians are all goddesses. She summons Artemis, Renenutet, and Aset to serve contemporary society. She explains, “I gave myself permission to make goddess figures, which part of me felt was cliché and second-wave feminism. I needed this though. It came from a personal need. I want my painting to come from that. It’s not just about formal relationships; I want there to be an essential need to make.”
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Cradle, 2016, Oil on canvas, 72” x 60”
Three events in particular inspired the artist to seek protection. Seapker was working on the series through the tumultuous Trump election and found herself making images that spoke to her deep desire to protect her two daughters from a world where sexism is tolerated. She clarifies, “I was so nervous about how changes with the current administration could affect their lives.” Physical danger arose when she and her husband witnessed a drive-by shooting the same week they brought their newborn daughter home from the hospital. It shook their family tremendously, and fear persists as Seapker notes that incidents of gun violence are unfortunately not uncommon these days. A third disturbance that urged her toward seeking shelter was grief associated with the ten-year anniversary of the death of a close family member. “Time inserted itself as a subject. I became aware of time and space in a way that shocks the system that anyone would know who has gone through a significant loss,” she explains. In a variety of ways, time and space play a significant role in Seapker’s art. The gradients of color used throughout her work indicate shifts within the temporal and spatial order. Often communicating with broad brushstrokes, she makes pathways across the canvas that become a history of her physical and emotional movement. Current pop culture elements such as the “The Future Is Female” t-shirt in Bearing or the Nike sneaker in Sybil tie the paintings to right now. The latter proves a fun reference to the Greek goddess Bearing, 2017, Oil on canvas, 96” x 44”
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Mountain Mother (For Kollwitz), 2017, Oil on canvas, 72” x 60”
of victory, and it also seems a grounding foot onto the real world. Foregoing a standard press release for this exhibition, Seapker sent a poem written by her husband, Bill Eberle. With phrases like, “Sitting in a chair. A head on your arm. A head that isn’t yours./A piece of you/outside of yourself./” and “From nothing/again/someone”, he creates impressions of the maternal context from which the work grew. About her own place in life she recalls, “Things changed after I had had kids and I understood the interdependent family that we are a part of and that different things move in different directions.” The artist suggests that motherhood may have brought about the most immediate influence for the current aesthetics and content of the work. She recalls, “I knew I needed to disrupt my figures, and I was watching my body go through these transformations. I was housing another human inside of me! Simultaneously that makes me feel really strong, and there are other times I have to disappear to pat a back in the middle of the night and become simply a rocking mechanism for my child. Thinking about my shifting physicality made these figures more interesting to me.” In Cradle, a highly abstracted enthroned goddess holds a child. Lines coming from the figure’s arms imply movement and suggest the act of soothing. Familiar images throughout
Hinge, 2017, Oil on canvas, 60” x 48”
history come to mind when seeing her representations of mother and child: Michelangelo’s tragic Pieta, the regal queen and heir, poignant photographs of real-life maternal moments, among others. In this work she exploits the paradox of representation and presentation to energetic ends. She communicates that paint is just paint while honoring the integrity of the content. The rock-like seat has a functional, believable supporting role for the figure, and yet it also falls away into loose brushstrokes on the canvas. The exaggerated arms and hands speak to the dynamic act of calming in general. She elaborates on cradling, “You hold a baby, but that’s also a gesture that you yourself have. You are comforting yourself, too. There’s a union in those gestures.” With the paintings in Sentinels, on their own or considered as a group, the artist accomplishes physical, emotional, and intellectual connections. The goddesses that fill the gallery serve as reminders of the protection against danger humans have sought throughout history. The bold color combinations, dynamic angular and curved lines, largerthan-life figures, and fragmented space capture attention immediately. Drawing the viewer in with unique aesthetic appeal, her compositions also stand up to analytical interpretation. With her sophisticated approach to artmaking both technically and conceptually in Sentinels, Seapker secures her place of prominence among Nashville’s artists.na Karen Seapker’s Sentinels will be on exhibition at Zeitgeist through February 24. For more information, visit www.zeitgeist-art.com.
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Nights A Photographic Essay
ashville
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS Kristine Potter
The first time I walked into the American Legion Post 82, on a famed Honky Tonk Tuesday Night, I was immediately taken with the atmosphere, the music, the fashion, and the dancing. I felt I had slipped into another era, despite occasional contemporary signifiers like flat-screen TVs and
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ATMs. I learned a similarly populated scene can occasionally be found at the Nashville Palace. I immediately thought back to some early (and lesser known) photographs by William Eggleston—portraits of the patrons of his favorite bars around Memphis in the late 70s. It is distinct and fantastic work for many reasons; one is his proximity to each subject, and another is the transformation of flash in an otherwise dark room. It’s all fashion and expression, and there is plenty of that here in Nashville. A few technical distinctions aside, I have set out to extend a similar attention and gesture toward the people who gather to help preserve and celebrate the culture of traditional country music. Thanks to everyone who has graciously allowed me to photograph them already or who will do so in the future.
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NASHVILLE REPERTORY THEATRE PRESENTS
Cups of Co-opportunity Saturday Morning, February 24 7:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Pick from over 300 cups made by Campus Artists Fill it up and enjoy the festivities! Gas Kiln Opening at 9:00 AM • Wood Kiln Opening at 9:30 AM Benefit for Borderless Arts TN (formally VSA)
1416 Lebanon Pike, Nashville, TN, 37210 • 615.242.0346 Hours: M-F 8am-4:30pm, Sat 10am-2pm
BY LYDIA R. DIAMOND FEBRUARY 10-24, 2018 TPAC’S JOHNSON THEATER TICKETS START AT $45 NASHVILLEREP.ORG | 615.782.4040
POCKETLINT BY LIZ CLAYTON SCOFIELD
Liz Clayton Scofield is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, thinker, all-around adventurer, and nomad. They hold an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. See their art at www.lizclaytonscofield.com.
Ashland City, Tennessee
Wandering, a creative process, when in a year, you double the times you’ve moved in a lifetime, you wonder if it will just keep going like this, that your feet are already itching to wander and you realize you’re distracting yourself from breathing and taking in the mountains, the green expanse that leaves you breathless, and you wonder why: you fell in love again on the drive here, and you wandered around a big-box store dragging your fingertips over objects you
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won’t buy but eventually someone else will, when they end up on the “priced to sell!” clearance shelf: “you will have a home one day,” I whisper to the toilet paper as I reject it. I spent 2017 wandering. I spent 2017 learning to wander. I lived in Atlanta, Wilmington, Ashland City, and Baltimore, for varying lengths of time. Home became a shell on my back, a state I took with me. I became of the world, in the world, detached but connected. In Atlanta, I learned to be alone. I’d bike aimlessly, wander around the outdoor shopping mall or IKEA or East Atlanta Village on a Friday night, rub up against the energy of others, swimming in their presence but removed, to learn to be permeable and present. In Wilmington, I wandered into a pack
Downtown Nashville
of artists where I found love, support, and exchange, through community and art. I found my way back to Tennessee and found an entirely new way to live: working on a farm, living in a tiny house, breathing in the trees on a hillside, and sitting in the quiet, alone in a radically different way. January 1, 2018, marked the end of my year of wandering. I signed a lease and moved into an apartment in Baltimore. My year of wandering led me here: seeds of love, art, community caught up in a gust, drifted away to a city I’d never even been, and planted, sprouted some magic beanstalk. And here I am. To rest and root and wander on, all the while. Capitalist notions of productivity teach that action leads to product. For artistic production, this could mean labor(skill/“craft”) x time = product, where labor is a visible and quantifiable expression of action. Wandering is a radical act of defiance against notions of productivity. Wandering is the liminal space of an artist’s (i.e. everyone’s) Real-Work, which is unquantifiable, invisible Magic: the beautiful mystery in finding Meaning through Meaninglessness. Wandering is the creative practice of Finding-Truth-When-Not-Looking-For-It, of Seeing-TheWorld-In-New-Ways, and Learning-Yourself/Becoming-YourBest-Self. After all, isn’t this the artist’s (i.e., everyone’s) work? Wandering is aimless, but not without aim. Set forth on some path, always subject to change, and continue: one foot in front of the other. Or: turn off all the lights and sit in a chair or on the floor in your home or someone else’s, close your eyes, and let your thoughts drift like clouds. Identify them as some animal and release them. No need to become attached to any particular Cloud Animal. They continue their infinite process of drifting and dissipating, equal in their states of Mattering/ Not-Mattering.
Farm, Ashland City, Tennessee
Wandering isn’t productive and yet is the most productive use of an artist’s (i.e., everyone’s) time. Wandering takes time. It is not the most efficient process to reach any particular outcome, but it is a process, and it does have outcomes. Wandering is not the direct route. It isn’t even a route. It just gets us somewhere, the places we never expected to go but needed to find ourselves all along or eventually or whatever, whenever. Wandering is riding a bike through a city, familiar or new, no maps but random turns, to find anywhere, somewhere, to stop and see, in a way you’ve never seen before, to feel a place, to get lost and find your way back, somehow. Wandering is wide-awake-howl-at-the-supermoon-atmidnight, alert, aware, and wondering, holding it all in a breath while letting go in an exhale, loving wholly with bright eyes. One. Foot. In. Front. Of. The. Other. I offer these words as an introduction to what will now be an ongoing conversation: Pocket Lint, the ball of dust and fabric and little imaginings stuck deep in my pocket that I rub together between the tips of my fingers. The friction of magic, or at least the imaginings of magic: the electric impulses in the brain that trigger something like art, something like magic, something like love, and something, anything, nothing at all. Welcome to Pocket Lint. These musings are documents of wandering: discoveries made while walking around a new city, or, getting lost in cracks in walls, or, singing softly to the moon at 2:00 a.m., or, staring into love’s eyes. Wandering, wondering, falling in love 10,000 times a day along the way. I’m looking forward to this journey with you. na
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ARTSMART
A monthly guide to art education
TENNESSEE ROUNDUP Tennessee Arts & Arts Education Conference Scheduled for June 2018 at APSU
The Tennessee Arts biennial statewide arts and arts education conference is planned for June 20 and 21 on the campus of Austin Peay State University (APSU) in partnership with the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA, or “seekah”). Conference activities will utilize several of the buildings on campus, including the new Art + Design Building. The Art + Design Building is a $21.3 million, 46,000-squarefoot building that features faculty office space, general purpose classrooms, a multifunction room, art studios, a photographic studio, a lecture hall, a general art gallery, and a student gallery. Accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, APSU’s Art + Design program offers studies in drawing, digital media, graphic design, illustration, painting, photography, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, and art education. The Department of Art + Design also houses the Goldsmith Press and Rare Type Collection, an exceptionally large collection of wood letterforms.
Photograph courtesy of State Photography
Since 1985, CECA has been providing students, the Clarksville community, and the Middle Tennessee region with engaging experiences through the Art + Design, Music, Theatre & Dance, and Creative Writing programs at APSU. CECA brings both emerging and prominent artists from around the nation to Clarksville each year to present concerts and lectures, work directly with students in master classes and workshops, and introduce innovative ways of making or exploring art. CECA also provides undergraduate students with graduatelevel experiences and internships that prepare them for the workplace or graduate school. In addition, CECA provides the
by Ann Talbott Brown Director of Arts Education Tennessee Arts Commission
“Both the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at APSU have a long history of elevating the arts in our state, so it’s thrilling for both organizations to collaborate in hosting this conference. I’m especially excited for attendees to visit APSU’s state-of-the-art facilities, meet some of our outstanding faculty, and learn more about CECA’s significance as the only state-designated Center of Excellence in the area of the creative arts,” said Dr. Janice Crews, CECA’s Director. As in the past, the conference will bring together arts administrators, educators, and artists for a full two days of learning and sharing around the theme of Design Thinking, an approach that can be used in all industries to consider and resolve a variety of issues. Additional professional development opportunities will include best practices, strategies in arts management and education, lesson demonstrations, collaborative work, networking, and more. Special Opportunity Grants will be offered beginning March 1, 2018, to those who want to attend the conference. The grant will be applied to conference costs and is offered on a first-come first-served basis. The commuter rate for the conference is $150, and the non-commuter rate is $200, which includes campus accommodations. Registration will open March 15. My co-chairs Suzanne Lynch and Nieya Wallace Murray and I hope you will mark your calendars and plan to join us in Clarksville. For more information, please visit our website at www.tnartscommission.org.
Swoon (visual artist), visiting artist lecture
Photograph courtesy of CECA
Jay E. Raphael (actor, director, and producer) talking with theatre and dance students
Photograph courtesy of CECA
talented faculty of the arts departments at APSU with research opportunities to enhance their professional growth.
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ARTSMART
Emma Crownover: Scholastic Art National Honors
“My class was a very diverse group of people. We could select our area of concentration, but we had to create twelve pieces. It takes the full year to develop and articulate your thesis,” Crownover explains. “I was just creating pieces [in photography] and seeing where it would take me. I’m definitely happy with the result.” Her signature photograph, Censored, was part of her senior year AP 2-D design series, accompanied by eleven other pieces within the same theme. With her art teacher, Shayna Snider, as her advisor throughout the process, Crownover submitted several pieces to the prestigious Scholastic Art Competition at Cheekwood last February. The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, recognized as “the nation’s longest-running and most prestigious scholarship and recognition initiative for creative teens in grades 7–12 has, since 1923, fostered creativity and talent and counts among its notable list
of alumni such names as Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Sylvia Plath, Ken Burns, Mozelle Thompson, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Redford, and Zac Posen. Featuring a nude subject, Censored challenged the norm for student art, risking rejection by jurors. “I just went for it,” she says. The piece captured a Gold Key Award in photography and automatically moved on to the national competition where it won a National Gold Medal. Weeks after graduation, Crownover was invited to Carnegie Hall in New York for the medal ceremony and to see her piece installed for exhibition along with other 2017 national medalists. “Wild” is her descriptive word for the Carnegie experience. “It was great to be behind the scenes and see how they put the event together, and then to actually be onstage for the show,” she says. “The hall itself is so formal, with lots of levels of balconies.” Recently, Crownover learned that Censored will be part of a national tour.
“Being validated like that is important, especially for young artists,” Crownover says. “It’s a big boost to your confidence.” Crownover is currently taking a “gap year” in Spain, working as an au pair for a Spanish family. In the fall, she will enroll in Scripts College, a liberal arts women’s college in Claremont, California.
by DeeGee Lester Director of Education The Parthenon
Photograph by Drew Cox
For high school students, the choice to stretch themselves intellectually and academically by taking AP (Advanced Placement) classes can unleash tremendous potential and lead to astonishing opportunities. Two years ago, a position as yearbook photographer persuaded Hume Fogg Academic Magnet student Emma Crownover to apply for a senior AP art class.
ARTSMART
by DeeGee Lester
In the 1920s, back-to-back radio programming of classical opera and country music inspired WSM Barn Dance host George D. Hay to christen the iconic nickname “Grand Ole Opry.” But the connections between the two genres run deeper, including universality of themes, the emotional connections of music and text, and the use of storytelling as the powerful foundation for songs.
Photograph by Ron Baker
Nashville Opera and CMHF: The Enchanted Forest
From the 2017 Education Tour, The Three Little Pigs
On Saturday, February 17, at 10 a.m., Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum partners with Nashville Opera as host to Anna Young’s The Enchanted Forest. In a “choose your own adventure” format, children explore opera basics while lending a hand in building an exciting operatic journey to save the enchanted forest from a fire-breathing dragon.
experience of our visitors through storytelling. Our intent is to educate and inspire people of all ages,” said Ali Tonn, Director of Programming and Education at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “We are thrilled to host The Enchanted Forest and to be able to offer this creative experience to students and families.”
Each performance depends on audience participation as kids make selections including the main character (usually performed in opera by a tenor or soprano), and a best friend or sidekick (either a mezzo soprano or a baritone). Young, the Director of Education at Nashville Opera, wrote the basic storyline and lyrics based on some of the most iconic music in opera, including Bizet, Mozart, and Gilbert & Sullivan.
Within the walls of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, The Enchanted Forest may connect in the minds of children the creativity, musicality, and storytelling of two musical genres. For more information, visit www.nashvilleopera.org.
She points out that the music is specifically tailored to fit each voice part. In the second half of the opera, the appearance of the dragon is always preceded by Georges Bizet’s music from Carmen. Because the audience is casting the characters, families can see several performances but never exactly the same production as the show is presented in coming months at sites throughout the community. (For dates and locations, see www.nashvilleopera.org/inyourcommunity/.)
The delightful sets for the production were created by Young’s mother, Tina Steenerson. Each panel in the 8x20-foot set is a colorized scene reminiscent of pages from a coloring book and featuring a castle as well as characters including a unicorn and fairies. The panels have also been replicated as separate coloring book pages which will be sent out to schools before the February 17 performance. “The programs we curate and host at the museum enrich the
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Courtesy of Nashville Opera
“The Enchanted Forest is especially exciting because it gives the opportunity for students to be in on the creation of every show. I loved reading choose-your-own-adventure stories growing up because I felt like part of the action. It’s the perfect way to get students engaged from the beginning and a great way to share the magic of beautiful operatic music all the while,” says Young.
ARTSMART Going to the homes of artists is pretty much my most favorite thing ever. It’s like stepping into their inspiration board, their creative mind, and/or their beautiful thought process. Shana’s entire home was touched by her creativity: felted lamp shades, woven wall pieces, organic felted sculptures, some huge, some small. I must have done several 360-degree turns in every room, finding something new and amazing each time. Shana’s work spoke to me on so many levels. First was her color palette. In her back yard, Shana dyes a lot of her wool, sometimes in long strands, which produces a beautiful tie-dye effect. The colors and textures of her pieces remind me of chalk pastel drawings: soft, subtle, and gorgeous. Second are her shapes. Shana’s pieces, from her jewelry to her sculpture, are fun, funky, and whimsical. Think Tim Burton meets Dr. Suess. They leave you tilting your head, smiling, and wanting to see more.
Shana Kohnstamm
Video Field Trip to Shana Kohnstamm’s Studio
I was so excited when I left Shana’s home. She’d taught me so many new and amazing techniques that I cannot wait to share with my students, both young and old. And it left me with this thought: Just when you think you know something, you don’t. You’re just scratching the surface. With everything in life, there’s always so much you can learn if you are open to it. Thank you so much, Shana, for that lesson! See more of Shana Kohnstamm’s work at www.shanakohnstamm.com.
A couple of years ago, 2013 to be exact, I discovered the wonderful world of needle felting. If you aren’t familiar, it’s when you take wool roving, which is cleaned and combed wool that closely resembles cotton candy, and attach it to a fabric surface by stabbing it with a sharp tool. That’s right, you stab the wool. The needle felting tool used is not only razor sharp but also barbed, which helps to attach the roving to the fabric surface and further felt it. Think of it like collage but instead of adding glue to the back of one paper and sticking it to your masterpiece, the stabbing and forcing of fibers to the surface works as glue. Trust me, after a long day, it’s just as cathartic as it sounds. I have been needle felting sweaters, coats, shirts, you name it for quite some time, and I even fancy myself as a wee bit of an expert. I’ve taught several classes and pretend to know what I’m talking about. However, it wasn’t until I met the artist Shana Kohnstamm that I discovered just how much I have to learn and the endless possibilities of this craft.
by Cassie Stephens Art Teacher Johnson Elementary
Photograph by Juan Pont Lezica
I first met Shana about a year ago when I was interviewing the artist Doris Wasserman. Doris introduced us knowing that we both have a strong passion for fiber arts. I asked Shana if she’d be interested in my recording a video of her in her studio for my students and other artists and she happily agreed. Not too long after that, I visited her in her home studio in Nashville.
STUDIOTENN
Doubt: A Parable |
February 15–25 Photograph by MA2LA
Jamison Theater
Brent Maddox as Father Flynn in Doubt: A Parable
Marguerite Hall plays Sister Aloysius in Doubt: A Parable
“W
hat do you do when you’re unsure?” So asks John Patrick Shanley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Doubt: A Parable, presented by Studio Tenn at the Jamison Theater in the Factory at Franklin February 15–25. When an unthinkable accusation is leveled against Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius realizes that the only way to get justice is to create it herself. This Tony Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated drama not only raises questions, but causes audiences to explore who they are and who they become in the face of adversity. Doubt: A Parable stars Marguerite Hall as Sister Aloysius, Brent Maddox as Father Flynn, Emily Landham as Sister James, and Aleta Myles as Mrs. Muller. Nathaniel McIntyre directs, with set and costume designs from Studio Tenn’s Artistic Director Matt Logan. The play was first performed Off Broadway in 2004, featuring Tennessee native Cherry Jones in a Tony Award-winning performance as Sister Aloysius. Shanley directed a 2008 film adaptation that starred Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. All four were nominated for Oscars. na
Evening performances are at 7 p.m. with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. For tickets, visit www.StudioTenn.com.
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POET’SCORNER
*lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring ring with the harmonies of Liberty* —James Weldon Johnson
Streetlight tends to paint The night like a waving flag. Sometimes, in the quietest moments, I imagine what it would feel like If my skin wasn’t so heavy. If it didn’t follow me like a lost shadow. I was told that this body is a triangular trade tragedy. I’ve been swallowing white lies Which are defined as trivial, But on July 12th, 2016 A black man was hanged And I caught my tongue like a 200-year-old Broken promise. So I’ve been collecting words like “Hope” and “fire.” Lighting sparks in my belly Till my skin illuminates the stillness. This light will outshine their Tiki torches and burning books. Healing like a violin when the ashes Lick my skin. Racism is rarely the sharp toothed boogeyman, The strange fruit monkey Or the shining armor. It is the pie-baking neighbor or The cookout dad who makes the Best burgers in town. Racism is the Coachella rap music And dreadlocked celebrities, But only silence when another bullet George Zimmerman’d its way into His back...four times. Racism is this ... silence
Photograph by Aleah Mae
BY HAVILAND WHITING Haviland Whiting is the 2018 Nashville Youth Poet Laureate and a sophomore at Harpeth Hall High School. Learn more at www.southernword.org
It is quiet like a pen drilled in a welfare office. Racism is the gentrification that will Destroy the welfare offices. This never has been a white or black problem. It has never been BET vs MTV, But rather we are a nation Watching rather than seeing. If we did, we’d see Puerto Rico with hope extinguished. We’d see blood on the hands of Syrians, And that we’ve caused it. If we did, we’d see that some children Are too afraid to take the bus to a school That exploits innocence like mass media manufactured self esteem. The world is not a broken thing, We are the broken things. I have seen the future. And in it, there are still broken people And the television sets with broken screens. there are also hands clasped together Like a barricade to hate. There is also religion and the quiet moments Of solidarity like the gospel. I have seen the future, and in it I wear this skin like the streetlight, quiet night masterpiece it truly is. I have seen the future, and in it We are in love. In love with the ability to feel something So human like connectedness. The solution to racism will never end racism. We, as a nation, must stop focusing On things ending and instead Focus on beginning. Begin love, begin awareness, Begin caring until your heart rips apart At the seams. King said, hate cannot drive out hate; Only love can do that. So, hate like no one is watching Love like the World is.
Background photograph by Carla Ciuffo, carlaciuffo.art NASHVILLEARTS.COM 105
THEATRE
Handmade: Friendships Famous, Infamous, Real, and Imagined by Jim Reyland is available at Amazon.com. Purchase an autographed copy and support a 2018 high school tour of his award-winning play STAND at writersstage.com. jreyland@audioproductions.com
BY JIM REYLAND
The Nashville Rep Winds Up a New Play. Smart Play.
Smart People
O
ne of the hardest things to do in the playwriting business is to write your play directly inside current events. By that I mean within the last twenty years. Without the benefit of history’s wiser perspective, when you don’t give time, time to percolate, you run the risk of audiences discounting it with “Just saw that on the news.” No matter how compelling the narrative, they may choose to wait for a version with a comfortably long view. While contemporary plays stand and make a statement, they tend to burn quickly. We all want worthy plays to last, and if the time doesn’t resonate, the play could be lost until its relevance comes back around. Thankfully, playwright Lydia R. Diamond hasn’t waited for that. Nashville Repertory Theatre kicks off 2018 with a wonderful new play that took that chance and beat the odds. Smart People is the fourth show of what has already been a strong season for the Rep. Smart People previews February 8–9 and runs February 10–24 at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. In Diamond’s play, set just before Obama’s election, the volatile dynamics of talking about race intertwine with the romantic interactions among four racially diverse Harvard intellectuals. A physician, an actress, a psychologist, and a neurobiologist who is studying the brain’s response to race (is it genetic?) all find that discussions about race can be fraught, even among friends who are well educated and socially aware. With barbed wit, this smart play explores the inescapable nature of racism and other tricky topics. Directed by guest director Jon Royal, the cast includes David Ian Lee, Christine Lin, Tamiko Robinson Steele, and Shawn Whitsell. Jon offers this insight about his experience working with this strong cast and the impactful new play Smart People.
“I want people to know that they’re about to enter a space that’s very much about this very moment that we’re collectively experiencing as a culture. The conversations, and failed attempts at connection that they will observe, are not so distant from our own clumsy day-to-day struggles with the ideas of race, love, identity, and coexistence.” Smart People director Jon Royal
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“The more that I work with this piece, the more that I can see how much these four individuals are really trying, in every aspect of their lives. Their best efforts can’t negate humility and basic listening, though. Being smart doesn’t mean that you can avoid the messiness that accompanies sharing space with other human beings.” na You owe it to yourself to settle into Smart People with its smart words and talented cast. The performances will be held in the Johnson Theater at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $25 for previews and start at $45 for the regular run. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit www.nashvillerep.org or call TPAC box office at 615-782-4040. Also, don’t forget to join the Rep for Inherit the Wind, March 24 through April 21, and the Ingram New Works Festival, May 9–19.
SOUNDINGOFF
Fine Art & Gifts
by Olga Alexeeva & Local Artists
BY JOSEPH E. MORGAN
Photograph by Michael F. Whitney
www.OGalleryArt.com
Upon These Shoulders at Fisk On Thursday, January 11, the contemporary music ensemble Intersection joined the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Met Singers, and an ad-hoc Community Chorus at the Fisk University Chapel to perform Upon These Shoulders, the second annual concert dedicated to the memory and inspiration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Featuring several premieres as well as traditional works, the concert managed to celebrate the life of MLK even as it pointed to the ongoing challenges we now face in seeking a just society. The concert opened with the Met singers performing the Liberian chant “I-She-O-Lu-Wah” under an arrangement by the ensemble’s director Margaret Campbelle-Holman, followed by the premiere of Cedric Dent’s arrangement of “My Lord, What a Morning.” Contralto Gwendolyn Brown then stepped onto stage and gave an exhilarating performance of Hannibal Lokumbe’s “If I Have to Die” from Fannie Lou Hamer, received by standing ovation. As the stage was reset, composer Joel Thompson introduced his Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, a riveting composition modeled on Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, and contemporary reality stepped in. Thompson took the text of his work from artist Shirin Barghi’s #lastwords project which memorializes the last words of victims of police shootings. Rich, poignant, and powerful, Thompson’s composition served as an excellent reminder that there is still so much work to be done. After intermission, the Fisk Jubilee Singers performed Hal Johnson’s “Ain’t Got Time to Die” and three negro spirituals with great eloquence. The concert ended with the world premiere of Jonathan Bailey Holland’s I, Too, Sing. Commissioned for this performance by Intersection, Holland’s six-movement work explores “race, equity and youth . . . carrying hope and a vision for the future.” A much more optimistic message than Thompson’s, Holland’s work was a perfect end to an evening of beauty, shock, and inspiration. Upon These Shoulders provides a powerful, collaborative, and communitybased way to celebrate a great man’s life.
Olga Alexeeva, Stand Out, Mixed media, 24” x 24”
Olga Alexeeva, artist and owner, is available for commissioned works for home and business Art classes by Olga are conducted weekly
615-416-2537
Open 7 Days a Week • Monday-Saturday 10-6 • Sunday 11-5 1305 Clinton St. Ste. 120 • Nashville, TN 37203
Like What You See? Subscribe to Nashville Arts Magazine $45 for 12 issues
www.nashvillearts.com
615-383-0278
Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet
Saturday, February 3 • 8 p.m. • Ingram Hall The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet continues to astonish audiences with its range of expression, tonal spectrum, and conceptual unity. This program includes three fantasies by Mozart as well as works by Pavel Haas and Henri Tomasi. Presented with gratitude to Mark Dalton for his generous support of the Blair School
2400 Blakemore Ave. Nashville, TN 37212
NASHVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE EVERYONE HAS A STORY
MOCKINGBIRD Adapted for the stage by Julie Jensen Based on the book Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
March 1 - 18, 2018 NASHVILLECT.ORG TICKETS 615-252-4675 or nashvillect.org All performances take place at The Martin Center 25 Middleton Street Nashville, TN 37210 FREE PARKING ON SITE
Learn More at a Free Lunchtime Event Bring your lunch to the Tennessee State Museum and enjoy an educational program. All of the programs are FREE and begin at 12:15 p.m. in front of the stage. Thursday, February 15 Tennessee’s African American Musical Heritage with TSM curators Graham Perry & Mike Bell
Thursday, March 15 Mortimer May, a Tennessee Holocaust Hero with Jack May
B. B. King (1925-2015) the “King of the Blues,” courtesy of Tennessee State Photographic Services.
Mortimer May from 1961. Courtesy Jack May family archives.
Thursday, April 19 The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Ms. Linda Wynn, assistant director at the Tennessee Historical Commission
Thursday, April 26 The History of Tennessee State Museum with TSM Director of Collections Dan Pomeroy
Button commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Tennessee State Museum Collection.
Portrait painting of Andrew Jackson on the battlefield at New Orleans by Ralph E.W. Earl, finished in 1817. Tennessee State Museum Collection.
Tennessee State Museum | 505 Deaderick Street | 615.741.2692 | Visit tnmuseum.org for more information
Jerry Fink and Edie Maney at Tinney Contemporary
Jon Buko at The Rymer Gallery
ARTSEE
Billy and Makenzie Cartwright at Tinney Contemporary
Hali McCurdy and Marshall West at Julia Martin Gallery
At Zeitgeist
ARTSEE
ARTSEE
Molly Horstman and Carol Mode at Tinney Contemporary
Avery at The Arts Company
Margaret Hood and Kriste Johnson at Blend Studio
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Photographer Devi Sanford speaking about her work for Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary
Photograph by Lyndy Rutledge
Sepi Rhansari and Jesse Bellamy at The Rymer Gallery
Bradley Rath and Kalee Smyth at The Rymer Gallery
John Toomey and Shalini Gupta at Julia Martin Gallery
Winterim Harpeth Hall students at Tinney Contemporary
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN JACKSON
ARTSEE
Franny Levin and Nate Barnes at Zeitgeist
ARTSEE
Christopher and Zoe Jones at The Rymer Gallery
ARTSEE
Candice Mills and Tim Crowder at David Lusk Gallery
Heather Magann, Briana Burt, and Sydney Johnson at Julia Martin Gallery
Margaret Powell at The Rymer Gallery
Alexandra Jo Sutton and Carriga Camp at COOP Gallery
Patrick Nitch and Sara Lee Burd at Zeitgeist
Derrick Meads, E.C. Gerety-Crippen and Kevin Gerety-Crippen at David Lusk Gallery
Vesna Povlovic and Celeste Jones at Zeitgeist
NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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AASHVI N
Art Up Nashville is a comprehensive fine art service provider dedicated to the professional installation of items such as art and antique objects, heavy mirrors, posters and photographs. No job is too big or small. Our staff consists of museum-trained art handlers who for years have regularly handled precious, irreplaceable items of all classifications for museums and galleries as well as commercial and residential clients. Additionally, our staff is made up of artists who possess a special appreciation for art and whose refined aesthetic sensibilities optimize the clients’ experience.
FYEYE TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY BY HUNTER ARMISTEAD Instagram: @hunterarmistead
A Frame of Film, A Line of Words, Capture the Creative Culture of Our City
Ciona Rouse From Vantablack (Third Man Books, 2017)
www.ArtUpNashville.com
The Poet Posing Nude
duncan@artupnashville.com 615-975-7577
Be not a body. Be not a brain or the marching band in your chest. Be not limbs. Be red canna lily. Be not stretched or stretching Be not your cold nipples turned to blades ready to slice. Be ready if someone needs slicing. Be not black. Only. Be orange and green and brown, which is purple. Be blue. Be line and the down slope of shadow around your torso. Be not torso. Be obtuse angles. Be round at your core. Be crowned at your core. Honor the peacock expanding in your belly. Be not teeth. Be doric columns in your mouth. Let your shin shine your skin electric. But be not skin. Be not tendon. Do not attach to yesterday’s bones. Be not muscle. Be charcoal, be ash. Be able to be buried. As the seed of a willow. Be roots reaching. Be index fnger seducing the goldfnch. Leap from the page like its song. But be not song. Be still. Be drawn. —Ciona Rouse www.cionarouse.com, Instagram:cionar
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
Up
Tommy Emmanuel performing on Music City Roots
February may be a short month, but we’ve packed it with entertaining, informative programming. This month we are premiering the latest documentary in our Citizenship series. A Time of Joining looks at the benevolent societies and fraternal organizations that formed after the Civil War and provided a social safety net long before the advent of Social Security. This original NPT production airs Thursday, Feb. 22, at 8 p.m., with an encore presentation on Sunday, Feb. 25, at 9:30 p.m.
Featured Artists The 10th season of Afropop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange airs Tuesdays at 11 p.m. with new host actor Nicholas L. Ashe. A young percussionist and artist Lonnie Holley are among the subjects of three short films on Feb. 13. On Feb. 27, 10 Days in Africa: A Home Movie, chronicles filmmaker Regi Allen’s journey to Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and Senegal. Our nod to awards season is AARP Movies for Grownups Awards, airing Friday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. on Great Performances. Helen Mirren, whose PBS
credits include the role of Jane Tennison in the original Prime Suspect series, receives the 2017 Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award during this celebration of films that appeal to discerning movie fans. Articulate with Jim Cotter continues Sundays at 10:30 p.m. This month’s shows feature former DEVO frontman Mark Mothersbaugh and textile designer Liz Casella (Feb. 11), as well as choreographer—and MacArthur Fellow—Kyle Abraham and pianist Ruth Slenczynsja, the last living link to Sergei Rachmaninov (Feb. 18).
World Tour You may have first “met” Samantha Brown as she visited hotels on her Travel Channel show; she has since taken viewers across Europe, China, and Latin America via her TV shows. Brown now comes to public television with Samantha Brown’s Places to Love. This new show takes the down-to-earth host from Bern to Brooklyn, Shanghai to the Texas Hill Country seeking out little-known haunts. Watch Sundays at 12:30 p.m. on NPT; Mondays at 7 p.m. on NPT2.
Architecture combines art and engineering, especially in the structures seen in Impossible Builds, airing Wednesdays, Feb. 7 through 21, at 9 p.m. The series reveals innovative solutions to finding new places and ways to build, including Zaha Hadid’s striking 1000 Museum in Miami (Feb. 7) and an ambitious floating resort in Dubai (Feb. 14).
Music Cities Music City Roots returns to Fridays at 7 p.m. this month. This season’s guests include Gillian Welch (Feb. 9) and guitarist Tommy Emmanuel (Feb. 23). Front and Center continues Fridays at 11 p.m. Guests include Miranda Lambert (Feb. 23) in a CMA Songwriters special recorded at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works last fall and featuring songwriters from Lambert’s Weight of These Wings album. Of course Nashville isn’t the only city with a rich musical heritage; there’s always Pittsburgh. We Knew What We Had: The Greatest Jazz Story Never Told, airing Monday, Feb. 19, at 11:01 p.m., introduces Steel City natives George Benson, Billy Eckstine, Art Blakey, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, and others. The program also considers the social conditions and historical events that fueled that creative output.
Twelve-year-old jazz drummer Kojo Odu Roney from the documentary Kojo on AfroPop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange
Courtesy of Black Public Media
Photograph by Trevor Leighton
Our free Indie Lens Pop-Up screenings continue through May. Find more information at wnpt.org/events and watch Independent Lens on Monday nights on NPT.
Helen Mirren, recipient of the 2017 Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award
Photograph by Jacqueline Justice
Arts Worth Watching
Show your love and support for NPT by making a donation at wnpt.org. Encore presentations of many of our shows are broadcast on NPT2; enjoy 24/7 children’s programming on NPT3 PBS Kids.
February 2018 Weekend Schedule 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30
Saturday *
am Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood Dinosaur Train Bob the Builder Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Pinkalicious & Peterrific Splash and Bubbles Curious George Nature Cat Sewing with Nancy Sew It All Garden Smart Martha Bakes Nick Stellino: Storyteller in the Kitchen Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television noon America’s Test Kitchen pm Cook’s Country Kitchen Pati’s Mexican Table Lidia’s Kitchen Simply Ming Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting Best of Joy of Painting Woodsmith Shop American Woodshop This Old House Ask This Old House A Craftsman’s Legacy PBS NewsHour Weekend Ray Stevens CabaRay Nashville
This Month on Nashville Public Television
*Beginning Feb. 24
5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 6:00 6:30
Sunday
A film by Stanley Nelson and Marco Williams.
am Sid the Science Kid Dinosaur Train Sesame Street Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Splash and Bubbles Curious George Nature Cat Tennessee’s Wild Side Volunteer Gardener Tennessee Crossroads Nature Washington Week noon To the Contrary pm Samantha Brown’s Places to Love Dream of Italy Travel Detective with Peter Greenberg Globe Trekker Changing Seas Two for the Road Rudy Maxa’s World Rick Steves’ Europe Antiques Roadshow PBS NewsHour Weekend British Antiques Roadshow
Monday, Feb. 19, 8 pm
Weekday Schedule 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 6:00
am Classical Stretch Happy Yoga with Sarah Starr Ready Jet Go! Cat in the Hat Nature Cat Curious George Pinkalicious & Peterrific* Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Splash and Bubbles Sesame Street Super Why! Dinosaur Train Peg + Cat noon Sesame Street pm Splash and Bubbles Curious George Pinkalicious & Peterrific* Nature Cat Wild Kratts Wild Kratts Odd Squad Odd Squad Arthur NPT Favorites PBS NewsHour *Beginning Feb. 19
A Time for Joining
Pinkalicious & Peteriffic
Benevolent societies form after the Civil War.
A new kids’ series based on the best-selling books.
Premieres Thursday, Feb. 22, 8 pm
Beginning Monday, Feb. 19
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow New Orleans, Hour 2. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Jacksonville, Hour 1. 9:00 Independent Lens Winnie. The multilayered journey of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Looking Over Jordan An NPT original. The African-American experience during and after the Civil War.
7:00 Antiques Roadshow 7:00 Tutankhamun New Orleans, Hour 3. Episode 4. Conclusion. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow 8:00 Victoria on Jacksonville, Hour 2. Masterpiece 9:00 POV The King Over the Do Not Resist. The Water. Victoria and militarization of Albert decamp to U.S. police forces. Scotland. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 9:00 Queen Elizabeth’s 11:00 BBC World News Secret Agents 11:30 The Education of Part 3. The Harvey Gantt Gunpowder Plot. The first 10:00 Make48 African-American Pitching the accepted to a white prototypes. college in S.C. 10:30 Articulate with Jim Cotter 11:00 Independent Lens
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7:00 Tutankhamun Episode 3. 8:00 Victoria on Masterpiece Faith, Hope & Charity. The queen learns of the horrific famine in Ireland. 9:00 Queen Elizabeth’s Secret Agents Part 2. Enemies within Elizabeth I’s court. 10:00 Make48 The teams test their prototypes. 10:30 Articulate with Jim Cotter 11:00 Independent Lens I Am Another You.
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7:00 We’ll Meet Again Heroes of 9/11. A comforting stranger; a fellow chaplain. 8:00 The Bombing of Wall Street: American Experience The unsolved 1920 crime that launched J. Edgar Hoover’s career. 9:00 Frontline The Gang Crackdown. The MS-13 gang. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:01 Afropop Three short films.
7:00 We’ll Meet Again Lost Children of Vietnam. A woman searches for her father; a man for his rescuer. 8:00 The Gilded Age: American Experience The disparities between late-19thcentury industrialists and their workers. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:01 Afropop Black Panther Woman. A woman remembers Australia’s Aboriginal Black Panther chapter.
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. 7:00 Animals with Cameras 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads A Nature miniseries. 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 NOVA 8:00 The Roosevelts: Great Escape at An Intimate History Dunkirk. A Strong and Active Archaeologists Faith (1944-1962). and divers recover FDR dies; Eleanor remains of World War II continues her ships and planes. humanitarian work. 9:00 Impossible Builds 10:00 BBC World News Europe in the Desert. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:00 BBC World News 11:00 Victoria on 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Masterpiece 11:00 Austin City Limits The King Over the Dan Auerbach; Water. Shinyribs.
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7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History The Rising Road (1933-1939). FDR’s New Deal tackles the Depression; Eleanor rejects the traditional role of first lady. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:01 Victoria on Masterpiece Entente Cordiale.
Thursday
7:00 Animals with Cameras 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads A Nature miniseries. 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 NOVA 8:00 The Roosevelts: An First Face of America. Intimate History The 13,000-year-old The Common Cause skeleton of a (1939-1944). FDR’s prehistoric teenager. third term coincides 9:00 Impossible Builds with WWII; then he runs The Scorpion Tower. for a fourth. A complex structure 10:00 BBC World News requires a new 10:30 Last of Summer Wine building material. 11:00 Victoria Season 2 10:00 BBC World News Faith, Hope & Charity. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits LCD Soundsystem.
Tuesday, Feb. 13, 8pm
Wednesday
Sundays through Feb. 25, 8 pm
Tuesday
The Bombing of Wall Street: American Experience
Monday
Victoria on Masterpiece
Sunday
Nashville Public Television’s Primetime Evening Schedule
February 2018 2
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7:00 Music City Roots Live Southern Avenue; Miss Tess; Band of Heathens. 8:00 Maya Angelou: American Masters And Still I Rise. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Front and Center Beth Hart.
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7:00 Lawrence Welk Show Broadway Musicals. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 A Place to Call Home No Other Love. 9:17 A Place to Call Home Answer Me, My Love. 10:03 Music Voyager Peru: Paracas. 10:30 The Songwriters Guy Clark. 11:00 Globe Trekker Tough Boats: The Nile, Egypt.
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7:00 Lawrence Welk Show Salute to Nat King Cole. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 A Place to Call Home A Kiss to Build a Dream On. 9:17 A Place to Call Home What Your Heart Says. 10:03 Music Voyager 10:32 The Songwriters Mac Davis. 11:00 Globe Trekker Art Trails of the French Riviera.
Saturday
7:00 Music City Roots Live 7:00 Lawrence Welk Show Liz Longley; Maureen Mardi Gras. Murphy; Gillian Welch. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:00 I’ll Have What 8:30 A Place to Call Home Phil’s Having The Ghosts of Barcelona. Tapas, Christmas Past. vermouth and jamón. 9:17 A Place to Call Home 9:00 I’ll Have What Auld Lang Syne. Phil’s Having 10:03 Music Voyager Los Angeles. Visits 10:30 The Songwriters with Martin Short Steve Cropper. and Allison Janney. 11:00 Globe Trekker 10:00 BBC World News Food Hour: 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Provence, France. 11:00 Front and Center Mike + The Mechanics.
7:00 Music City Roots Live Raul Malo. 8:00 Great Performances Nas Live from the Kennedy Center: Classical Hip-Hop. 9:00 I’ll Have What Phil’s Having Hong Kong. Century eggs. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:01 Front and Center CMA Songwriters Series Presents: Luke Combs and Kane Brow. .
Friday
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Wednesdays, Feb. 7 – 21, 9 pm
for NPT, NPT2, and NPT3 PBS Kids.
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Wednesday, Feb. 21, 7 pm
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7:00 Music City Roots Live Colin Linden; Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley; Tommy Emmanuel. 8:00 Great Performances AARP Movies for Grownups Awards. Helen Mirren is honored. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Front and Center CMA Songwriters Series Presents: Miranda Lambert.
Nature: The Last Rhino
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7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 A Time of Joining An NPT original. Benevolent societies provided a social safety net after the Civil War. 8:30 First Black Statesmen 9:00 The Early Black Press 9:30 Fighting on Both Fronts: The Story of the 370th 10:00 BBC World News 10:03 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Victoria on Masterpiece The Luxury of Conscience.
Visit wnpt.org for complete 24-hour schedules
Impossible Builds
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7:00 Nature 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:00 Music City Roots Live Snowbound: Animals 7:30 Volunteer Gardener Ashley Campbell; of Winter. 8:00 Hamilton’s America Bonnie Bishop; 8:00 Neanderthal 10:00 BBC World News Billy Strings. 9:00 Neanderthal 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 8:00 Memory Rescue with 10:00 BBC World News 11:00 Victoria on Daniel Amen, M.D. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Masterpiece 10:00 BBC World News 11:00 Austin City Limits Comfort and Joy. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Ms. Lauryn Hill. Season 2 finale. 11:01 Front and Center Sheryl Crow.
Wednesday, Feb. 14, 8 pm
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7:00 We’ll Meet Again Coming Out. People changed by the gay rights movement. 8:00 American Creed Former Secy. of State Condoleezza Rice, historian David Kennedy and guests discuss American ideals. 9:00 Frontline Bitter Rivals: Iran and Saudi Arabia, Part 2. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Afropop 10 Days in Africa: A Home Movie.
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NOVA: Great Escape at Dunkirk
7:00 Tales from the Royal Wardrobe 8:00 Victoria on Masterpiece Comfort and Joy. Albert shares German Christmas traditions in the Season 2 finale. 9:30 A Time of Joining 10:00 Make48 The winning products. 10:30 Articulate with Jim Cotter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: 2nd Century Jazz. 11:00 Independent Lens Tell Them We Are Rising.
7:00 Antiques Roadshow St. Louis, Hour 2. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Jacksonville, Hour 3. 9:00 Independent Lens Rat Film. The city’s rats serve as a framework to tell the history of Baltimore. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 John Lewis – Get in the Way
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow 7:00 We’ll Meet Again 7:00 Nature St. Louis, Hour 1. Freedom Summer. The Last Rhino. A race 8:00 Independent Lens 8:00 Frontline to save the northern Tell Them We Are Bitter Rivals: Iran and white rhino. Rising: The Story of Saudi Arabia, Part 1. 8:00 NOVA Black Colleges and Revolution in Iran, Prediction by the Universities. reaction in Saudi Numbers. Can we 9:30 First Black Arabia, wars in forecast the future? Statesmen: Afghanistan, Lebanon 9:00 Impossible Builds Tennessee’s and Iraq. The Floating House. Self-Made Men 10:00 BBC World News 10:00 BBC World News 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Afropop 11:00 Austin City Limits 11:01 We Knew What We Between Two Shores. Chris Stapleton; Had: The Greatest Two mothers struggle Turnpike Troubadours. Jazz Story Never Told to unite children born George Benson, Billy on two different islands. Eckstine, etc.
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7:00 Tales from the Royal Bedchamber 8:00 Victoria on Masterpiece The Luxury of Conscience. Victoria and Albert face the consequences of standing by their convictions. 9:00 Secrets of the Tower of London 10:00 Make48 The final pitches. 10:30 Articulate with Jim Cotter 11:00 POV Do Not Resist.
Wednesdays, Feb. 7 & 14, 7 pm
Animals with Cameras
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7:00 Lawrence Welk Show 200 Years of American Music, Part 1. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 A Place to Call Home I Do, I Do. 9:17 A Place to Call Home Unforgettable. 10:03 Music Voyager Peru: Amazon. 10:31 The Songwriters Bill Anderson. 11:00 Globe Trekker Road Trip: Patagonia.
WORDS Peter Chawaga
Snapshot
Warhol’s Life and Work at Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
drawings, and prints,” explains Joseph S. Mella, director of the gallery. “They were also used for [Warhol’s] commercial work, designs for album covers . . . or advertising campaigns. Particularly in the 1970s until his death, they were a primary means for generating art and income.” The gallery obtained its full collection of 156 works by the artist in 2008, after the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts invited it to apply for a grant. The exhibition will feature forty-two Polaroids from this collection, which capture surprisingly proactive moments in time despite their impromptu simplicity.
Bianca Jagger, 1979
There’s a 1985 snapshot of Dolly Parton looking directly into the camera with blonde bouffant; a portrait of O.J. Simpson holding a football in 1977; and a 1980 picture of Georgia O’Keeffe and Juan Hamilton, the man who would inherit her homes and much of her estate six years later, to the consternation of her surviving family members. The exhibition will also include eighteen gelatin silver prints, a screen print, Polaroid cameras like those that Warhol used, and Polaroids of current Vanderbilt students.
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ndy Warhol is one of the most recognizable artists in modern history and one whose prevalence in the zeitgeist works symbiotically with the type of work he created. Brightly colorful, larger than life, and firmly within the era’s beau monde, Warhol’s subjects, artwork, and popular persona all shared a common aesthetic. This aesthetic is captured, deconstructed, and elaborated upon in a curated selection of Polaroids and black-andwhite photographs of Warhol’s friends, subjects, and clients on display at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery’s exhibition FAMOUS! (and not-so-famous): Polaroids by Andy Warhol. “The Polaroids served as source material for commissioned portraits that, in their final form, were silk-screen paintings,
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But beyond the glamorous and iconic lifestyle that many associate with Warhol, the exhibition reveals his penchant for the business of art and the intimate side of his personality that may get visitors closer to who he really was. “I think of such Polaroids of Dolly Parton, Bianca Jagger, O.J. Simpson . . . as being prime examples of the many celebrities he photographed that I find intriguing, but equally the anonymous sitters that also reveal that the business side of his practice was hugely important to Warhol,” says Mella. “Additionally, the casual, black-andwhite images of people and friends in his orbit are equally fascinating.” This exhibition may at once reinforce Warhol’s pop-art reputation while defying the surface polish that it carries for so many viewers. na FAMOUS! (and not-so-famous): Polaroids by Andy Warhol is on display at the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, 1220 21st Avenue South, until March 2. For more information, please visit www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery.
See more than 200 of the British Museum’s most engaging and beautiful Roman objects. The Frist is the exclusive North American venue for this stunning exhibition.
OPENING FEBRUARY 23 Downtown Nashville 919 Broadway Nashville, TN 37203 FristCenter.org/Rome #FristRome
PROGRAM HIGHLIGHT Lecture:
Curator’s Perspective: The Reach of Rome—Then and Now Presented by Dr. Sam Moorhead, finds adviser for Iron Age and Roman Coins, The British Museum
FREE · Friday, February 23, 6:30 p.m.
The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the British Museum and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts.
Platinum Sponsor
Hospitality Sponsor
Supported in part by the 2018 Frist Gala Patrons and
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Statue head of Augustus (Rome, Italy), 30–25 BCE. Marble, 14 3/4 x 8 1/4 x 8 5/8 in. The British Museum, 1888,1210.1. © The Trustees of the British Museum
Journey West in the
Jen-Jen Lin and Kap Sum
Jen-Jen Lin
Photograph by Martin O’Connor
Photograph by Martin O’Connor
Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music February 24–25
Photograph by Neil Blake
by Amanda Dobra Hope When you’re an immigrant, it can seem as if you have two separate identities. This often presents an inner conflict between which to accentuate and which to bury in the background. But what would happen if you combined them, integrated them fully into your being, and began to live life from your confident, multicultural self? What if you then shared that true self with others, and in turn uplifted the world with your art? Jen-Jen Lin, founder, artistic director, and choreographer of the Chinese Arts Alliance, ultimately decided to go that route, after originally trying to suppress her Chinese heritage. When Lin first immigrated to the United States to study dance, she tried hard to keep her heritage from showing in her art, thinking it might invite an immediate stereotype and lead to the kind of treatment she had received just going about her normal business in public. Lin ultimately decided that rather than run from her heritage, she would embrace her identity as a Chinese-American artist, dancer, and choreographer. As Lin explains, “I thought, I have my background. We need a new perspective. I need to do something. I have dance.” In the early days of the Alliance, the group performed Journey to the West in order to introduce Chinese folk dance to the public. This year, imitating Lin’s own personal journey, the Alliance will be presenting Journey in the West, highlighting Chinese-American culture by melding Lin’s original Chinese choreography with her love for modern dance.
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The dancers in the production hail from different cultural backgrounds, furthering Lin’s desire to bring us all together through dance. “When you talk about dance and art, there’s really no race,” she adds. “When I started, I wanted to present more Chinese things; now I want to grow with the city and current issues. I want to present Chinese-American culture. That is the purpose of the group.” You can catch Journey in the West, commemorating the Alliance’s fifteen-year anniversary, on Saturday, February 24, at 7 p.m. or Sunday, February 25, at 2 p.m. at Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. Though this production will feature more contemporary works than the public may be used to from the Alliance, you can also expect three excerpts from Chinese folk tales of the past. Tickets can be purchased on the Alliance’s website at www.chineseartsalliance.org. Prices are $15 for adults and $5 for children, students, and seniors. For more information, visit www.chineseartsalliance.org.
It all begins with a name ... In my family, there was always a right or proper way of doing things. And this included naming babies. A firstborn female child was always named after her maternal grandmother; the secondborn after her paternal grandmother, and so on. So when my older sister Mary was born, she was named Mary Chambless Chapman after our maternal grandmother—Mary Chambless Dryer of Birmingham, Alabama. When Mary grew up and had two daughters of her own, she broke the mold and named them Catherine Chapman Webster and Frances Cloud Webster, drawing names from both sides of the family. This breaking with tradition drove Mother crazy.
BEYONDWORDS
Photograph by Anthony Scarlati
ry Eve st fir ! ay Frid
BY MARSHALL CHAPMAN
“How will anybody know who she is?” she exclaimed after Catie was born. “After she’s gone, nobody will know who that child was!” Which had me thinking, Who cares? She’ll be DEAD for chrissakes!
Williamson County Culture
Okay. Fast forward to 2015. My niece Frances and her husband, Todd Peter, are expecting their first child—my first great-niece and sister Mary’s first grandchild. Frances, being a traditionalist, was all ready to name this child for her maternal grandmother (my sister Mary), but when you’re naming a female with the last name Peter, you have to be careful. Mary Peter? Sounds like Merry Peter. Which reminds me of a woman I met one time in Chattanooga named Georgia Dicks whose brother was called Happy. I mean, how do you survive junior high school with a name like Happy Dicks? Anyway, so Mary Peter was out. Along with a lot of other names, including Anita. As it turned out, Frances and Todd took Mary’s middle and last names and christened their baby Chambless Chapman Peter. And when I heard that name, I loved it. The alliteration appealed to my poetic soul. Plus it scanned well. But then what would they call this child? Chambless and Chapman sounded too serious. Or too trendy. Or too ... something. Then it hit me—Cha Cha. Yes! This child should be called Cha Cha! So I phoned in my suggestion. And would you believe it stuck? My great-niece is now known as Cha Cha Peter, and I don’t know about you, but if I were a little girl at summer camp and heard there was another camper named Cha Cha Peter, I would seek that girl out in the hopes that she would be my best friend. Marshall Chapman is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter, author, and actress. For more information, visit www.tallgirl.com.
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MYFAVORITEPAINTING RENE STUBBLEFIELD POE, ARTIST
Why I feel connected to this painting …
Rene Stubblefield Poe
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
I am a child of the Cold War. One of my earliest memories is of the Cuban Missile Crisis, not that I knew it by that name at the time. What I remember is my mother being afraid. My father was a civilian employed by the government at Fort Rucker in South Alabama. He had to remain at work for the duration of the crisis, even sleeping there. I remember my mother worried and making plans in case “the worst happened.” From that time on, all things Russian occupied a corner of my mind reserved for dark and scary things. Stories of the Iron Curtain going up in the middle of the night, separating family members; stories of people being shot at something called Checkpoint Charlie. I imagined life on the other side of that wall to be bleak and strangely colorless. Polyankov’s In the Field with its vibrant colors, clear sunshine, and this little girl in her bright polka-dot dress was such a colorful shock! The girl’s expression is resolute. Stubborn maybe? The pure whiteness of her headscarf draws my eye. Then I looked in the corner and saw the date: 1963. I was six years old when it was painted. She may have been about the same age. We had both just survived the Cuban Missile Crisis. Did she even know? na
About the painting …
N
ot much is known about this artist, but what we do know is how this painting came to be in the U.S. Much of Russian art, prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, was statesponsored Socialist Realism. The Soviet government was involved in the subject matter choices as well as the style of paintings being produced in art academies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, that system began to fall apart—like the old Soviet Union itself. Suddenly art collectors had access to a treasure trove of never before seen Russian Impressionist paintings. Thanks to collectors like Raymond Johnson and Vern Swanson, the largest collection of Russian art outside the former Soviet Union is now in the United States. And thanks to Stan Mabry at Stanford Fine Art, who has had a portion of this collection available for sale here in Nashville, I am fortunate to be able to call one of these “unknowns” my favorite painting!
Nikola Stepanovich Polyankov, In the Field, 1963, Oil on board, 17” x 12”
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H AY N E S G A L L E R I E S PRESENTS
BLACK &WHITE IS BEAUTIFUL ON VIEW UNTIL MARCH 17, 2018
H AY N E S G A L L E R I E S . C O M