FLOW ERS FOR
E V ERY
OCCASION
601 8th Ave South Nashville, TN 37203 615-736-5200 ilexforflowersnashville@gmail.com www.ilexforflowers.com
Allium Sativum Photography by Brett Warren shot in the Ilex studio
TM
PUBLISHED BY THE ST. CLAIRE MEDIA GROUP
Charles N. Martin, Jr. Chairman Paul Polycarpou, President Ed Cassady, Les Wilkinson, Daniel Hightower, Directors
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EDITORIAL & ADVERTISING OFFICES 644 West Iris Drive, Nashville, TN 37204 615-383-0278 ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT Cindy Acuff, Beth Knott, Keith Wright 615-383-0278 DISTRIBUTION Wouter Feldbusch, Brad Reagan SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CUSTOMER SERVICE 615-383-0278 BUSINESS OFFICE Theresa Schlaff, Adrienne Thompson 40 Burton Hills Boulevard, Nashville, TN 37215 EDITORIAL
COLUMNS
PAUL POLYCARPOU Editor and CEO
JENNIFER ANDERSON The Great Unknowns
SARA LEE BURD Executive Editor and Online Editor sara@nashvillearts.com
MARSHALL CHAPMAN Beyond Words
REBECCA PIERCE Education Editor and Staff Writer rebecca@nashvillearts.com MADGE FRANKLIN Copy Editor DESIGN TRACEY STARCK Design Director ADVERTISING CINDY ACUFF cindy@nashvillearts.com
TED CLAYTON Social Editor JENNIFER COLE State of the Arts LINDA DYER Antique and Fine Art Specialist SUSAN EDWARDS As I See It ANNE POPE Tennessee Roundup JIM REYLAND Theatre Correspondent
BETH KNOTT beth@nashvillearts.com
JUSTIN STOKES Film Review
KEITH WRIGHT keith@nashvillearts.com
BETSY WILLS Field Notes
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 for free, or by mail for $5.00 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 Visa or Mastercard number.
J 2O14 anuary
on the cover:
Maggie Taylor, The Experience, 2009 Archival ink jet print, 15" x 15" Bennett Galleries Article on page 41
FEATURES
COLUMNS
14 Spotlights
16 As I See It
20 Art See
Susan Edwards
32 Public Art
21 Crawl Guide
34 The Great Unknowns Jennifer Anderson
36 The Road to OZ
35 Film Review
39 Nashville Skyline Photography Competition 41 This is Not Photography Jerry Uelsman & Maggie Taylor 46 The Crouch Collection
35 The Bookmark
100
36
61
56 Beth Nielsen Chapman Running Through Time
56
61 Joel Anderson Geo-graphically Speaking
51 NPT
65 Ronnie McDowell The King & The Mouse
100 Field Notes Ilya Zomb
102 Appraise It AndrĂŠe Ruellan
69 Tom Rice Etched in Stone
103 On the Town
72 Downton Abbey Comes to Nashville The 2014 Antiques and Garden Show
105 Beyond Words 106 My Favorite Painting Joseph Mella
75 Jerome Brunet Every Picture Tells a Story 79 Johnny Lee Park The Mechanics of Beauty 82 Meredith Edmondson Breaking the Glass Ceiling 84 Poet's Corner Donika Ross 86 The Violin Shop A Fiddler's Gallery 88 Theatre
86
91 Frame by Frame: The ICiT Story 94 ArtSmart
41
NashvilleArts.com
January 2O14 | 7
Featured Artist
MAGGIE TAYLOR
PUBLISHER ' S NOTE
Art Creates a City
George Rickey exhibit at Art Basel
J
anuary is the time for resolutions, which often involves revising the same checklist of goals from last year (and years before). While I still have hangers-on, I am
Small celebration
thrilled to have marked one goal off my list. The first week of December art lovers descend upon Miami to enjoy the largest international art fair in the United States, Art Basel. This year, I was one of them. Standing at the door of the 500,000 square feet of exhibition space, I became aware that all my years of studying art and attending art crawls, gallery openings, and museum exhibits had been training for what I was about to encounter. Art Basel is a showcase of some of the best Modern and Contemporary art for sale. Its impact on the art market is immeasurable. Gallery owners from leading international galleries compete to enter the show and pay upwards of $50,000 for a coveted space at Art Basel—that does not include a host of additional costs including shipping and insuring the art. With the risk of change in what’s popular and what’s valuable in the Contemporary art market, this fair is considered a tastemaking event; it sets a standard that allows artists to build reputations and collectors to feel secure that they are purchasing investment-quality art.
Woman in a stone skirt
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
As I walked around the fairs, I thought about the extraordinary efforts our galleries make each month to curate shows that connect us with each other and with art from our city and around the world. To celebrate our vibrant community of arts enthusiasts, we are launching a new column this issue called ArtSee, which will feature a selection of photographs from some of the art crawls, gallery openings, and art events around Nashville. Check out www. nashvillearts.com to view more photographs. Also this month, Susan Edwards, Executive Director, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, debuts her new column “As I See It” on page 16. Cheers to a happy, arts-filled 2014. Sara Lee Burd Executive Editor
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Wm. Louis Sonntag, 54” x 66”, exhibited Knoxville Museum of Art Norman Rockwell signed lithograph Cornelius Hankins, Middle Tennessee Landscape Charleston, SC Miniatures
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Byron’s Hours of Idleness, 1st Edition, with jeweled Sangorski/Sutcliffe Binding
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50+ lots of Fine Jewelry Heriz Carpet, 12’ x 8’
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East TN Corner Swiss Music Mid. TN Sugar Cupboard, illus. Box, attr. Carlo Bugatti Chest, Signed “Art & Mystery” Paillard
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Winter Fine Art & Antiques Auction January 25, 2014 at 9 AM EST Live Auction of over 900 lots to be held at our gallery in Knoxville, TN
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Preview Friday, January 24th, 12noon - 6pm, 2240 Sutherland Ave, Knoxville, TN 37919 Tennessee’s Leading Source for Investment Quality Art & Antiques. Estates & Individual Consignments being accepted for future auctions.
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Canvas Couture
M
anuel Cuevas is the designer to the greatest names in show business—from music legends Johnny Cash and Elvis to the Beatles. He needs only one name, Manuel. In a city of stars, his entrance into any room ignites energy and creates a buzz of recognition and excitement. How does a painter capture the essence of a man like this? Such was the challenge taken on by Colombian-born, Nashvillebased artist Jorge Yances. “I wanted something that was not a portrait,” Yances says. “Manuel has become a Nashville treasure, a U.S. treasure, and I wanted to reflect who he is and what he represents. It was to be a surprise for him.” The opportunity for a public presentation of the painting came when Manuel moved to his new showroom on Broadway and urged his friend Yances to display works from his new series at a public reception. A prominent Manuel feature is his signature hand gesture: the closed hand suddenly opening up, fingers wide in a starburst. As Manuel unveiled what he believed to be Yances’ signature piece in the new collection, he suddenly said, “Wait a minute—that’s my hand! What’s going on here?” Framed by unfurled Tennessee and national flags, Manuel’s energy
PHOTOGRAPH: CONNIE CHRONUK
by DeeGee Lester
Manuel Cuevas and Jorge Yances
and joy for life appear to burst from the painting as he reaches toward the viewer, his hand gesture becoming the third star in the state flag. The designer’s signature flowers are sprinkled across a city view, featuring the Ryman, the Music City Center, and the Nashville skyline, which, upon closer examination, are peopled by the ghostly figures of women and Manuel’s own silhouette among the clouds—a fitting tribute to a Nashville icon. Jorge Yances’ painting of Manuel is on display at Manuel American Designs, 800 Broadway. Hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. For more information, visit www.manuelcouture.com. To see more of Jorge Yances' work, visit www.yances.com.
Small Town, Big Mural
B
rian Tull and his wife, Laura, recently completed this 20’ x 45’ mural on a historic building that was once the Brevard Lumber Company. Within walking distance
Artistic Eyewear for Expressive Individuals 407 Church Street Downtown Franklin • 615-599-1800 James Tilley, O.D. • Penny Fishpaw, L.D.O. The Gold Boutique on Church www.charactereyespc.com
of downtown Brevard, North Carolina, the long-vacant site is being transformed into an arts district, thanks to the efforts of investor Josh Leder, neighboring Haen Gallery, and the community. It is the intent to preserve the lumberyard and the area where trains once picked up passengers and freight, and Brian wanted to tie together the historic function of the building and art. “My artwork is nostalgic, and I wanted to portray a hardworking industrial guy reflecting on his work.” Tull is represented by Haen Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, and Tinney Contemporary in Nashville. To see more of his work, visit www.briantull.com and www.tinneycontemporary.com. To learn more about the Brevard Lumber Yard Arts District, visit www.brevardlumberyard.com.
14 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
OPENING DLG WINTER ‘14
david lusk gallery
516 Hagan st . Nashville . davidluskgallery.com
AS I SEE IT
The Rewards of Slowing the Pace
I
shall be forever grateful for the opportunity to look at paintings by John Constable every day for three months while they were on loan to the Frist Center from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Afterwards, I traveled to the
United Kingdom to visit “Constable Country,” where I found much of the countryside and architecture unchanged since the nineteenth century. Even the English weather cooperated by contributing a soft rain for atmospheric finish. It was impossible to take the natural beauty there for granted. Rather, I felt a connection over time to the people who had lived there, even Constable. Moreover, I was reminded of two things: how patient contemplation helps control the momentum of contemporary life and that I live in one of the most physically beautiful states in the union, one worthy of daily appreciation.
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, Oil on canvas, 51.3" × 73"
JANUARY PERFORMANCES 17TH-28TH 2014 TKTS: $15
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We think of vision as instantaneous, direct, and accurate. In our rapid-fire technological world we value quickness and spontaneity. But are we missing something? Perception changes with more focused attention. Details and relationships not seen initially come into view as we concentrate on what is before us. Last fall, Harvard Magazine published Jennifer Roberts’ much talked about essay “The Power of Patience,” in which the author discusses the merits of looking at a work of art for what seems like a tediously long period of time.1 The exercise is rewarding, in part because art is generally a repository of subtleties and depth. Importantly, Professor Roberts sees the lessons of art, vision, and prolonged looking as applicable beyond art history. Consider the rewards to you of investing more time with a cloud, a star, a poem, a child. Each of us is soldiering forth at a hectic pace in these times. My New Year’s Resolution is to slow the tempo and savor the beauty. Jennifer L. Roberts, “The Power of Patience: Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention,” Harvard Magazine, November–December 2013, 40–43.
1
www.FranklinTheatre.com/live-theater 16 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Susan H. Edwards, PhD Executive Director & CEO Frist Center for the Visual Arts
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Mohsenin Galleries
new location – vintage rugs, art, & furnishings
T
by Alyssa Rabun
he art of carpet weaving dates back to 500 B.C., but the allure of exotic, handspun rugs is still in vogue across the globe. Shahin
“Rugs originating from the cottage industry of Iran (Sarough, Farahan, Heriz, Sultanabad, Bijar, Serapi, Oushak, etc.) have proved to be the most popular in the Southeast United States,” said Mohsenin. “There is a definite subculture of rug collectors in Nashville. Some clientele buy rugs as a commodity, for the sheer pleasure of owning an exquisite, handmade piece of art.”
PHOTOGRAPH: JERRY ATNIP
Mohsenin will cater to the rug collectors and interested community members by educating. Mohsenin Galleries hosts quarterly rug seminars that focus on rugs from different regions of the world. On January 16, for example, the seminar will focus on the rugs that have received the most attention locally: rugs from the cottage industry of Iran. These talks will
Megan Bergmann and Shahin Mohsenin
PHOTOGRAPH: JERRY ATNIP
Mohsenin, founder of fine art and rug gallery Mohsenin Galleries, has helped unearth a community of rug collectors in Nashville through his work in retail and design. Mohsenin’s vision for the gallery, which opened in September, is to serve not only as a space showcasing decorative arts and furniture, but as a space that houses a team of experts offering a consultative approach to the rug trade.
be lead by Mohsenin and local experts to include topics like the historical background and cultural relevance of rugs within a local context. Furthermore, Mohsenin Galleries will offer clients services like advice on the care and cleaning of rugs, rug appraisals, and consignment opportunities for individuals and designers. The 6,000-square-foot space has two floors that look like a curated Asian marketplace, with rich reds and golds draping from the ceiling and aged mahogany antiques making bold statements beneath their colorful counterparts. Works from local artists are scattered throughout the space, with exhibitions changing regularly. The gallery currently houses playful paintings by Arizona-based artist Brian Walker, on view until March. “There is a charming, comedic naivety that exists in Walker’s work,” said Mohsenin. “He describes his style as urban outsider. Currently, we hold all twelve pieces of his collection of the Chinese Zodiac. We are also showcasing many of Walker’s most acclaimed works, such as Perceived Control, Wiser, and Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing in addition to eighteen more pieces.” Despite an eclectic mix of works from throughout time and space, the gallery emits cohesion. “The one unified theme
18 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
that runs through the gallery is a nod to timeless elegance and aesthetics,” said Mohsenin. “We are tastefully blending pieces from different eras and regions with more contemporary artworks to create an unforgettable eclectic space.” Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday by appointment. Rug seminars cost $60 and include beverages and snacks. For more information, visit www.mohseninimports.com.
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Historic Downtown Franklin
©cranshaw
“Tennessee Art League”
Call or email today for information on TAL Upstairs
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN JACKSON
Lisa Bachman Jones, Charles Clary, Herb Williams
Claudia Martinez, Alanna Santini, Roxanne Cordt
Onion Man, Heather McGlaughn, Jordan Proper
SEE ART SEE ART SEE Vesna Pavlovic, Jodi Hays, Felix Gresham, Janet Decker Yanez
Charles Clary
Band at Crawl after party Track One
Jennifer Burgess, Beau Burgess, Jarod Gardiner, Tommy Stalknecht, Jennie Alley
Jerry Park, Nick Dantona, Anne Brown, Jerry Atnip at The Arts Company
Sarah Johnson
Maansi Jeevan, Rana Mukherji
Upstairs at The Rymer Gallery
Installation at Tinney Contemporary by Dorothy O'Connor 20 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
CRAWL GUIDE The Franklin Art Scene takes place Friday, January 3, from 6 until 9 p.m. in historic downtown Franklin, where a $5 ticket gives you unlimited access to trolleys that circulate to over 30 galleries and studios. Inspirations On Main will showcase paintings by Jennie Schut, who recently received the Jennie Schut – Inspirations on Main 2013 Best in Show for Visual Art at the ArtLightenment Art and Film Festival. Gallery 202 will feature Raku Pottery Sculpture by Nelson Grice. Jack Yacoubian Jewelry and Fine Art Gallery will exhibit work by Donna Blackard, Susan and Emily McGrew, Paul Harmon, and Lisa Ernst. The Savory Spice Shop will show a series of cityscapes by contemporary Denise Michelle – Savory Spice Shop artist Denise Michelle. Damico Frame & Art Gallery will present images by “PHONEtographer” Jimmy Stratton. Heirloom Shop will host mixed-media artist Philip Willis. Boutique MMM will feature artist Maia Ketterbaugh and craftsmen Tom and Linda Baker. O’More College of Design will showcase paintings by Polish artist Gosia Lacka-Kwiek.
Donna Blackard – Jack Yacoubian
On Saturday, January 4, head to downtown Nashville for the Downtown Art Crawl from 6 until 9 p.m. The Arts Company will welcome a new year of art
Jimmy Stratton – Damico Frame & Art Gallery
SPOTLIGHT
and the beginning of the gallery’s 18th year with its annual exhibit entitled Of Things to Come, which will introduce some of the artists and projects planned for 2014. WorkSpaces: Artists’ Studios II, a series of some 75 artists’ studios by photographer Jerry Park, will also be featured. Tinney Contemporary will exhibit Scenes, photographs and an installation by Dorothy O’Connor, in the front gallery and work by Jodi Hays in the rear gallery. The Rymer (detail) Gallery will feature the Aggie Zed – The Arts Company exhibit Meticulous Excavations, new work by Charles Clary and Jamey Grimes. Gallery One will showcase selected works by gallery artists, including new work by Debra Fritts. Tennessee Art League will celebrate the opening of their upstairs space, which will offer additional exhibit space, studio rentals, a co-op studio, and workshop space. At the Arcade, WAG will present Illustration, too, an exhibition of picture-book art by Watkins students Barbara Ball, Michael Cribbs, Ross Denton, J Greer, Casimira Guarini, Jarryd Harris, Cassie Isenhower, Don Ross Denton – WAG Mann, Brian Poteete, and Jill Thompson. L Gallery will show abstract expressionistic paintings by Carol Lena Saffell. Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston will take place from 5:30 until 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, January 4. Participants include Cleft Studios, Fort Houston, Ground Floor Gallery, Ovvio Art, Track One, and Zeitgeist. Don’t miss Zeitgeist’s group show featuring Terry Rowlett’s Nomads and Outsiders, Megan Lightell’s Private Landscapes, and photographs from Peter Alan Monroe’s Coney Island Peter Alan Monroe – Zeitgeist series. On Saturday, January 11, visit Second Saturday at Five Points in East Nashville from 6 until 9 p.m. for fine art, antiques, and artisan wares.
NashvilleArts.com
January 2O14 | 21
ABSOLUTE ONLINE AUCTION Native American and Southwestern Art Collection of a Nashville Gentleman Closes January 22 n Beginning at 2:00 PM CT
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PHOTOGRAPH: ROGER BRUHN
Patrick Dougherty, Three of a Kind, 2013. Private Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, Nebraska
Cheekwood Announces 2014 Exhibitions
T
by Rachel Carter
his year at Cheekwood, art imitates nature with an exhibit lineup that promises big names, big sculptures, and even bigger bugs.
In March, seventeen of the mere 100 living, professional bamboo artists bring their complicated works to Nashville. The exhibit, Modern Twist: Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Art, features sculptures, wall-hung installation pieces, and baskets woven from bamboo. The artwork is intricate in design and simple in material, blurring the line between ancient tradition and modern art. Visitors may want to stroll through the Japanese Garden and bamboo forest as a point of reference. The exhibit runs until May 26.
PHOTOGRAPH: © SUSAN EINSTEIN
The New Year also brings “stickwork” of a different sort. Patrick Dougherty, the Martin Shallenberger Artistin-Residence for 2014, will create a large-scale sculpture installation out of sticks and tree saplings specifically for Cheekwood. “With Uematsu Chikuyu, Sound of Wind, 1991. Bamboo (madake), rattan, lacquer Dougherty’s sculpture and the bamboo art, visitors can see how artists incorporate natural materials into their work,” Cheekwood Curator of Art Jochen Wierich says. The exhibit begins on March 22 and is ongoing. From May 24 to August 31, David Rogers’ Big Bugs are taking over the grounds. The exhibit features eleven of Rogers’ enormous insect sculptures, including a dragonfly, an assassin bug, and a 1,200-pound, seventeen-foot-tall praying mantis carved out of black-locust wood. “This exhibit allows visitors to see bugs in a completely new light,” Wierich says. “Rogers has created
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Flowers, n.d. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
something fantastic out of what is typically a small creature that we often find annoying.” And just in time for summer, Andy Warhol’s Flowers are coming to Cheekwood on June 14. Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of flowers, created between 1964 and 1965, were originally inspired by a Patricia Caulfield photograph of hibiscus flowers. Warhol created the works with the same serigraph technique he used for his now-immortal portraits of pop-culture icons, but flowers remained a constant theme in his art until his death in 1987. The exhibit features Warhol’s work in paintings and photographs and runs until September 7. For more information, visit www.cheekwood.org.
NashvilleArts.com
January 2O14 | 23
B
And They're Off . . . Home Stretch Wins
eing named the Featured Artist for the 2014 Iroquois Steeplechase is the fulfillment of a dream for portrait artist Christopher Scott Huffman. “I have always been struck
by the majestic presence of horses; it is a beauty coupled with incredible strength. When I learned of the Featured Artist role, something caught fire inside of me,” said Huffman. “I had to shoot for it.” Largely self-taught, Huffman spent much of his youth studying the methods of the great European masters. Visiting art galleries all over the country, he examined the artists’ brushstrokes trying to discern how they achieved their results. Huffman’s technique is a gradual sculptural process beginning with larger shapes and values to create proportion and continuing with smaller details and layers of color to create depth. “Christopher Scott Huffman is an incredibly gifted artist with a unique ability to portray the personality of his subjects,” said Dwight Hall, chairman of the Iroquois Steeplechase Race Committee. “In Home Stretch he has captured the feeling of race day. You can sense the excitement of the jockeys, almost hear the roar of the crowd as they near the finish, and feel the beautiful strength of
Christopher Scott Huffman, Home Stretch, 2013, Oil on linen, 30” x 40”
the horses—the detail is impeccable.” Home Stretch was inspired by the finishing moments of the 2011 Iroquois race, originally captured by Steeplechase photographer and Huffman’s longtime friend Tommy Quinn. Home Stretch will be on display beginning February 6 at the
Belle Meade Plantation Gift Shop and at York & Friends Fine Art Gallery in March. See more of Christopher Scott Huffman’s work at www.tocreateart.com. For more information about the Iroquois Steeplechase, please visit www.iroquoissteeplechase.org.
Rockwell – the Nashville Connection
L
Sets Record-breaking Price at Auction
ast month, Norman Rockwell’s Saying Grace sold for a record-breaking $46 million at Sotheby’s auction house in New York City, making national headlines. The
next day Rockwell’s Little Boy and Beagle was auctioned at Christie’s for $557,000, nearly doubling its estimate.
Norman Rockwell, Little Boy and Beagle, 1926, Oil on canvas, 25” x 16”
Stan Mabry of Stanford Fine Art in Nashville once owned Little Boy and Beagle, so prior to the sale Christie’s contacted him to verify the artwork’s provenance and learn about the extensive research he had conducted on the piece. In the late 1990s Mabry sold the painting to a collector for approximately $60,000, its market value at the time.
24 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Mabry commented, “This is the kind of art we strive to find, art that will stand the test of time and increase in value. Stanford Fine Art has always focused on investment-quality, nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, and it is both gratifying and affirming to see that this art is now so highly valued by collectors worldwide.” See more of Rockwell’s work at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts’ exhibition American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell on view through February 9. To learn more about Stanford Fine Art, visit www.stanfordfineart.net.
“Paramount” by Andy Warhol
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8 1160 Manley Lane $2,690,000 9 110 Lynnwood $2,500,000 10 917 Overton Lea $2,100,000 11 2179 S Berrys Chapel $1,849,000 12 2900 Tyne Blvd $1,795,000
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PHOTOGRAPHS: KENTUCKY DEPARTMENT TRAVEL & TOURISM
YORK & Friends fine art Nashville • Memphis
Paducah in the Spotlight Selected works from our 50 artists will be Red ay Tagged for d r u t 1 Sa uary incredible r savings! Feb -5pm
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107 Harding Place • Tues-Sat 10-5 615.352.3316 • yorkandfriends@att.net Follow us on at Ron York Art www.yorkandfriends.com
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by Wendy Wilson
aducah, Kentucky, known as Quilt City USA by its many fans, now has a new honor that will bring it even more attention. In November, it was named a
member of the Creative Cities Network by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Creative Cities Network has a total of forty-one cities worldwide with Paducah being only the seventh City of Crafts and Folk Art. UNESCO promotes collaboration among its Creative Cities to foster stronger ties among art communities worldwide. “It adds to our credibility as a cultural hub for quilting and the arts in general,” says Laura Schaumburg, marketing director for the Paducah Convention and Visitors Bureau. Kentucky tourism officials say the designation will allow them to showcase the National Quilt Museum and Yeiser Art Center in Paducah, as well as the Paducah School of Art and Design, which has programs in photography, drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, and jewelry. In the mid 1980s, the American Quilter’s Society was founded in Paducah and began hosting an annual Quilt Week that draws people from across the globe. Held in April, the event features workshops, a vendors’ mall, and an intense competition that Schaumburg says is dubbed the Kentucky Derby of quilts. “About 30,000 people come every year,” Schaumburg says. “Considering our population is 26,000, that’s pretty big. They want to see who’s going to win Best of Show. That’s always a big thing.”
To learn more about UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, visit www.unesco.org.
BLAIR CONCERT SERIES 2013-2014
PLEASE JOIN US
ISABELLE FAUST, violin with
ALEXANDER MELNIKOV, piano Tuesday, January 21 8:00 p.m., Ingram Hall “Her sound has passion, grit and electricity but also a disarming warmth and sweetness that can unveil the music’s hidden strains of lyricism ...” — New York Times Details about the spring 2014 concert series may be found at blair.vanderbilt.edu All concerts at the Blair School of Music are free and open to the public unless specifically stated otherwise. For complete details about all the upcoming events at Blair, visit our website at blair.vanderbilt.edu
2400 Blakemore Ave. Nashville, TN 37212
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Maybelle Carter Graces Carter Vintage Guitars
hristie and Walter Carter wanted to change their guitar store’s dull exterior and at the same time create a landmark. Fine artists Jenna Boyko Colt and
Brain Law of Vermillion Murals made it happen.
The other side of the building features a huge depiction of a Les Paul ’59 Reissue, which Christie says is “better than our sign for letting people know we are a guitar store.” Carter Vintage Guitars at 625 8th Avenue S. offers a comprehensive range of vintage guitars, mandolins, banjos and more. For more information, visit www.cartervintage.com. For information about the artists, visit www.winningfinishes.com.
PHOTOGRAPH: MELODY BARNES
According to Jenna, “The first image that came to mind was the iconic black-and-white photo of Mother Maybelle Carter playing her vintage Gibson guitar. The rest of the design evolved as a collage of vintage elements—the harlequin pattern echoing the colors on the interior walls of the guitar showroom and a sunburst
to highlight a classic Gibson head stock.”
Screenwriter's Competition Ends January 31 committee of high-profile names within the film industry. The list of judges is expanding but so far includes Tom Pollock, president of the Montecito Picture Company, former chair of Universal Pictures Motion Picture Group; Blossom Films, Nicole Kidman’s Academy Award-nominated production company (Rabbit Hole, In the Cut, Monte Carlo); Ben Nearn, co-founder and CEO of Sycamore Pictures (Black Swan, The Ides of March); and Lewis Bogach, vice president of production for CMT-TV, and director Harmony Korine.
Jeff Nichols, Director of Mud, opening night 2013
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by Justin Stokes
reat art starts with a great idea. Seemingly defined by that maxim, the Nashville Film Festival has been re-inventing the concept of a film festival for the past four decades, introducing us to new content and contemporary ways in which audiences can appreciate film as a whole. The festival, known for providing resources for
With opportunities for those who are writing screenplays for short films, feature films, and teleplays for pilots, this all-inclusive competition anticipates seeing more than 1,000 entries. And while the late registration has already begun, the festival is encouraging both novice and experienced writers to continue their submissions of all genres until the January 31 deadline. For a complete listing of film festival rules, please visit www.nashvillefilmfestival.org.
local filmmakers, has now expanded its duration from eight days to ten. And as the festival has always paved the way for cinema in Tennessee, the “celebration of firsts” has something else to add: a screenwriting competition. Promising more than $55,000 in prizes and cash, the competition is also awarding semi-finalists and finalists silver passes to the festival. This competition just might be the screenwriting opportunity of a lifetime. However, the ultimate prize for the aspiring writer is the opportunity to have their selection read by a
Ted Crockett, Executive Director NaFF and Butch Spyridon, Executive Director Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau
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COURTESY OF NASHVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Honoring Nashville’s Civil Rights Movement with Public Art
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by Anne-Leslie Owens, Public Art Project Coordinator
ashville is honoring its Civil Rights history with a significant public artwork in Public Square Park.
This summer, the Metro Arts Commission approved a budget of $300,000 and secured a prominent location beside the historic courthouse for artwork recognizing Nashville’s pivotal role in the Civil Rights movement. Nashville’s non-violent demonstrations—sit-ins, march, and economic boycott—were so effective that they served as models for later protests throughout the South, and Nashville’s leaders went on to make major contributions on the national Civil Rights stage.
time at the Nashville Public Library’s Civil Rights Room, a walking and driving tour to Civil Rights sites, and a Q&A with several participants in Civil Rights activities here in Nashville. Using the information they gathered, the artists will complete design proposals to present to a citizen selection panel. The panel will recommend an artist to the Public Art Committee and the Metro Arts Commission for final approval in spring 2014. The project is expected to be completed in 2015. Following that, Metro Arts will begin the procurement process for a second Civil Rightsinspired public art project on 5th Avenue. For more information and to view the artists’ previous portfolios of work, please visit www.artsnashville.org.
Metro Arts considered hundreds of professional artists before inviting six to participate. Of those, four artists/artist teams— Andrews/LaFevre Studios, New York, New York; Colab Studio, Tempe, Arizona; Artist Richard Hunt examines Tennessean Hood Design Studio, photographer Larry McCormack’s photo Oakland, California; and merge series at the Nashville Public Richard Hunt Studio, Library’s Civil Rights Room Chicago, Illinois—accepted the invitation and participated in the December 2–3 site visit. Highlights of the artists’ visit included 32 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
VINCENT PEACH
Contemporary Handcrafted Pearls, Diamonds and Ancient Coins. 300 12th Ave. S., Nashville,TN
(615) 242-3001 vincentpeach.com
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TOP PICKS
2014
A N e w Ye a r i s u s h e r i n g i n n e w s t y l e s a nd trends. Here are a few of Keith's favorites & new arrivals, which I'm sure will end up in some of Nashville's HOTTEST HOMES!
The Great Unknowns
Shaun Shiveley Whimsical Abstractions
Vintage Wooden Hat Molds Early 20th Century $154 each
Mid Century Modern Light $750
Antique Cast Iron Console $4,300
Coat Rack Floor Lamp Late 19th Century $950
Artist Shaun Shiveley
by Jennifer Anderson | Photography by Tiffani Bing
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isual art was a large part of Shaun Shiveley’s childhood. As the only child of an artist mother and an
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Escape from Winter Book your
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engineer father she spent many afternoons sitting under her mother’s easel and watching the goth-cult series Dark Shadows. The creative living environment of her youth developed her active imagination, and, as a child, she learned to appreciate formal qualities of art through singing lessons. The seed of her confidence in the visual arts began in an eighthgrade art class after she received accolades from her teacher. She earned her college degree in voice but returned to visual art after her mother’s death. The grieving process set her on a journey of selfdiscovery guided in part by the psychological essays of Carl Jung. Inspired by the art of Joan Miro and his use of color and symbolism, she incorporates precisely drawn shapes and bold colors to represent her explorations of what happiness looks like. She creates her art from a place of subconscious joy and believes that through this expression she brings joy and positive energy into the world. Her vibrant, non-objective paintings encourage viewers’ imaginations and free them to explore their own sense of happiness.
For more information about Shaun Shiveley, contact UnBound Arts at unboundartsnashville@gmail.com.
Beach, 10 minutes from Destin, FL R Grayton R Short walk to the beach! Only 55 minutes from Nashville Ron Southwest Airlines
NOW TAKING RESERVATIONS FOR 2014 Visit us at www.vrbo.com/449728 or call (615) 473-0110
(detail) Solar System Debri, Acrylic and Sharpie on canvas, 30" x 48"
34 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Las Marthas at Studio A Lunch Series
FILM
by Justin Stokes
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ringing audiences together through quality programming, the Community Cinema series is a communal-viewing program fostered by ITVS that makes the Emmywinning Independent Lens available in a public setting. Taking the PBS
flagship into a partnership with Nashville Public Television (NPT), the 2013–2014 six-month season has already begun free viewings in NPT’s Studio A. Las Marthas, the second installment in the series, is an examination of a 114-year-old commemoration of George Washington’s birthday in the form of a debutante ball put together by the Society of Martha Washington of Laredo, Texas. The ball, part of a month-long celebration of George Washington, is the biggest in the world and has helped solidify positive relations between Americans and MexicanAmerican families whose ancestors had relocated to Laredo. Observing the young women who have descended from these affluent Mexican families, we’re shown a crossroads of two
Film still from Las Marthas courtesy of Community Cinema
worlds that places community values right at the intersection. This is a slice-of-life narrative that shows the attitudes created in an atmosphere of pageantry. The girls involved in the ball are a measure of the “third space” rejection mentioned in the film, as the culture created in Laredo was not Spanish, American, or anything else but a product of people looking for a new home.
The next showing in the series is scheduled for Wednesday, January 22, at 11:30 a.m. in NPT’s Studio A, inside the NPT Arts Center at 161 Rains Avenue in Nashville. Each screening will include a light lunch and a discussion about the film. Those attending are advised to RSVP by the Monday prior to each screening. Further information can be found online at www.wnpt.org.
The Bookmark A Monthly Look at Hot Books and Cool Reads The Invention of Wings SUE MONK KIDD
Orfeo RICHARD POWERS
From the author of The Secret Life of Bees comes a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women. This book, set in earlynineteenth-century Charleston, looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved. Meet the author at Salon@615 on January 15.
Inspired by the myth of Orpheus, National Book Award-winning author Richard Powers delivers his most emotionally charged novel to date. Composer Peter Els runs afoul of a federal terrorism unit and becomes known as the Bioterrorist of Bach. Music and the world of sound are evoked beautifully, along with the process of artistic creation.
Andrew’s Brain E.L. DOCTOROW The author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. This suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound.
For more information about these books, visit www.parnassusbooks.net.
The Parthenon Enigma JOAN BRETON CONNELLY This groundbreaking book challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. In particular, the author probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze that originally encircled the upper reaches and the remains of which now reside with the Elgin marbles in Britain. Connelly is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her work on Greek art, myth, and religion.
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PERFORMING ARTS
THE ROAD TO
OZ by Joe Pagetta
Photography by Ravi Deepres
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hen OZ, the non-profit performance space and arts center located in a converted cigar warehouse in West Nashville, opens its 2014 winter/spring season next month, it will be the culmination—if culminations are beginnings—of almost six years of dreaming on the part of its founder, Cano Ozgener, and as many years of planning by his son and the arts organization’s CEO, Tim Ozgener. “We’ve always been passion-driven people,” says the younger Ozgener. “At the end of the day, our experience has been that if there is something we love or are passionate about, then it shouldn’t feel like work. It should be fun that you are building something for the greater cause.” “This is the start, not the end,” adds the elder Ozgener, an Armenian immigrant who, before bringing art to Nashville, brought cigars to the world as the founder of the family-owned-and-operated CAO Cigars. “We are creating the nucleus. It’s up to the community to come up with the dreams that enhance it.” Choosing to open on February 13 with a performance of FAR by Wayne McGregor | Random Dance is indicative, according to artistic director Lauren Snelling, of just how that collaboration works. McGregor is world renowned for his contributions in the world of ballet, as a choreographer for the San Francisco Ballet, La Scala, and others, and as a resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet. He is considered “one of the most celebrated and sought-after choreographers of his generation,” according to the New York Times. “[Guest curator] Kristy Edmunds and I ultimately talked about commissioning new works that are
created for the space but in the short term knew that was not viable,” said Snelling. “But by identifying significant artists that have performed and presented their work on the world scale and bringing them here in the inaugural season, you create a really beautiful platform for the recognition of other artists to see that their work can be presented well here, that these are things this audience can connect to.” Inspired by the philosophical inquiries of the eighteenth century and French polymath Diderot’s first encyclopedia, FAR explores an era that first placed “a body in question.” Staged in an environment of shadow and light created by rAndom International and lighting designer Lucy Carter, with a score by the critically acclaimed composer Ben Frost, FAR features ten dancers confronting the distortions, sensuality, and feeling of the Age of Enlightenment. “Wayne is someone who is completely inspired by so many other disciplines—by visual art, by sound art—and he’s constantly working on interesting collaborations,” adds Snelling. “And he’s completely inspired by the set of circumstances here at OZ. He’s so touched, not only that his work is included but that we are opening the season with it, that he’s traveling to be here. While this is not the premiere of the work, he’s coming here because he’s inspired by how all this started.” FAR, by Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, takes place at OZ, 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle in Nashville, on Thursday, February 13, at 8 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit www.oznashville.com.
“We are creating the nucleus. It’s up to the community to come up with the dreams that enhance it.” – Cano Ozgener
Art for a Cause presents local art to benefit children living in poverty he Cayce Place Revitalization Foundation (CPRF) is a nonprofit-led advocacy group whose mission is to break the cycle of multigenerational poverty. Cayce
Carter Vintage Guitars A friendly comfortable place for fine guitars and the people who appreciate them. • Vintage guitars, mandolins, banjos, ukes, basses and amps • New instruments from Gibson Custom, Gilchrist, Duff, Red Mountain and more boutique builders • Repairs • Appraisals • Lessons • Guitar Art • Musical Events
CARTER VINTAGE GUITARS 625 8th Ave. S. Nashville, TN 37203 10:30-6:30 Mon-Sat 1:00-5:00 Sun (615) 915-1851 www.cartervintage.com
GUITARS
PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN GUIDER
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by John Guider
Place, bordering Shelby Street in East Nashville, is the city’s oldest and largest public housing project with over 1,200 youth under the age of 18 living at risk within its confines. These children are, on a daily basis, subjugated by epidemic levels of violent crime coupled with attendance in low-performing schools. By no fault of their own they have been placed in a situation that makes it nearly impossible to rise above. Recently Jennifer Kroll and her husband, Randall Gilberd, opened their lovely, three-story house in Historic Edgefield for a memorable evening. Art for a Cause, a specially catered event, was orchestrated primarily by Jennifer Kroll for the dual purpose of showcasing the work of local artists and bringing awareness to the foundation headed by her husband, Randall, and fellow Historic Edgefield neighbor Bob Paul Harmon, Maria Theresa II, Borzak. Artists who participated 1990, Oil on canvas, 45 2/3" x 35" included Paul Harmon, Johnny Lee Park, Daniel Holland, Mandy Peitz Moody, and Shaun Shiveley. Randall Gilberd was introduced to the dispiriting world of inner city hopelessness when he volunteered to be a Big Brother while in college in Boston. Randall was stunned at the living conditions his charge had to endure. He became further distressed when he realized the young man’s survival had more to do with his ability to fight than to learn. Integrity meant more about Daniel Holland, Alligator, 2013, keeping your mouth shut than Oil on canvas, 48” X 48” learning the difference between right and wrong. When Randall moved to Nashville to raise his family he decided to do more. His research had shown him other cities, such as Atlanta, had made great strides in breaking the crime rates of notorious areas like East Lake Village, and he insists Nashville has an opportunity to do the same. His foundation wants to show that first-rate urban schools are a reality and that the cycle of poverty can be broken if the city is willing to follow the already proven guidelines other cities have successfully undertaken. For more information about the Cayce Place Revitalization Foundation (CPRF), visit www.cayceplace.org.
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Nashville Skyline Photography Winners Announced
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uring October of last year, hundreds of photographers submitted their best photos of the Shelby Street Bridge, the AT&T “Batman” building, the Pinnacle building, LP Field, and the Cumberland River for Mayor Karl Dean’s “Nashville’s Sky Through My Eye” competition. “As our city has grown and changed, so has our
skyline,” Mayor Dean said in a press statement. “This competition gives citizens the opportunity to capture the beauty of downtown and how Nashville looks to them.” The winning photographs will be displayed in the historic Metro Courthouse and used in promotional material for Metro Government, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation. Winners also received $1,000 donated by the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation. Second place winners received a $250 gift certificate for Dury’s. To see more photos from the competition, visit Mayor Karl Dean’s Facebook page and www.nashville.gov.
Clockwise from Top: Leslie Wilkes Photography – First Place Professional Ryan Maciej – First Place Hobbyist Kerry Woo Photography – Second Place Professional
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NELSON GRICE
HISTORY EMBR ACING A RT
202 2nd Ave. South, Franklin, TN 37064 • www.gallery202art.com • 615-472-1134 Visit Us During “Franklin Art Scene” January 3, 6-9pm
Jerry Uelsmann, Self Reflection, 2009, Gelatin silver print, 20” x 16"
Jerry Uelsman and Maggie Taylor
This is Not Photography Exhibit Opens January 27 at Baldwin Photographic Gallery, MTSU
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by Daniel Tidwell
he visual world of photographers Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor is a lush dreamscape where reality is conflated and re-imagined in surprising and evocative ways. Working independently, these photographers,
who also happen to be husband and wife, have created individual bodies of astonishingly creative surrealistic work through diametrically opposed technical methods. Uelsmann and Taylor will be the subject of the inaugural exhibition at MTSU’s new Baldwin Photographic Gallery opening on January 27, 2014. It’s an
auspicious beginning for this unique gallery, which will be one of the few exhibition spaces in the region dedicated to the medium. “Jerry Uelsmann is one of the most important photographers of our time,” says Billy Pittard, chairperson of MTSU’s Electronic Media Communication Department. “He was the first photographer to have a one-man exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 . . . a key event in the acknowledgement of photography as an art form.” At the time, photography was still widely regarded as a tool
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for documenting reality, rather than a means of artistic expression. Uelsmann’s finely tuned allegorical images helped shatter those notions and push the artistic expectations of the medium. In a well-known untitled work from 1969, Uelsmann creates a dynamic, surreal landscape where a tree magically floats over an alpine lake with a seed pod reflected in the water below; while in a more recent work Dream Theater from 2004, Uelsmann melds rococo architecture with a florid sky, while a crow and an unseen protagonist with hands on a dictionary keep watch over a lone figure in the distance. Both images are rife with implications and imply unspoken narratives while begging the viewer to bring their own experience and interpretations to these richly textured black-andwhite photos. Hundreds of astounding images have poured out of Uelsmann’s fertile photographic imagination since he began his career in the late 1960s. Perhaps more astounding than the images themselves is the
Maggie Taylor, Moving On, 2012, Archival inkjet print, 15” x 15"
“ When you create these images
you’re at the fringes of your own understanding. It’s not an intellectual thing.”
– Jerry Uelsmann
Jerry Uelsmann, Journey into Night, 2006, Gelatin silver print, 16” x 20"
fact that they are all created in the darkroom, through an intricate process involving multiple enlargers and layering of photographic negatives. In a very real sense, Uelsmann’s process and images were extremely prescient—anticipating the advent of Photoshop by years. In a world where we’ve all become used to Photoshopped images and CGI special effects, Uelsmann’s old-school analog methods fused with the psychological resonance of his images is especially intriguing.
Maggie Taylor, The Concert, 2013, Archival inkjet print, 15” x 15"
For Uelsmann the creation of images is an inherently intuitive process. “When you create these images you’re at the fringes of your own understanding,” according to the photographer. “It’s
42 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled, 2013, Gelatin silver print, 20” x 16"
not an intellectual thing.” The photographic negative has never been the final product for him; rather it’s a jumping-off point for improvisation and invention. In the documentary Jerry Uelsmann & Maggie Taylor: This Is Not Photography, Uelsmann talks further about this approach and how he hopes his work is received: “If when someone looks at my photograph, if their first thought is, how did he make this, I feel I’ve failed. I don’t mind that being the second question. I’m used to that. But their first response should be some authentic ‘gee, this is weird,’ or ‘I had a dream like that,’ or ‘boy, that makes me feel lonely or happy.’ You know, it’s an authentic human response. “The technique is not the image; the technique supports the image,” says Uelsmann. “It’s that kind of thing that opens up possibilities to create, in my case, visual phenomena that was unachievable . . . with traditional photography.” As an image maker, Maggie Taylor operates in a similar sphere, relying on intuition and her own process to combine appropriated historical images, photographs, and scanned objects into densely layered works that resonate with a distinctively painterly feel. Unlike Uelsmann, Taylor never had a huge affinity for the darkroom and
Maggie Taylor, The Garden Game, 2013, Archival inkjet print, 15” x 15"
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Maggie Taylor, The Burden of Dreams, 2012, Archival inkjet print, 15” x 15"
wholeheartedly embraced digital technology, relying on Photoshop, her scanner and digital printer to produce her work. In many of Taylor’s images, historical characters exist in a trance-like realm, where the natural world has been saturated with color, and animals co-exist and complement the actions of the protagonists— lending a mythological feel to the finished work. In The Experience from 2009, an ethereal, nude woman strikes a pose in a muted, cloudy landscape, while vivid butterflies provide strategic protection from the prying eyes of the viewer. A regal woman, shown in profile, sports a fantastic headdress composed of a menagerie of animals and objects in 2013’s The Burden of Dreams. In other works humans are left to their own devices, as in The Garden Game (2013) where a stoic young girl has uprooted a bush from a lush garden, while another girl picks unseen fruit from a large tree, under a gorgeous twilight sky. The dense, painterly look of the work is intentional and plays a key role in how she hopes the viewer perceives the surreal narratives at play: “I want it to be a really cohesive visual space that is inviting
the viewer . . . almost as if you’re looking at a painting. People can look at it, digest it, and make sense of the narrative in some way, and then it brings up their own personal associations.” According to Taylor, “There is no one meaning for any of the images; rather they exist as a kind of visual riddle or open-ended poem, meant to be both playful and provocative.” Billy Pittard likens Taylor’s images to “delicious visual stories” reminiscent of the writings of “Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, and Lewis Carroll. She tweaks the imagination of the viewer with altered states of reality and blends of the vaguely familiar with the dreamily strange.” The exhibition at the Baldwin Gallery is not the first time that Uelsmann and Taylor have exhibited together – the couple have had several joint shows, both nationally and internationally. The exhibit opens on January 27 at the Baldwin Gallery at MTSU. For more information visit www.mtsu.edu, www.maggietaylor.com, and www.uelsmann.com.
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Jerry Uelsmann, Dream Theater, 2004, Gelatin silver print, 16� x 20"
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Winford Gibson, JFK, Part of series Love Triangle – Kennedy, Monroe and Jackie, 1992
THE CROUCH COLLECTION A Gift of World-Class Folk Art to Austin Peay State University by Robert Hicks It seemed like the right fit when I was asked to write a story about some forty pieces of Outsider/Folk Art that Jacqueline and Ned Crouch had recently gifted to Austin Peay State University in Clarksville. As a fellow collector who has, for many years now, known Jacqueline and Ned and their unending passion for collecting, it was a welcome assignment.
Austin Peay had a small collection that included pieces by the likes of William Edmondson, Inez Nathaniel, Enoch Tanner Wickham, and Bill Traylor, but until Jacqueline and Ned’s gift, the university's collection could have been dismissed simply on the grounds of its size . . . or lack of size.
Jessie Lee Mitchell, The Family, Acrylic Paint on paper
Herbert Baggett, Black Cat, 1993, Carved and painted wood
Yet now, with the inclusion of the Crouch gift, new life has been breathed into Austin Peay’s collection. The university has taken on far more than a commitment to house the gift. Austin Peay has now joined a small but important group of museums and institutions, worldwide, which have begun to consider non-traditional folk art as something more than whimsical sideshow material. For me, as a collector living in the heart of Middle Tennessee, the news of the Crouch gift could not be more welcome. But the value of their gift reaches far beyond my band of fellow collectors. While other regional museums have picked up a piece here or there, no other Mid South institution has made a commitment to the movement on the level that Austin Peay now has. Stepping up to the plate, the university has purchased a building in the heart of downtown Clarksville to house both the art and their now-ballooning collection of archival study materials about non-traditional folk art that includes photographs, slides, and printed materials.
Ronald Cooper, Hell It Is, 1998, Painted shoe, carved and assembled objects
Herbert Baggett, Kid Rack, 1991, Carved and joined wood, found objects
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Anonymous, The Circus, circa 1920, Carved and joined wood, wire, cloth, paint
Austin Peay has now joined a small but important group of museums and institutions, worldwide, which have begun to consider non-traditional folk art as something more than whimsical sideshow material.
Miles Smith, Hoot Owl, Carved and painted wood, tin, glass eyes
It seems a bit odd to be linking Austin Peay with the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, both Harvard and Yale, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but when it comes to collecting non-traditional folk art, that’s the very company the institution keeps these days. My time with Jacqueline and Ned was a welcome reminder of why I began to collect. Unlike so many collectors I’ve known over the years, Jacqueline (Ned pronounces it flowingly, the way I remember folks in Palm Beach pronouncing Mrs. Onassis’s name when I was a kid) and Ned didn’t collect to impress. It has always been about passion. They are far removed from those collectors I group under the “Charlie the Tuna” heading. You know, the ones who collect so that someone (in Charlie’s case Star-Kist Tuna) will think they have good taste. (Now, if you’re too young for that reference to make any sense, you might want to go to YouTube and make your way through some of the StarKist commercials of the ’60s and ’70s.) Their collection has been driven by passion at every turn. Because they
Roy Ferdinand Jr., Polk-a-dot Dress, 1991, Mixed media on poster board
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Few great collections of folk art began with folk art. More often than not, the collector began with art that had an academic seal of approval and then, over time, was drawn to something that was outside the academic lines. Jacqueline and Ned still have that first piece, a small carving that cost them $100 of their thensmaller budget. They brought it home, placed it in the center of their mantel, sat down across from it . . . and they remember asking each other, “What have we done?� Herbert Baggett, Little Man, 1995, Carved and painted wood
share an educated and critical understanding of both beauty and creativity, the collection reflects the depth and wealth of their knowledge. Whether speaking of an object now recognized as a masterpiece of American folk art or the cast-iron widget from a machine next to it, it remains all about their passion for the object. Best of all, they are full of stories about the objects that have filled their well-lived lives with joy.
I well understand that rush mixed with both excitement and dread. Soon there was no stopping them as they moved among the selftaught artists they seemed to discover at every turn. They had been bitten, and their passion flourished in a world that was both familiar and foreign. Now, with their gift to Austin Peay, Jacqueline and Ned are affording others the opportunity to enter their world and partake Sultan Rogers, Hurt Man, of the feast they have shared, Carved and painted wood together, for so many years. It is a remarkable gift. Austin Peay has been given the opportunity to lead the way in an area of study far too long ignored. And in so doing, the university has been given the chance to do what universities were created to do, enlighten the world around them. The outsider art collection is on exhibit at the Mabel Larson Gallery at Austin Peay State University. It is free and open to the public.
PHOTOGRAPH: JERRY ATNIP
For more information about the Mabel Larson Gallery visit www.apsu.edu/art/mabel-larson-gallery.
Ned and Jacqueline Crouch
Left: Red top Denzil Goodpaster, 1975, Dolly Cane, Carved and painted wood with wire. Right: Carl McKenzie, 1975, Dolly Cane, Carved and painted wood
NashvilleArts.com
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700 Dealers, Two Stores, One Acre of Shopping!
GASLAMP ANTIQUES
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Appraisal Fair, January 25th, 10-4, $10 per item. Reservations: 615.292.2250, 615.297.2224 100 Powell Pl, Ste 200 & 128 Powell Pl, 37204: M-Sat 10-6, Sun 12-6 GasLampAntiques.com
GENTLE STILLNESS OF BEING Saturday, January 18th 4:00-7:00 pm
Book Release and signing come and meet the photographer
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www.gallerysimin.com
Arts Worth Watching When a documentary subject is as elusive as author J.D. Salinger was, it takes a lot of interviews with friends, colleagues, and historians to piece together a life. For the American Masters 200th episode, Salinger director Shane Salerno went to the extreme to tell the story of the Catcher in the Rye author, interviewing 150 subjects, including members of Salinger’s inner circle who have never spoken on the record before. Additionally, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, John Cusack, Danny DeVito, John Guare, Martin Sheen, David Milch, Robert Towne, Tom Wolfe, E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal, and Pulitzer Prizewinners A. Scott Berg and Elizabeth Frank talk about Salinger’s influence on their lives, their work, and the broader culture. Using film footage, photographs, and other material that has never been seen, the film is the first work to get beyond the Catcher in the Rye author’s meticulously built-up wall: his childhood, painstaking work methods, marriages, private world, and the secrets left behind after his death in 2010. It comes to NPT and PBS stations on Tuesday, January 21, at 8 p.m. via American Masters.
Monday, January 13, at 9 p.m. Eschewing narration and standard interviews, Wiseman’s film takes viewers from faculty meetings to classrooms, from financial aid seminars to research laboratories, to show the myriad aspects of USC life. Filmed during the fall 2010 semester, the film reveals the administration’s struggles to maintain the academic excellence, public role, and diversity of the student body in the face of drastic budget cuts imposed by the state of California. Wiseman reveals the complex relationships among the school’s various constituencies—students, faculty, administrators, alumni, the city of Berkeley, the state of California, and the federal government. Great Performances brings two new specials to NPT and PBS stations this month. On Friday, January 17, at 9 p.m. via Great Performances at the Met, it’s Eugene Onegin, acclaimed English director Deborah Warner’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s most popular opera, co-directed by her longtime collaborator Fiona Shaw and conducted by Valery Gergiev. Anna Netrebko reprises her company role debut as Tatiana, the naïve heroine of Pushkin’s classic novel, and Mariusz Kwiecien portrays the self-confident title character. Piotr Beczala reprises his acclaimed performance as Onegin’s friend-turned-rival, Lenski.
In Barrymore, on Friday, January 31, at 9 p.m., 83-year-old stage and screen legend Christopher Plummer portrays another titan of theater and film from an earlier age, the illustrious—and notorious—John Barrymore. This acclaimed film adaptation of William Luce’s 1997 play is set in 1942 during the final months of Barrymore’s life. On the stage of a Broadway theater, the famously combative star struggles to recreate his performance in Shakespeare’s Richard III, recalling the highs and lows of his remarkable life and career in the process. Legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman (Titicu Follies, High School, Boxing Gym, Crazy Horse) goes back to school for his intimate and sprawling film At Berkeley, a 2013 Venice Film Festival winner coming to NPT via Independent Lens on
Austin City Limits, airing on Wednesday nights at 11 p.m., has a stellar lineup to start the year off. On January 8, it’s Queens of the Stone Age, followed by Jason Isbell and Neko Case on January 15; fun. and Dawes on January 22; and Portugal. The Man and Local Natives on January 29.
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ThisMonth
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 5:00 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 6:00 6:30
Saturday
am Electric Company Angelina Ballerina Curious George The Cat in the Hat Peg + Cat Dinosaur Train Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Super Why! Sewing with Nancy Martha’s Sewing Room Garden Smart P. Allen Smith Simply Ming Cook’s Country noon America’s Test Kitchen Bringing it Home with Laura McIntosh John Besh’s Family Table Martha Bakes Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting Best of Joy of Painting Woodsmith Shop The Woodwright’s Shop Rough Cut with Tommy Mac This Old House Ask This Old House Hometime PBS NewsHour Weekend pm Tennessee’s Wild Side
January 2 014
Nashville Public Television
A NEW SEASON OF SECOND CHANCES.
Sunday
am Sesame Street Curious George The Cat in the Hat Peg + Cat Word World Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Super Why! Tennessee’s Wild Side Volunteer Gardener Tennessee Crossroads A Word on Words Nature noon To the Contrary The McLaughlin Group Moyers & Company Washington Week with Gwen Ifill Globe Trekker California’s Gold Joseph Rosendo’s Travelscope America’s Heartland Rick Steves’ Europe Antiques Roadshow PBS NewsHour Weekend pm Charlie Rose: The Week
Season 4 finds aristocrats coping with last season’s shocking finale and grappling with the future, as three generations of the Crawley family have conflicting interests in the estate.
Sundays, beginning January 5 8:00 PM
Daytime Schedule 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 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
am Classical Stretch Body Electric Arthur Wild Kratts Curious George The Cat in the Hat Peg + Cat Dinosaur Train Sesame Street Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Super Why! Sid the Science Kid Thomas and Friends Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood pm Caillou Super Why! Dinosaur Train Martha Speaks Clifford the Big Red Dog Peg + Cat The Cat in the Hat Curious George Arthur WordGirl Wild Kratts pm PBS NewsHour
Nashville Public Television
Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock Season 3 Rejoin the 21st-century team of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they battle the worst that modern criminality has to offer.
Doc Martin
Season 5 Doc Martin continues to deal with the mysterious illnesses and odd events that plague the town of Portwenn.
Thursdays, beginning January 2 at 9:00 PM
Sundays, beginning January 19 9:00 PM AND
Fridays, beginning January 24 7:00 PM
wnpt.org
Monday
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7:00 Royal Memories: Prince Charles’ Tribute to The Queen 8:00 Masterpiece Classic Downton Abbey Season 4, Part 2. Fates converge at a house party. 9:00 Unlocking Sherlock 10:00 Bluegrass Underground Alison Brown Quartet. 10:30 Closer To Truth What Would It Feel Like to Be God? 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
7:00 Antiques Roadshow Boise, Hour Two. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Tulsa, OK - Hour Two. 9:00 Independent Lens At Berkeley. Explore major aspects of university life at The University of California at Berkeley, the oldest and most prestigious member of a 10-campus public education system, and one of the finest research and teaching facilities in the world.
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Boise, Hour One. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Tulsa, OK, Hour One. 9:00 Independent Lens The Invisible War. This Oscar-nominated documentary investigates one of America’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Injunuity
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Chasing Shackleton Tuesday, January 8 9:00 PM
7:00 Secrets of Highclere Castle 8:00 Masterpiece Classic Downton Abbey, Season 4, Part 1. Six months after Matthew’s death, family and servants try to cure Mary and Isobel of their deep depression. 10:00 Bluegrass Underground The Wood Brothers. 10:30 Closer to the Truth How Do Humans Differ from Other Animals? 11:00 Tavis Smiley
Sunday
Primetime Evening Schedule
January 2014
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7:00 1964: American Experience Based on The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964, follow some prominent figures of the time and the actions of ordinary Americans. 9:00 Frontline Secret State of North Korea. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin
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7:00 Poisoner’s Handbook: American Experience In the early 20th century, the average American medicine cabinet was a would-be poisoner’s treasure chest. 9:00 Frontline To Catch a Trader. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Over 90 and Loving It An inspirational group of people in their 90s and 100s who continue to lead full lives.
1964 American Experience Tuesday, January 14 7:00 PM
Tuesday
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15 7:00 Nature The Private Life Of Deer. 8:00 NOVA Zeppelin Terror Attack. The untold story of the biggest flying machines ever made which rained down death on British towns for two and a half terrifying years during World War I. 9:00 Chasing Shackleton 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits Jason Isbell/Neko Case.
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7:00 Nature Legendary White Stallions. 8:00 NOVA Alien Planets Revealed. NASA’s Kepler mission identified more than 3,500 potential planets. 9:00 Chasing Shackleton What happened on this famous survival story. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits Queens of the Stone Age.
7:00 Great Performances From Vienna: The New Year’s Celebration. Ring in the New Year with the Vienna Philharmonic at the opulent Musikverein, under the baton of guest conductor Daniel Barenboim. 8:30 Return to Downton Abbey 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits Rodrigo Y Gabriela.
Wednesday
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16 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Chef’s Life Collard Green Queen. The Mills brothers participate in their 100-yearold all-male family tradition of making collard kraut. 8:30 Mind of a Chef Curry. 9:00 Doc Martin Born With a Shotgun. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Unlocking Sherlock
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7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Chef’s Life Love Me Some Candied Yams! Sweet potato farmers. 8:30 Mind of a Chef Sea /Salt. April goes clamming in Riverhead, New York, and makes clam chowder. 9:00 Doc Martin Dry Your Tears. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Miller’s Tale
7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 A Chef’s Life A Peanut Pastime. Vivian visits a peanut farm just before and during harvest. 8:30 Mind of a Chef London. 9:00 Doc Martin Preserve the Romance. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Forgotten War: The Struggle For North America
Thursday
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17 7:00 Appalachians The phonograph and the radio exposed the mountain people to new influences. 8:00 Great Performances at The Met Eugene Onegin. Anna Netrebko and Mariusz Kwiecien star as the lovestruck Tatiana and the imperious Onegin in Tchaikovsky’s fateful romance. 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Moyers & Company
10 7:00 Appalachians 8:00 Panama Canal: American Experience 9:30 POV Listening is an Act Of Love: A StoryCorps Special. An animated special from StoryCorps celebrates the transformative power of listening, with six stories. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Moyers & Company 11:30 Rivers and Rails: Tennessee Civil War 150
7:00 Appalachians The Appalachian mountains include the Alleghenies, the Cumberlands, the Blue Ridge and the Great Smokies. It is an ancient range, rugged and beautiful. 8:00 Carol Burnett: The Mark Twain Prize Julie Andrews, Lucie Arnaz, Tony Bennett, Tim Conway and Tina Fey. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Moyers & Company
Friday
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18 7:00 Lawrence Welk Show 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Café Time And Tide. 9:00 Miranda Just Act Normal. Miranda has some difficulty convincing people she’s not actually having a breakdown. 9:30 Outnumbered 10:00 Globe Trekker Buenos Aires City Guide. 11:00 Doc Martin Born with a Shotgun.
11 7:00 Lawrence Welk Show 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Cafe Time And Tide. 9:00 Miranda A New Low. There’s a new girl on the scene this week and Miranda and Stevie find it tough to keep up with her youthful energy. 9:30 Outnumbered 10:00 Globe Trekker Southern Mexico. 11:00 Doc Martin Dry Your Tears.
7:00 Lawrence Welk Show 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Café There Were Three In The Bed. 9:00 Miranda Let’s Do It. Miranda’s love life is looking up as two men vie for her affections. 9:30 Outnumbered 10:00 Globe Trekker Alps & Lapland. Holly travels by dogsled. 11:00 Doc Martin Preserve the Romance.
Saturday
Nashville Public Television
wnpt.org
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8:00 Masterpiece Classic Downton Abbey Season 4, Part 5. 9:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series III: His Last Vow. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
7:00 Kennedy Half Century The impact and influence of JFK’s life, administration and tragic death on the general public, the media and subsequent U.S. presidents. 8:00 Masterpiece Classic Downton Abbey Season 4, Part 4. What’s troubling Anna? 9:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series III: The Sign Of Three. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
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7:00 Nazi Mega Weapons Super Tanks. 8:00 Amish Shunned: American Experience This film follows seven former members of the Amish community as they reflect on their decisions to leave one of the most closed and tightlyknit communities in the United States. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last Of Summer Wine 11:00 Shelter Me Second Chances.
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7:00 Nature An Original Duckumentary. 8:00 NOVA Roman Catacomb Mystery. Beneath the streets of Rome lies an ancient city of the dead, a labyrinth of tunnels lined with tombs. 9:00 Super Skyscrapers 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last Of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits Sarah Jarosz/The Milk Carton Kids.
7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Chef’s Life Have Yourself Some Moonshine. 8:30 Mind of a Chef British Classics. Bangers and mash, fish’n’chips, and pies. 9:00 Doc Martin Remember Me. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Music Makes A City The orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky.
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7:00 Nature The Funkiest Monkeys. The feisty crested black macaques. 8:00 NOVA Ghosts Of Murdered Kings. A methodical hunt for clues in Ireland’s County Tipperary. 9:00 Hawking Stephen Hawking. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits Portugal. The Man/Local Natives.
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7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Chef’s Life The Buttermilk Belt. A visit to Maple View Dairy. 8:30 Mind of a Chef Italian. April explores her deep love for Italian cuisine and its influence on her cooking. 9:00 Doc Martin Mother Knows Best. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Return of the Wolves: The Next Chapter
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7:00 Nature Meet the Coywolf. A mixture of western coyote and eastern wolf. The coywolf is a beautiful carnivore found increasingly on the streets of North American cities. 8:00 NOVA Monster Typhoon. Typhoon Haiyan. 9:00 Chasing Shackleton 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits fun./Dawes.
Visit wnpt.org for complete 24 hour schedules for NPT and NPT2
7:00 Antiques Roadshow Detroit, Hour Two. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Eugene, Or - Hour Two. 9:00 POV American Promise. Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson, middleclass African-American parents in Brooklyn, N.Y., film their son and his best friend make their way through one of the country’s most prestigious private schools. 11:00 BBC World News
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7:00 War Letters: American Experience War Letters. Personal correspondence from the American Revolution to the Gulf War. 8:00 Salinger: American Masters A look at the Catcher in the Rye author’s childhood, work methods, marriages and the secrets he left behind after his death in 2010. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News
7:00 Antiques Roadshow 7:00 Amish: Detroit, Hour One. American Experience 8:00 Antiques Roadshow 9:00 Frontline Eugene, OR - Hour One. League of Denial, Part 1. Frontline and prize-win9:00 Independent Lens ning journalists Steve The State Of Arizona. ExFainaru and Mark plore the explosive emoFainaru-Wada of ESPN tions and complex reveal the hidden story realities behind Arizona’s of the NFL and brain inheadline-grabbing strugjuries. gle with illegal immigra10:00 Frontline tion. League of Denial, Part 2. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:00 Aging Matters: 11:30 Tennessee Explorers End of Life Part 2.
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Boise, Hour Three. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Tulsa, Ok - Hour Three. 9:00 Independent Lens Blood Brother. Rocky Braat didn’t know his desire for family would lead to an AIDS hostel in India where he would find more love and need than he could bear. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Conversation With James Lawson
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7:00 Return of the Wolves: The Next Chapter 8:00 Masterpiece Classic Downton Abbey Season 4, Part 3. Love is in the air, and darker emotions too, as Mary, Edith, Tom and Anna each struggle with a dilemma. 9:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series III: The Empty Hearse. Contemporary Sherlock is back for a third season. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
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NOVA Zeppelin Terror Attack Wednesday, January 15 8:00 PM
Nashville Public Television
Nature The Funkiest Monkeys Wednesday, January 29 7:00 PM
7:00 Lawrence Welk Show 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Cafe Reap What You Sow Part 1. 9:00 Miranda Teacher. Miranda is rather British when it comes to sex, or shenanigans as she likes to call it. 9:30 Outnumbered 10:00 Globe Trekker Greek Islands. 11:00 Doc Martin Remember Me.
FEBRUARY
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7:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series III: The Sign Of Three. 9:00 Great Performances Barrymore. The 83-yearold stage and screen legend Christopher Plummer portrays another titan of theater and film from an earlier age, the illustrious — and notorious — John Barrymore. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Moyers & Company
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7:00 Lawrence Welk Show 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Cafe Stags Or Hens. 9:00 Miranda After an impromptu ‘date’ is planned with long-term crush Gary Preston, Miranda decides to take a trip to the new clothing store. 9:30 Outnumbered 10:00 Globe Trekker Colorado To Utah. 11:00 Doc Martin Mother Knows Best.
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7:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Sherlock, Series III: The Empty Hearse. Sherlock stalks again in a third season of the modern version of the Arthur Conan Doyle classic. 9:00 Real Mary Poppins The harrowing life story of Pamela Travers, creator of Mary Poppins. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Moetsr & Company 11:30 Next Door Neighbors: Little Kurdistan, USA
• •
Follow me to English & Company ENGLISH & COMPANY
118 Powell Place • Nashville, TN 37204 Mon. - Sat. • 10:00 - 5:00 • (615) 315-5589 englishandcompanytn@gmail.com Follow us on Facebook
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YEOMAN’S IN THE FORK
A Rare Book & Document Gallery Located in Historic Leiper’s Fork, TN
12/12/13 12:15 PM
Airstream Trailer, 2013
Hatch Show Print
R ARE BOOKS & DOCUMENTS BOUGHT AND SOLD H A L E Y G A L L E RY
224 5th Avenue South • Downtown Nashville 615-256-2805 • HatchShowPrint.com Hatch Show Print is another historic property of the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum, a section 501(c)(3) non-profit education organization chartered by the state of Tennessee in 1964.
Wednesday thru Saturday 10-5 | Sunday 1-5 4216 Old Hillsboro Road | Franklin, TN ph: 615.983.6460 | fx: 615.515.9060 www.YeomansInTheFork.com
Beth Nielsen Chapman Running Through Time By Holly Gleason | Photographs by Patricia O'Driscoll
W
hat Beth Nielsen Chapman hasn’t done—save curing cancer and solving world hunger— probably isn’t worth doing. The award-winning
songwriter and artist on her own terms has fallen in love, lost a husband to cancer and won her own battle with breast cancer, been encouraged by Bishop Desmond Tutu, recorded Prism, a spiritual album in nine languages, including Farsi and Latin, worked with NASA on The Mighty Sky, a children’s album about astronomy (which has just been nominated for a Grammy), and raised a talented son who is also seeking his way in the realm of music. Faith Hill dominated the country, pop, and adult contemporary charts with the CMA Song of the Year “This Kiss,” and Elton John was so transfixed by her ballad of loss and wonder “Sand and Water” that he replaced “Candle in the Wind” with it as a
tribute to Princess Diana in his live shows. Though her songs have provided bedrock for Bonnie Raitt (“Meet Me Halfway”) and Willie Nelson (“Nothing I Can Do About It Now”), Bettye LaVette (“Fair Enough”), and Trisha Yearwood (“Down On My Knees,” “You Say You Will”), Chapman’s essence rises to the surface when she brings these songs to life.
Bishop Tutu looked her in the eye and suggested she say yes to the universe – and let God handle all the details. Slowly the pieces fell into place.
To hear the intention, the nuance, and the heart of the writer is something few do as well as Chapman, and midway through a career retrospective Box of Songs, she realized there was a record within her vast box set. UnCovered is a celebration of some of the many songs she’s written, and it was born on her front porch. “I was sitting on my porch with [legendary BBC host] Bob Harris when I realized it will be 2016 before [Box of Songs] will be finished. We were talking about all of it, and Bob said, ‘Well, this is what you should do! Your record’s right there: from Elton John to Bonnie Raitt to Willie Nelson. And you should call it UnCovered.” And so a dozen songs were culled into a once-ina-fan’s-life overview of a very singular woman. Laughing, she admits she loves hearing people sing her songs; even invoking the Outlaw Waylon Jennings, who told her, “A great song doesn’t care who sings it.” But there is something so warm and inviting when Chapman steams up Raitt’s “Meet Me Halfway,” offers a smoky, au revoir take on Lorrie Morgan’s chart-topping “5 Minutes,” or gives a really downhome treatment to Tanya Tucker’s #1 “Strong Enough to Bend” that the notion of how many things a single song can be is immediately apparent.
“Beth’s music is warm, deeply touching, and from the heart,” Harris says of her gifts. “She’s a ‘give everything’ performer, and her audiences respond with love and affection.” Love and affection are a big part of what she brings to her music. In spite of one of pop music’s most circuitous trails, she loves the music as much now as she did when she “first came to Nashville in 1985, five years after I finished licking my wounds when my first unsuccessful record came out on Capitol, literally the same week as ‘Disco Duck’ was released.” No manager, no plan. After dropping out to have a baby, bake bread, and live life, she was drawn back to songwriting, having been immersed in Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Ricky Skaggs, and Rodney Crowell. She knew she wasn’t a country singer, even though royalty like Don Williams and Willie Nelson were cutting her songs. Jim Ed Norman, the visionary head of Warner Nashville, offered her a pop deal the same time he signed a cappella group Take 6. “I was a Joni Mitchell-ite in disguise!” she marvels, then offers genuine wisdom. “If you picked a genre, it seemed like that was it. So I didn’t pick a genre, and there’s really no genre that claims me. I’m a completely crazy person about songs: every genre, every style! As long as it connects the dots . . . ” Almost three decades later, those dots have served as crumbs in the woods. They’ve led her, fed her, brought her friends, and bound her adventures together with melodies and words. When she lamented Prism could be too difficult to realize, Bishop Tutu
“Solid stone is just sand and water and a million years gone by” from SAND AND WATER looked her in the eye and suggested she say yes to the universe, and let God handle all the details. Slowly the pieces fell into place—just like UnCovered, an album she never intended but one that realizes the breadth of her songs’ reach. “[Maybe I] reclaimed them, brought them back to their original intention after sending them into the arms of other artists. It’s never been a bad thing; I’m always thrilled.” With her earthy voice, she dives down into the songs and emerges with pearls. Whether you know the original versions or not, there is plenty for grown-ups to love on UnCovered. But for those who know, it’s an extra treat. Whether the effervescence of “This Kiss” being given a bit more soul or the shuffle to “Almost Home” that is pure, busking exuberance, Chapman knows how to shine. Beth Nielsen Chapman's UnCovered will be released on January 20. For more information, follow her on Twitter @BNCmusic or visit www.bethnielsenchapman.com.
American Chronicles: The Ar t of Norman Rockwell has been organized by the Norman Roc kwell Museum, Stoc kbridge, Massac husetts.
This exhibition is made possible with the generous suppor t from National Endowment for the Ar ts, American Masterpieces Program; the Henr y Luce Foundation; Cur tis Publishing Co.; Norman Roc kwell Family Agency; and the Stoc kman Family Foundation. This exhibition is suppor ted by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the ar ts and Humanities. PRESENTING SPONSORS:
Anne & Joe Russell SUPPORTING SPONSOR:
HOSPITALIT Y SPONSOR:
The Frist Center for the Visual Ar ts gratefully ac knowledges our Picasso Circle Members as Exhibition Patrons.
THE FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY:
Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission
This exhibition is suppor ted by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Ar ts and the Humanities.
DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE 919 BROADWAY FRISTCENTER.ORG Norman Rockwell. Art Critic (detail). Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, April 16, 1955. Š 1955: SEPS. Norman Rockwell Museum Collections
PHOTOGRAPH: HOLLIS BENNETT
Nashville graphic design guru creates the look and feel of the places that we call home by Nancy Cason
J
oel Anderson is a talented guy who not only makes things, he makes things happen, all while balancing his roles as artist and designer, entrepreneur and community advocate, husband and father of four. As head of Anderson Design Group—
specialists in illustrative design, branding, and product development—Anderson has become his own best client with the production of a dozen lines of original fine-art posters, including the awardwinning Spirit of Nashville series. His graphic images of Music City legends and landmarks were originally designs for a limitedrun promotional calendar, Anderson explained. “I wanted to show my clients in New York and L.A. that Nashville is a hip, creative place with a lot going on.” The images were so visually compelling, clients began ripping pages from their calendars and framing their favorites. As word spread and public demand grew, more iconic images were added.
PHOTOGRAPH: HOLLIS BENNETT
Anderson and his team of gifted illustrators focused on communicating the intangible: the unique character of Music City that fosters a sense of belonging and a shared community spirit among locals and visitors alike. And while the posters became immediately collectible as art for the home and office, Deana Ivey of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation acknowledges their unexpected civic contribution. “Anderson Design Group has captured the heart of Nashville and showcased it on a national and international stage. The firm’s Spirit
62 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
“There is a hunger in our culture to get back to the basics, to hold onto those things that are timeless, authentic, and that bring us joy.”
of Nashville designs promote our music brand, deep history, and iconic attractions with a vintage and unique twist.” Is ADG the new Hatch? Not at all, Anderson says, although they do share an innovative approach to design and dedication to craft. Anderson insists that each design begins as a pencil sketch and ensures that the final product, although ultimately produced on the computer, retains a handmade look, with hand lettering or classic fonts and a color palette that appears aged and imperfect. But it’s his vintage-style aesthetic, with imagery and themes reflective of early-to-mid-twentieth-century posters, that makes his designs instantly recognizable and universally appealing. Like good advertising, Anderson’s artwork communicates on an
emotional level, evoking nostalgia for the past. The Belle Meade Theater, with classic film imagery from the ’40s and the signature theater marquee of the same period, brings to mind a time of innocence and excitement (“Fall in love at the movies!”). The Loveless Café recalls the thrill of a back-roads drive in Dad’s ’53 Buick to a favorite café for country ham and scratch-made biscuits. Anderson notes, “There is a hunger in our culture to get back to the basics, to hold onto those things that are timeless, authentic, and that bring us joy. Our artwork taps into these values, while communicating that this is something from another time.” Anderson has also created destination posters that inspire wanderlust. The World Travel posters boast flat planes of bold color that draw our attention to exotic locales—the Taj Mahal and Venice at sunset—triggering memories of fabulous travels or
adding new itineraries to our bucket list. Scenes of national parks and great American cities from The Art & Soul of America series capture the essence of familiar sites—glorious palm trees and mountains framing a concrete L.A. skyline, and the pastoral Great Smoky Mountains where a family of bears might just appear at any moment. Anderson provides insight into the conceptual challenges of pinning down the distinguishing features that make a place immediately recognizable. “In designing the Bluebird Café poster, we worked through many options. For instance, we found that the physical building is uninspiring, and the idea of a person sitting on a stool playing a guitar could fit any number of music venues in Nashville. Finally, we captured the unique experience of dining and listening to music at the Bluebird with a musical bluebird character illuminated in a round spotlight, with a knife and fork on either side.” While Anderson’s group continues to design for clients, poster sales now account for 70 percent of his business, and he’s recently expanded the reach of his artwork by licensing the four hundred plus designs in his digital catalogue for reproduction on a variety of gift items. Anderson gratefully gives back to the community that has given him so much. He is deeply involved in mentoring local graphic design students, keeps all his business local, and features the products of other Nashville “makers” in his Studio Store. He also donates 10 percent of the profits from Spirit of Nashville poster sales to several local organizations—folks that, in Anderson’s words, are “doing good and changing lives.” For a complete look at ADG artwork, visit online at www.spiritofnashville.com or stop in at the ADG Studio Store at 116 29 th Street North near Centennial Park.
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Ronnie McDowell
The King & The Mouse by Stephanie Stewart-Howard Photography by Jerry Atnip
Immortal Icons, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 40” x 60”
Y
ou probably know Ronnie McDowell best for his soulful tribute to Elvis Presley “The King Is Gone” or perhaps for the dozen or so movies and TV
spots where he’s provided chillingly accurate vocal representation of the late icon. Or maybe it’s songwriting—
pieces like “Hey Mississippi” for Jimmy Buffett, for example. But the man’s remarkable gifts aren’t limited to music. He happens to
be one hell of a painter. And lately that talent, with its Rockwellian style and all-American sensibility, is focused on the world created by Walt Disney. McDowell has always painted. He says his first “good” work was a bright-red fire engine created in first grade, circa 1956 in Portland, Tennessee. In ’77, after he hit it big with “The King Is Gone,” he went to visit his dear former teacher, then in a nursing home, and
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January 2O14 | 65
Last Chance, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 32” x 46”
heard that she still had the picture in her possession. “Well, ma’am, I’d sure love to have that,” he told her. “Yes,” she replied. “But since you’ve become famous, I’m going to give it to my children instead.” McDowell laughs at that recollection. “About three years ago, a friend of mine gave me a collection of drawings of Elvis I’d done in seventh grade,” he says. “He’d asked me to do them for an art contest and turned them in with his name on them. They all won blue ribbons, and I let him have the credit. But I kept painting, kept evolving. Norman Rockwell became my hero for his realism—I love to make paintings look like photos.” McDowell’s adult work began with an Elvis (of course) painting. In the early ’70s, he had a dream about a young boy in a Mississippi shotgun shack looking in the mirror and seeing himself grown up—Elvis Aaron Presley circa 1956 at the beginning of his glory days—as if asking his future self, are you sure we’re going to get into this?
Reflection of a King, 2007, Acrylic on canvas, 36” x 30”
McDowell puts extensive research into his work, and the piece is filled with fragile historic detail of the home as it really looked. A print of the work hangs in Graceland today. It was so successful Loretta Lynn’s daughter asked him to immortalize her mother in the same way. Then he painted young Oprah Winfrey, getting home details like a photo of JFK on her dresser and, on the wall, one of her grandmother from a tiny, black-and-white photo.
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tribute to the work of Walt Disney, and the paintings are so extraordinary they have captured the imagination of Disney Fine Arts. His daughter Athena submitted the work to Disney, and now it is about to be introduced to the world. It started with an idea from Tyler, McDowell’s son—an image of Walt getting ready to go to California from Kansas City in 1923, strutting train-side with Mickey Mouse at his side. It’s got all the Disney sense of magic. When his daughter sent it to Disney, they were ready to sign him to a contract immediately.
Reflection of a Talk Show Queen, 2010, Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 36”
“norman rockwell became my hero for his realism – i love to make paintings look like photos.”
Two years ago, the great George Jones asked for a picture of himself being arrested on his John Deere for a DUI. McDowell went over, camera in hand, shot Jones on the tractor at every angle, and went home and painted true to life. He took it over to Jones on Christmas Day. “I put on a Santa hat, and you’d have thought I gave [Jones] Fort Knox.” From Dolly Parton to Johnny Depp, he has pegged celebrities as few artists dare. Now, inspired by his adult children, McDowell has turned his talents to paying
Jack of All Trades, 2013, Acrylic on canvas, 60” x 40”
From there came other works, notably black-and-white images of Mickey with Oswald the Rabbit, Walt’s original character (stolen from him and the rights only newly returned, eighty years later), and Elvis teaching Mickey to dance on the Ed Sullivan Show. There is much more to come from McDowell—Disney and who knows where else his talent may take him. Anyone who tries to pigeonhole this talent is wasting their time; it’s abundantly clear that he has a big imagination and a bigger heart. It shows in all he does, in music, art, and life. For more information about Ronnie McDowell and his art, visit his website www.ronniemcdowell.com.
The Journey Begins, 2012, Acrylic on canvas, 40” x 60” NashvilleArts.com
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STONE
Nashville Sculptor Tom Rice Carves a Legacy Photography and Story by John Guider
T
om Rice is busily preparing for a show of a lifetime. In 2017, the Customs House Museum in Clarksville, Tennessee, will be holding a retrospective of Tom’s work created during a career that spans almost fifty years as an artist.
Throughout that period Tom has worked in different mediums. The pieces that stand out the most for me are the sculptures that he has formed out of heavy blocks of solid stone. Working in stone is unique in both vision and difficulty. Beating on a rock for hours on end with nothing but a hammer and chisel is just plain hard. It is physically painful too. Stress injuries happen far too often. Ending up with a piece of art takes
NashvilleArts.com
Sleeping Bird, Recycled limestone baluster fragment, direct carved, 8” x 4.5” x 4.5” January 2O14 | 69
with each slam of the hammer, a shockwave is sent out through the entire piece, threatening its very integrity. the work could crack at any moment. a unique dedication that is truly worthy of celebration. Even though a year may seem an eternity to create a few new pieces for exhibition, it’s not. Especially for one who chisels in stone, the days have a way of turning into months before a piece can rightfully be considered completed. Stone sculpture has to be one of the most difficult mediums for an artist to work in. Because it is a reductive process, once something has been taken away it can’t ever be put back. There is no painting over the lines or erasing mistakes. For that reason the spatial considerations are immense. One has to be able to compose mentally in three dimensions and then bring that vision into fruition without any second chances. A redo means starting all over again. Working from one’s mind and not a model is especially difficult. Not many are capable of it, which is one reason why the stone sculptures of local folk artist William Edmondson, one of Tom’s major influences, can command over six figures at auction.
Pinnacle Bird (detail), Recycled limestone, Victorian lintel fragment, pine, and marble, 70” x 15” x 7”
As the artist chips away, a special bond is created between the work and its master. The artist might even start to treat the piece like a pet, cajoling it and holding it with the same care as if it were alive. When a painter nears the completion of a special work, an excitement and a joyful energy can erupt from within, pushing the painting further on. For a stone sculptor, the excitement exists, but it can be coupled equally with a disabling stress stemming from the fear that something terrible is about to happen. Because, with each slam of the hammer, a shockwave is sent out through the entire piece, threatening its very integrity. The work could crack at any moment.
Bear Claw, Recycled limestone step, direct carved, 6” x 30” x 18” 70 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
response was to make shells so big people would have to stop and take notice. His birds take on a more modern feel, reflecting his admiration for the likes of Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi. The images of the birds are wonderfully transcendent as Tom is able to turn a slab of rock into a work that becomes incredibly ethereal in its beauty. Although the birds lack the extreme detail of some of his other pieces, he surely makes up for that fact by creating pieces that are so sensual and fluid in their form that they become almost erotic in their feel. Tom’s love for nature is present not only in his imagery but also in the materials he uses. He recycles the stone from torn-down buildings, stone mills, and even discarded tombstones. Found objects appear in his other work as well. Equally evident is his obsession for perfection. For example, when he created one of his snake figures from an old, wooden walking cane, he hammered in over a thousand flat-headed tacks to replicate the scales of the snake’s skin. Tom Rice is an artist worth discovering. His work is articulate, unique, and expertly finished. Sleeping Bird, Limestone, direct carved, 7” x 6” x 6”
The artist approaches each piece with a certain leap of faith, not knowing what fractures or imperfections may lie inside. As the artist works the stone, the dimensions become narrower and more vulnerable. The commitment is such that soon the artist is reasoning with the work, confronting it, making promises to it if it will only stay intact for a few more poundings. Only until the work is finished and placed securely on its pedestal can the artist finally breathe a sigh of relief. But once the work is complete it is there for eternity. With that in mind, it is no wonder that when I asked the price of a perfectly rendered, thirty-inch shell chiseled from a solid slab of limestone that took over three months to fashion, Tom replied unhesitatingly, “Priceless.” It is clear from Tom Rice’s work that he possesses an intensely aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. The theme prevails in most of his work, from his architecturally perfect shells to his highly stylized birds. He traces this admiration back to his youth, when the feathers and stones he found along the ground became his “toys.” He draws inspiration from other artists as well. His decision to make gigantic shells Vessel, Limestone, direct carved, out of slabs of stone came 16” x 10” x 6” from a comment his college mentor and lifelong friend Olen Bryant made after being gifted a real shell: “With beauty like this, why do we even bother?” Tom’s
To see more of Tom Rice's work, visit the Centennial Art Center.
Outdoor studio, works in progress: Birdbaths, vessels, birds, benches, and pedestals. Limestone, wood, marble, and found objects.
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PHOTOGRAPH: HIGHCLERE CASTLE 2013
Downton Abbey Comes to Nashville The 2014 Antiques and Garden Show by Robert Hicks
T
wenty-four years ago, Cheekwood in partnership with the Nashville Exchange Club (now the Economic Club of Nashville) ventured out into a brave, new world of fundraising. Noting the success of the
With the very real possibility of failure, Connie and Sigourney accepted the challenge by organizing and co-chairing that first Antiques and Garden Show of Nashville. Of course, as all of us now know, the show proved to be a huge success on every possible level. Tennessee-born Albert Hadley, of Albert Hadley, Inc.,
PHOTOGRAPH: PEYTON HOGE
Heart of Country Antiques Show held every February at the Opryland Hotel and believing that a passion for gardening was on the rise nationwide, Cheekwood board member Martin Roberts proposed the idea of a combined show to his fellow Cheekwood board members Connie Cigarran and the late Sigourney Cheek.
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Event Highlights PHOTOGRAPH BY DONNIE HEDDEN
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6 Noon-3 p.m.: Early Shopping Event Private meet and greet and book signing with Charlotte Moss for Golden Benefactors, invited designers and celebrities. Charlotte Moss will highlight her favorite finds and dealers that caught her interest during her preview of the show. 5:30-6:30 p.m.: Benefactors Reception and Media Event Ribbon cutting ceremony with Mayor Karl Dean 6:30-9:30 p.m.: Preview Party
was a good friend of the show from that very beginning right up until his death in 2012. With his connections in New York and beyond, the show garnered both credibility and respect from the start. So with twenty-three years of success under their belt, on Thursday, February 6, the Twenty-fourth Annual Antiques and Garden Show of Nashville will open its doors in the new Music City Center and run through Sunday afternoon, February 9. The Co-chairs this year are Vee Vee Scott and Mindy Jacoway. Over those twenty-three years, the show has grown to 150 antique and garden exhibitors, interior designers, landscape architects, and speakers on house and home. Among my favorites every year are the spectacular show gardens created by some of our region’s best garden designers. For my money, those gardens would be worth every penny of the admission price, and yet there is so much more to this oasis of spring and inspiration in the gloom of winter.
PHOTOGRAPH: HIGHCLERE CASTLE 2013
Charlotte Moss, multiple-award winner for her design work of both private residences and executive suites all over the world, will be serving as Honorary Chairman this year. Joining Charlotte will be Lady Carnarvon, the eighth and current countess of Highclere Castle, the real-life setting for the worldwide television hit series Downton Abbey, speaking on life at Highclere along with some insights into what it’s like to have your house become one of the most recognizable and envied homes in Keynote Lecturer: The Right the world. She will share some behind- Honorable Countess of Carnarvon the-scenes stories from diaries, letters, and photos kept over the centuries. She will also discuss her new book, Lady Catherine, the Earl and the Real Downton Abbey. Along with Charlotte and the countess will be interior designers Alexa Hampton, Jennifer Boles, Mario Buatta, Nina Campbell, garden designer Jon Carloftis, and Canal House Cooking authors Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton. And, as to be expected, all of the speakers will have their most recent books available for purchase, and author signature, at the event. Individual, group, lecture, and special event tickets are all on sale at www.antiquesandgardenshow.com.
Guests can enjoy a first look at the show while mixing and mingling with friends. Tickets to the preview party can be purchased for $200.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 10 a.m.-6 p.m.: Show open 11:30 a.m.: Keynote Lecture Lady Carnarvon will take guests through the gardens and history of Highclere Castle and share fascinating stories from diaries, letters and photos kept over the centuries. She will also discuss her new book, Lady Catherine, the Earl and the Real Downton Abbey. Tickets to the keynote lecture can be purchased for $50. 6-8 p.m.: A Bourbon Party: Bourbon + Southern Food + Gardens = Modern Entertaining Guests can indulge in the best Southern tastes and entertainment with the Canal House Cooking authors, The Bourbon Review publishers and garden designer Jon Carloftis. Featured designers will also make appearances to sign their books. Tickets to this party can be purchased for $50.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 10 a.m.-7 p.m.: Show open 1-2 p.m.: Designer Panel Lecture Featuring Alexa Hampton as moderator, Jennifer Boles, Mario Buatta and Nina Campbell. Followed by book signing with all designers. Tickets to the designer panel lecture can be purchased for $50. 4-7 p.m.: Music in the Gardens
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9 11 a.m.-5 p.m.: Show open 1 p.m.: Finer Things in Life – the Southern Way: A Lecture on Gardens, Lifestyles and Entertaining Featuring Jon Carloftis and the Canal House Cooking authors; followed by book signing. Tickets to this lecture can be purchased for $25. Tickets to the show are $12 to $15 in advance and $20 at the door. All tickets, including tickets to the lectures and parties, can be purchased now at www.antiquesandgardenshow.com.
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AT T H E
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NINA CAMPBELL
JON CARLOFTIS
and more than 150 antique and horticultural dealers
T I C K E T S O N S A L E N O W:
AntiquesAndGardenShow.com Benefiting Cheekwood and ECON
PHOTOGRAPHY
Routine check on highway I-10, the U.S.’s largest terrestrial drug vein, linking the U.S. to Mexico. Large 18-wheel trucks are commonly used for passing tons of drugs into the country.
Every Picture Tells a Story (doesn’t it?) Photojournalists Capture the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and Hopefully the Truth by Demetria Kalodimos | Photographs by Jerome Brunet There’s a reason why we call it the “mind’s eye.”
daring a tank to roll in Tiananmen Square, 1989.
Pictures—images caught in the snap of a shutter—can often convey more than even the most elegant, well-chosen words.
Firefighters raising the flag after 9–11.
A trigger to the temple brought the brutality of Vietnam home quicker than years of expert reportage. Bravery? One frame defines that word. A still-unidentified man, defiantly
Marines doing the same at Iwo Jima 56 years earlier. Photojournalism at its finest. My entire news career has been spent in television and radio, where, by design, more than just words tell the story. Sound and pictures often replace or trump sparse writing. In my estimation,
El Paso county jail. One phone call is allowed to try to get bailed out.
After an hour of emergency treatment, this man perishes from a hit-and-run accident.
that is when television and radio are at their best. Today we are bombarded by images that often reach us before word one—before there is time to process what images mean, whether they’re valid, and the context in which they’re coming at us. Right now I’ll bet there’s a camera within your reach. Every phone can record sound, pictures, moving video . . . and there’s no longer a wait for the image to develop or for the story to unfold.
4 a.m., local sheriffs wait for a hot call in a local truck stop. This, along with patrolling, represents 80 percent of their job.
There is, however, plenty of opportunity and temptation, it seems, to manipulate. In 2012, we saw sharks (or did we?) in the heart of Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. An Austrian newspaper recently ran what turned out to be an altered photo of a frantic family fleeing Syria. A top photographer for an iconic West Coast newspaper was exposed, and let go, for digitally altering news photos, including enhancing the flames at the scene of a fire. Every picture tells a story—a story Edward R. Murrow hoped would teach, illuminate, and inspire. Should we have to question whether the story is true?
Sheriff’s Office Special Response Team (SRT) trains for possible future riots in jail; capable of securing a large cellblock within seconds.
A woman is extracted from her car after running off a small bridge and into a canal. Showing signs of multiple fractures, she is immediately rushed to the nearest hospital.
Riding Shotgun with Local Law Enforcement, Photojournalist Jerome Brunet Captured These Unforgettable Images
W
Heated discussion between a deputy sheriff and a border patrol officer.
hen asked why I'm interested in law enforcement I'm compelled to reply, we all should be. The fact is, we know incredibly little about our “boys in blue” although we see them on our street corners and, of course, in dramatized versions on television and in Hollywood. I've always been interested in the symbolic aspect of the modern-day police officer, the man with the badge, gun, and authority to dramatically change a person’s life forever—society’s apparent answer to all life’s little and not-so-little problems. However bleak and insignificant a situation may seem, officers are constantly dealing with lost children, family quarrels, various assemblies of the homeless, and confronting each day the violence and corruption humanity inflicts on each other every day. During the six months I spent with a multitude of deputy sheriffs, I had the rare opportunity to follow and record the everyday activities of these noble men and women. I managed to capture a few strong moments of out-of-the-ordinary situations faced by these law enforcement officers, people not unlike you and me, who share various difficult tasks ranging from the mundane routine of pages of paperwork to absolute life-threatening danger—the ugliness and insanity which ultimately lead to an inevitable breakdown of values and morals. This is an accurate account, albeit brief, of a police by Jerome Brunet officer’s job description.
Jerome Brunet is represented by Rock Paper Photo in New York. For more information about Brunet, visit www.jeromebrunet.com. Police K-9 “Charlie” takes a break during a usually hectic day.
Composite, 2013, 20" x 30"
Fixation, 2013, 30" x 40" 78 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Suffer, 2013, 30" x 40"
JOHNNY LEE PARK THE MECHANICS OF BEAUTY by Lydia E. Denkler
S
even large-scale digital prints created by Tennesseebased artist Johnny Lee Park will be on view at The Building in East Nashville beginning January 16. Park’s
work merges intimate studies of female figures with the bloodless precision of mechanistic design. The relationship between man and machine is provocatively dystopian and profoundly unsettling. It both distorts our concept of humanity and challenges our sense of self-determination. Park states that he has “a simultaneous attraction to and horror of the relationship between humanity and technology. I try to reflect this contradiction by combining figurative and organic elements with the mechanical, architectural, and technological elements.”
“a simultaneous attraction
to and horror of the relationship between humanity and technology ”
He has long had a fascination with the precision and complexity of industrial design, particularly nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury studies of machines of war. Renaissance art and figure studies have been influential to his career as an artist and were a major focus of his education. The realistic depiction of the human body, in particular the beauty of the female form in its natural, organic state, captivates Park. The fusion of machine and female images simultaneously reveals beauty and revulsion. All sensuality and vitality grows cold and lifeless when entangled with mechanical parts. Park’s work has evolved from pure printmaking into a mixed-media approach that often deploys prints as a foundation for further manipulation. Each piece is created by the process of digital relayering. “It builds layers of semi-transparent forms that allow the melding of the organic with the technological to show through. I prefer to engage the viewer’s imagination by suggestion of what is there rather than blatantly displaying it.” In the first piece in the series, Suffer, the female subject is a winged and damaged creature, curled up into a fetal position. She is left
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January 2O14 | 79
Downtown Franklin’s First Friday Art Crawl
Friday, January 3, 6-9 p.m.
Prototype, 2013, 20" x 30"
exposed, bones visible through her skin. She is lost in her own ruin and disempowerment. A sense of mental claustrophobia connects this image to its companion image, Fixation. This female figure, also in a submissive fetal position, is prisoner to her own thoughts, seemingly unaware of the messages branded on her body. In Jessica Experiment, the human form is barely discernable beneath a somber grey fog. The aerial perspective of this piece looks like a crime scene, and Jessica is both icy and bloodless. Only her eyes remain animated, flickering. Her body seems possessed by the mechanical imagery at work on her face. A human-machine hybrid emerges. Perhaps the most mysterious and bone-chilling piece in the series is Icon. The portrayal of the female figure is haunting, her face framed by a mechanical grid. Park notes that the original photo was taken next to a crypt door, but he manipulated the image to leave the viewer questioning whether she is going in or coming out. This gothic image is also strongly reminiscent of an allegorical tragedy, a doomed heroine in classical drapery who has made a deal with the devil.
More than 30 galleries and working studios in a 15-block area, featuring artists at work, live music, wine and more! There’s no cost to attend, but a $5 wristband provides unlimited transportation on trolleys circulating during the event.
Johnny Lee Park has a background in figure studies and printmaking, especially lithography and etching. He is a practicing photographer and teaches both photography and graphic design. Park has his MFA in photography and printmaking and has taught at a number of Middle Tennessee universities. He is currently a full-time instructor at the International Academy of Design and Technology in Nashville. An exhibit of Johnny Lee Park's work opens January 16 at The Building, 10 08 Woodland Street Contact unboundartsnashville@gmail.com for more information.
www.FranklinArtScene.com Facebook.com/FranklinArtScene Sponsored By:
80 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
POLK PLACE ANTIQUES
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Antique African Art for the Discriminating Collector Artworks include statues, masks & ceremonial regalia from all major ethnic groups of SubSaharan Africa. B A 615.790.3095 williamdarrellmoseley@yahoo.com 5701 Old Harding Pike
(Behind Global Motorsports, in the Heart of Belle Meade)
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10:30am - 5:00pm Wed. - Sat. Tuesday by chance or appointment
G 427 Main Street Franklin, TN 37064
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Friday 5-9 p.m. Opening Reception Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday 11 p.m.-3 p.m. A fine art sale featuring Rick Casali Joined by more than 50 other professional artists.
For details visit lipscombartevent.com
Breaking the Glass Ceiling Meredith Edmondson Is Spreading the Word by Cat Acree
“Chihuly” was the Nashville buzzword of 2010, when it seemed like everyone had fallen in love with the kinetic glass sculptures bursting from Cheekwood’s gardens and the videos of artists wielding soft, hot glass on the ends of giant metal poles. And yet, since
that summer, glasswork has seen almost no growth in Nashville’s art community and has yet to gain the level of attention afforded to other mediums. Local glass artist Meredith Edmondson fell in love with glassblowing for its
community, that feeling of being part of a team. And that’s the tragedy of it: Nashville’s glassblowing community is nearly nonexistent. Combining the artists who share Meredith’s studio in the Fort Houston/Wedgwood area and Jose Santisteban’s Franklin studio, Meredith estimates it to be a community of fewer than ten. Her frustration is palpable—and understandable. “It’s not really something you can do very successfully on your own,” Meredith says. “The most fun projects to me [are when] you
82 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
turn around and [there are] six people and everybody’s working to make this one thing.” Twenty-eight-year-old Meredith has been blowing glass in Nashville since graduating in 2009 from Tennessee Tech, where she ditched her nursing-school plans to learn glassblowing at the Appalachian Center for Craft. She taught herself casting and much of the flat glasswork she does now—a prophetic choice, as she can make fused glass pieces by herself. She stacks half-inch strips of sheet glass in a kiln, fires them to a temperature between 1200 and 1400
Haptic, 2009, Glass, 6’ x 5’
Refraction, 2009, Glass, 4’ x 4’
degrees (cooler than the traditional 2200), and allows them to melt flat, giving her work the appearance of being hand-woven. Fused glass allows her to play with colors and patterns, and it keeps her working, but it doesn’t provide her with that communal joy and energy of glassblowing. “Nashville is growing and changing, and I’d like to see more glass artists join the arts community,” Meredith explains. “The city is very much photography and printmaking and painting. . . . A lot of really cool threedimensional work that I’ve seen in Nashville isn’t made here.”
Window Vase, 2009, Glass, 5" x 5" x 16"
Genie Bottle Trio, 2009, Glass, Tallest 6" x 6" x 12"
For now, Meredith’s work is a labor of love, stretching her imagination with commissions and seeking out the few glassblowers that are here. “Every time I get frustrated—and I’m like, my lease is up in January and I’m out of here—that’s when I meet somebody else or this article happens,” Meredith says. “This is what I need to do, and this is what I need to keep doing, no matter how frustrated I am. To be able to build something here would be really awesome.” Calling all local glassblowers! Meredith Edmondson would love to hear from you: meredith.edmondson@gmail.com. For more information about Meredith Edmondson please visit www.meredithedmondson.com.
It’s a notable void, considering the strong glass communities in Asheville and Louisville, as well as the underappreciated Appalachian Center for Craft, which, much like glass in Nashville, is constantly under threat of extinction. To save it, and to save glass in Nashville, “it’s going to take an interest and finding a group of people that are really dedicated.”
PHOTOGRAPH: LAWRENCE BOOTHBY
Meredith has dreams for a multipurpose facility similar to Glassworks in Louisville, which has an event space and a gallery devoted entirely to three-dimensional work. That’s a [very] long-term goal, considering the facility would require $5 million. In the short term, Meredith would love to have a place to offer demonstrations and classes for schools “to get people excited, as excited as I am.”
ABOVE: Wrap Glass, 2013, Glass, 16" x 8" x 20" LEFT: (Detail) Window Vessel, 2009, Glass, 6.5" x 6.5" x 8"
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POETRY
ROCK. SALT. SEA. Rock beats ocean. Ocean holds salt, and in each grain a feather. A boulder. Impossibility. This is a father and a blue sound. This is an ocean; a beginning of roundness; a rock.
A rock being no more
stone than he an opening. A bleeding space. – Donika Ross
PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN JACKSON
Donika Ross will present her poetry at the Poet's Corner at Scarritt-Bennett on January 23 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. For more information visit www.scarrittbennett.org.
Stillness. Toni Swarthout. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 60 inches
OUTSIDE IN — NEW TREE PAINTINGS BY TONI SWARTHOUT Opening Reception: Sunday, January 12, 3 – 5 pm January 12 – February 13, 2014 • Marnie Sheridan Gallery open Monday – Friday 8:00 am – 4:30 pm and by appointment Harpeth Hall School • 3801 Hobbs Road, Nashville, TN 37215 • Call 615.297.9543 for more information
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The Violin Shop A FIDDLER’S GALLERY by Alyssa Rabun | Photographs by Ryan Roth
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hat began twenty-five years ago as a tiny counter kiosk in the back of a guitar store is now an iconic gallery space lined with spruce-top and maple violins that date back to the 1700s. The shop—that boasts
buying, selling, repairing, and showcasing violins, violas, and bows—is attracting musicians and music lovers from across the country. Ask any fiddler in town if they’ve heard of The Violin Shop and they will dive into a story about a violin they bought, a bow they had re-haired, or a show they played with one of its owners, Fred Carpenter, Ian Panton, or Brandon Godman. While the shop’s motto “fine fiddles, fine music” rings true, it does little to underscore The Violin Shop’s far reach within Nashville’s string community. Fred Carpenter, founder of The Violin Shop, came to Nashville to play music in 1984. He started out as a road musician, but while he was knee-deep in tours with The Dillards, he took up an apprenticeship in a local violin store where he learned to repair and restore violins and bows. For three years he blended touring with rigorous study, and in 1988 he started a shop of his own. Fred Carpenter
“Fiddling brings you to Nashville,” said Carpenter, who moved from San Francisco. “I started out playing and slowly incorporated buying and selling.
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Brandon Godman
When violins started to take over my house, I opened a corner fiddle cart and later moved to the shop in Bellevue where we thrived for nineteen years. We moved to the new shop on 8th Avenue [Franklin Pike] in August because we wanted to be in the center of town to be more accessible to clients.”
In the back workshop, violins in need of repair are stacked on the shelves, and bows to be re-haired are hung as far as the eye can see. Polish, glue, and restoration tools are scattered across wooden workbenches, and worn aprons attest to a steady labor force.
Carpenter works alongside co-owners Godman and Panton. Both long-term fiddlers, they met Carpenter as customers, shopping for fiddles of their own, but transitioned into co-owners due to deep-rooted expertise and palpable passion for the industry.
“Most nights I stay until midnight rehairing bows,” said Carpenter. “I am often thirty bows deep in repairs in the midst of working on full restorations, which can take anywhere from one month to two years. We stress accurate, quality work.”
The new shop breathes like a gallery, with high ceilings, open spaces, glossed hardwood, and clusters of violins lining the walls. The front rooms are divided into new violins and older ones, ranging from old Italian and French to new German, English, Chinese, and American instruments.
In the lobby, in black and white, photographs pay tribute to fiddlers of yesteryear, including Vassar Clements, Kenny Baker, and Benny Martin. On the ceiling, an art piece crafted with decades-old violin cases offsets the clean photography. The clientele are also a fresh mix of old and new, with
regulars varying from beginner violinists to celebrity musicians like Alison Krauss. “We cater to a wide demographic of clients,” said Godman. “We cater to a lot of fiddle players. In fact, we know most fiddlers in town. People visiting town also make special trips to see our shop.” In addition to retail, The Violin Shop stays heavily involved with the fiddling community by hosting events. During the summer, for example, the shop hosts a concert series called “fiddle tastings” in collaboration with neighboring Craft Brewed. The event blends live music with wine and beer tastings. “One of our main goals is to see the Nashville string community grow,” said Godman. “We are excited to offer events where the string community can get together, network, and play music.” The Violin Shop is located at 2504 Franklin Pike. For more information visit www.theviolinshop.com.
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THEATRE
ROYAL GAMBIT:
Henry VIII and His Six Wives
by Jim Reyland
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as he a bloodthirsty English monarch?
Yes. Was he willing to remove anyone or anything that got in his way? Yes. Did Henry VIII in his own violent, self-serving, and tyrannical way change the world? Did he force his contemporaries and their descendants to consider themselves in a new light? You decide. In January, Christ Church Cathedral, as part of its Sacred Space for the City arts series, will present Royal Gambit: Henry VIII and His Six Wives, reopening the case of Henry VIII. Was he madman or reformer? Rod Streng, co-director, gets the conversation started. “Gressieker’s Royal Gambit provides a platform for the exploration and discussion of the role of intellectual history in shaping the human experience.” The play claims “to present some aspects of our modern age,” but thankfully the script avoids being pedantic and offers, rather than a clear philosophy, only suggestions and subtle hints for grappling with our anxiety about the future, the ambiguity of our present, and our guilt regarding the past.”
PHOTOGRAPH: KAREN ROGERS
There is much to discuss. Shakespeare wrote at length about Henry VIII. He found him to be extremely interesting, dramatically and otherwise. To begin, Henry VIII married his brother’s widow and then divorced her because she couldn’t give him a son. Thinking he might be cursed by this divorce and unable to have a male heir, he tried to get an annulment. The Pope and the Catholic Church said no, and so Henry started his own Church of England with himself as God’s representative on Earth. He then married his mistress, Anne Boleyn, still with no son and eventually no head for Anne Boleyn. What ensued was a political and religious fiasco. In the end, Henry ordered the beheadings of some of the top political minds of the day, a few cardinals, at least one
“The world of the play is filled with important ideas . . . the dialogue often centers on the humanistic view of man’s destiny as opposed to the more spiritual course.” – Ted Swindley, co-director
nun, a couple of his six wives, and countless members of the royal court who questioned his motives. A period production like Royal Gambit is a great deal to process for the directors and actors alike. Rod Streng, co-director: “It’s exciting to see the actors identify their places in history, not just as historical figures but as agents who centuries ago played a role in creating who we are today. Many of them have taken time to read biographies to investigate and research the individuals they portray in order to construct an accurate portrait that contributes to the meaning of the play.”
PHOTOGRAPH: JEFF FRAZIER
In the end, Henry VIII collected power and wives while executing tens of thousands of English subjects during his thirty-sixyear reign. This powerful play, Royal Gambit, puts us in a unique position to consider the king and hear from Henry’s six wives: Catherine of Aragon (divorced), Anne Boleyn (executed), Jane Seymour (died), Anne of Cleves (divorced), Kathryn Howard (executed), and Katherine Parr (widowed). All these women were either unlucky, had good barristers, or, in one case, managed to outlive her husband. Royal Gambit: Henry VIII and His Six Wives gives you a front-row seat to the transformation from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason. David Payne, Christ Church Cathedral, adds, “This metaphysical portrait of Henry VIII and the six women in his life contrasts this king, the epitome of Renaissance man, with modern, liberal thought and concludes that humanism is dead in the twentieth century.”
Eddie George Returns in Nashville Shakespeare Festival's Othello The Nashville Shakespeare Festival will present the powerful tragedy Othello, featuring Eddie George in the title role, January 9 through February 2 at Belmont University’s Troutt Theater. “Othello is a stunningly human play as well as a suspenseful psychological thriller,” said Denice Hicks, the festival’s artistic director. “The Nashville Shakespeare Festival last staged this play twenty-three years ago, and the story is as relevant and worthy of our attention as ever.” For tickets to the public performances, visit www.nashvilleshakes.org or call 615-852-6732.
Don’t miss your opportunity to experience the history of a king and his wives at Christ Church Cathedral, 900 Broadway, on January 23, 24, 31 at 7:30 p.m. and January 25, February 1 at 2 p.m. Tickets available online at www.christcathedral.org/SacredSpace/ticketsales until the day of the show, $13.50. Available at the door, $15. The film version of Jim Reyland’s new play, STAND, performed across Middle Tennessee in 2012 as part of The Stand Project, is now available to stream at www.writersstage.com. Watch The STAND Film starring Barry Scott and Chip Arnold and directed by David Compton. And please consider a donation to support Room In The Inn. jreyland@audioproductions.com
“Both Lucille Ball and the classic television show she created with Desi Arnaz are timeless and brilliantly funny,” said Kathleen O’Brien, TPAC’s president and chief executive officer. “From the moment the audience arrives, this ingeniously staged production will transport them back in time through its multi-generational, feel-good fun.” I Love Lucy® Live On Stage, the hit stage show adapted from the most beloved program in television history, arrives in Nashville for a two-week run in the Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s James K. Polk Theater January 14–26, 2014. Tickets available by phone at 615-782-4040, www.tpac.org, and at the TPAC Box Office.
PHOTOGRAPH: JEREMY DANIEL
I Love Lucy Comes to Life in Nashville
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PHOTOGRAPH: MATT RAMPULLA
Paul Skidmore, James O’Keeffe, William Cavataio
Frame by Frame: The ICiT Story
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by Justin Stokes
ollaboration and innovation are two of the most recognizable pieces in the machine of education.
PHOTOGRAPH: STEVE HERLIHY
It is this marriage of working together and working creatively that shapes minds and rekindles spirits, particularly of our youth. Looking to grow and learn through these concepts, our students place a fundamental importance on programs that engage them. ICiT: Inspiring Creative Innovative Thinkers is one such arts program, which offers opportunities for creative input and output in the same setting. Coordinated by Bella Veritas Productions, the program is a collection of mentors and artists who teach core principles of education through movie making. Starting with a month-long summer camp, ICiT puts under-served pupils into a month-long workshop. By communicating their ideas and strengthening their understanding of storytelling, students weave together characters, theme, and dialogue into a plot structure. After screenplays ten to twelve minutes in length are
PHOTOGRAPH: MICHAEL PHILLIPS
Paul Skidmore, Jessica Polk
Film still from Time to Pass
written, a script is selected by the camp’s jury to be produced by a team of filmmakers. Thus the apprenticeship is taken from writing to production, and the result will be a polished film comparable to something one might see at the Belcourt Theatre. ICiT traces its heritage back to its first class of 2010, when ten students yearning to learn were sponsored by the YMCA of Middle Tennessee. The program, headed by professionals of the film industry, chose the winning screenplay, by Kayla Crockett. Giving the enthusiastic students a chance to be on set during the production, ICiT helped frame a positive experience for those
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After a hiatus, the program is back for its third year. Bigger than ever, ICiT is now able to offer theatrical showings in international film festivals, distribution of the winning films via the NECAT Network, and online showcases for viewers wishing to stream the films. Two films will be showcased at the 2014 NaFF. Partners for the program have included the Memorial Foundation, Nashville Entrepreneurship Center, Microsoft, the Nashville Film Festival, and many others. But ICiT is still looking for sponsors in the area to help make the dreams of future filmmakers come true. For complete details on the program, including sponsorship details and information on getting involved, please visit the website for ICiT Films. www.ICiTfilms.com
PHOTOGRAPH: SARAH BENNETT
enrolled, letting them make a movie and instill a monumental sense of pride in their peers, parents, and teachers. After the first film premiered at the Nashville Film Festival, the program’s success became solidified within the arts community.
Jeff Durham teaching a film class
It is this marriage of working together and working creatively that shapes minds and rekindles spirits, particularly of our youth.
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ART SMART a monthly guide to art education
STATE OF THE ARTS by Jennifer Cole, Metro Nashville Arts Commission
PHOTOGRAPH: JERRY ATNIP
I believe there are no constants and fewer norms in modern art. However, I have never met anyone who didn’t love the work of William Edmondson—the soft, round forms of arms and faces, the bridge of a nose, the outline of lace on a collar, or the simplicity of a white-limestone dove. There is something raw and powerful and just maybe divine about this great American artist who grew up the son of freed slaves not far from where we now sip coffee at Edgehill Village. Although not widely revered and collected in his lifetime, his work has claimed its place in both modern and folk-art circles, and his reach can be felt in the likes of Bill Traylor, Mose Tolliver, and Howard Finster. Nashville’s recent decision to renovate a small park on Charlotte Avenue long named for Edmondson has launched a renewal of interest in and celebration of this quiet iconoclast.
Bess & Joe, Limestone. From the permanent collection of Cheekwood Botanical Gardens & Museum of Art
and high school teacher leaders to study the project, the site, and its history with the intent of generating Common Core unit plans in math, English/language arts, science, history, and visual art. The cadre brings together teachers in all subject disciplines and focuses on public art, creative placemaking, and community history as the impetus for classroom learning. The teachers will meet with site planners, artists, area arts leaders and historians, and each other over the next six months and will complete unit plans by July of 2014. Plans will be widely available for classroom teachers and home school instructors to use just as the park opens and Cheekwood launches its Edmondson and Friends exhibit. This is the best of education and art coming together—a project where teachers can embrace new content and learn crossdiscipline. The cadre showcases how children can leverage art as a way to unpack history and science and community pride while grounding their work in something real and tangible like public sculpture. Our hope is that this park, this teacher cadre, the new public art, and all of the arts-based collaborations that have evolved will finally help Nashville honor this quiet, reverent, and brilliant cultural hero.
William Edmondson. From the permanent collection of Cheekwood Botanical Gardens & Museum of Art
For a teacher’s guide to Edmondson and Friends visit www.goo.gl/L5DcrL.
MDHA is moving dirt and light poles now to implement a community-inspired design by local landscape architect Kim Hawkins that uses soft forms and organic shapes and limestone to pay natural homage to Edmondson. Funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and Metro’s Percent for Art fund will install in the park additional sculptures by contemporary, selftaught legends Lonnie Holley and Thornton Dial. Cheekwood has joined the collaboration and, in late 2014, will be curating an installation of Edmondson’s work and its influence on others in contemporary sculpture and assemblage. Finally, the city has embraced its love affair with Edmondson and his critical role in our artistic, cultural, and racial history. There is no better canvas for teachers. In December, the Ayers Institute for Teaching & Learning at Lipscomb University and Metro Arts launched a cadre of ten middle
Critter, Limestone. From the permanent collection of Cheekwood Botanical Gardens & Museum of Art
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FRIST FOSTERS TEEN TALENT
The focus of MAQ Attack! is on contemporary art. Jhaveri says exposure to contemporary art and living artists is exciting to teens. “It’s the art most relevant to teens,” she says. “Contemporary art communicates a wide variety of topics and worldviews, and artists are working with a range of experimental media like video, performance, and technology. Connecting teens to these kinds of art experiences provides them with opportunities to explore other people’s perspectives.”
MAQ Attack! is a free drop-in program held at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts from 6 to 9 p.m. the second Friday of every month, August through April. Students need to show a valid high school ID to participate in the Martin ArtQuest interactive gallery or the open studio activities. For more information, visit www.fristcenter.org.
ACT TOO PLAYERS by Wendy Wilson
Teens ready to tap into their creative side have a new place to go. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts has started a free monthly program to help teens appreciate art and create their own. Called MAQ Attack! the program is held the second Friday night of every month during the school year. The name comes from the Martin ArtQuest Gallery, an educational space at the museum featuring hands-on art-making stations. The program is geared toward high school students ages 14 and up. “We’re creating a safe space for teens to socialize and enjoy a cultural event targeted to their interests,” says Keri Jhaveri, youth and family educator at the Frist. At the program’s first event on November 8, teens interacted with the museum’s 30 Americans exhibit, which features the work of African American artists in various mediums and runs through January 12. The teens were led in a collaborative poetrywriting project based on their thoughts of the ideas expressed in 30 Americans. They also had a chance to try their hand at other projects. Alison Ford, a 22-year-old MTSU student, helped several high school students with relief printmaking techniques. “They had music playing. It was a really fun environment,” she says. “The Frist really went all out.”
Act Too Players Develop Confidence and Skill by Lisa Venegas
For twelve years Sondra Morton, owner and theatre arts director of Act Too Players School of Music and Theatre, along with ten theatre professionals, has been helping kids experience the joy of performing. Act Too offers young people from 3½ to 18 years old classes in acting, dance for the performer, behindthe-scenes operations, and vocal lessons that result in seven topnotch productions per semester. “We want to give kids the experience of what it’s like to be in a show, to go beyond what they Rehearsal for The Little Mermaid, Jr. think they can do, and provide an outlet to focus their energy and creativity,” says Morton.
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STILLMAN: ONE-MAN PLAY AT THE PARTHENON
William Stillman, Acropolis, plate 15, 1870
by DeeGee Lester Rehearsal for Anything Goes
Whether they are acting, singing in the chorus, or making sets, these young people get to set aside their daily lives for a bit and become immersed in the art of theatre. At the same time, they are developing confidence and learning valuable life skills such as public speaking and team building. Act Too Players will present the musical productions The Little Mermaid Jr., Anything Goes, and Songs for a New World at the Franklin Theatre January 17–24. Tickets are $15–$25 and may be purchased at www.franklintheatre.com/live-theater/. Act Too Players will host an open house in their new, more spacious location at 1113 Williamson Square, Suite 119, Franklin, on January 26 from 2–6 p.m. For more information, or to enroll in classes, visit www.ActTooPlayers.com.
In conjunction with the current exhibition of 1869 photographs of Athens, Greece, the Nashville Parthenon continues the presentation (which premiered November 16) of Wish You Were Here, a one-man play about the photographer William J. Stillman. Written by Valerie Hart and directed by Robert Kiefer, the play explores the life of Stillman— painter, diplomat, photographer, and the ultimate networking genius who developed associations with the major figures of his era on both sides of the Atlantic. Actor Richard Northcutt captures the complexities of one of history’s little-known but infinitely Richard Northcutt plays William interesting figures who could Stillman playfully brush aside Oscar Wilde, explain the architectural musings of John Ruskin, and be alternately funny, tender, and exasperating. Funded by the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, the play expands the museum’s educational offerings while introducing visitors to an exciting and rewarding entertainment experience. The Parthenon’s west gallery, which houses the Stillman photographs and a rare copy of Stillman’s 1870 book The Acropolis of Athens, Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally in Photographs, serves as the site for the production which is offered January 11 and 25 and February 8 and 22 with show times at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. There is no additional charge for the play beyond the usual museum admission fee.
Rehearsal for Songs for a New World
For more information visit www.nashville.gov.
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ON THE HORIZON: FRANKLIN HIGH SCHOOL ART STUDENTS Refining Their Craft by Stephanie Stewart-Howard | Photography by Tom Griscom
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he Franklin High School art room bustles as students in the Advanced Placement art class prepare their portfolio submissions to ensure AP credit and for college applications. Instructor Laura Rheinlander has been their guide, but the AP class is far removed from other classes she teaches, like Art 1, which introduces students at all grade levels to basic techniques. “At this stage, they really have their own strong voices,” she says. “The goal isn’t just to get AP credit; it’s to make something that’s important to them, and if I can help guide them along that path, then I’ve done my job.” At a time when all too often budgets mean giving up art classes, Rheinlander understands that art education is invaluable to all her students, those who come in and learn the basics, then move on to other fields of study, and those who stay, developing skills and perfecting them in class until they too are seniors in an AP program. Each of the students featured here has a different perspective— not only on her work but on the impact her talents will have on the
Students Sofi, Abi, Sydney and Annika with AP Art Instructor Laura Rheinlander
world beyond the portfolio or the space on the school walls where favorite pieces are displayed.
SOFI GOODWIN Sofi Goodwin hopes to become an illustrator. Inspired by street art, modern artist and design activist Shepard Fairey, and the work of innovative children’s book artists, her series based on Alice in Wonderland has a fresh, modern vibe with vivid and saturated color. “I really want to be a kids’ author and illustrator,” she says.
“And when I had my portfolio evaluated, it was suggested that I add some pieces like that.” The Alice drawings are gleeful fun, and Goodwin’s Alice is a thoroughly contemporary brunette in colorful jeans, not the Victoriana-Disney, pinafore-clad stereotype. Goodwin admits there’s an element of self-portrait in her Alice (she adores the book), but it doesn’t overwhelm, even when you’re sitting next to her. In Conversations with a Caterpillar Alice sits beneath a monumental mushroom, laughing, looking up at a caterpillar high above. The realistic, oversized mushroom pairs well with the brightly clad girl in purple and saffron. “I wanted to show that even in a work of imagination, I can make things realistic,” Goodwin says of her mushroom. The next two are more striking for the absence of whole subject matter—the Mad Hatter’s hand, clutching his bizarre pocket watch, and a close-up of the Queen of Hearts’ face with heart-shaped pupil, clearly angry if not utterly deranged. “I Google-searched images of angry faces up
NashvilleArts.com
Sofi Goodwin, Conversations with a Caterpillar, 2013, Watercolor and India ink, 18” x 24”
close,” says Goodwin. “It kind of came alive as a drawing of its own volition.” Given her love for Alice, there may be more interpretations in her future, but for now, Goodwin is aiming her sights at art school, hoping to get into the Art Institute of Chicago. January 2O14 | 97
SYDNEY DUNCAN
Sydney Duncan, Blow My Mind, 2013, Mixed media, 4.5” x 24”
Sydney Duncan focuses her art on people. Her series of portraits is intensely biographical, looking at different stages of a relationship inspired by her own experiences. “It was portfolio review day, and I was giving in to all the insecurity, feeling mediocre when I talked to my boyfriend, who was studying in Italy, taking art classes—it was incredible how stuff was getting to me.” Mediocre is, of course, the last word to describe her work. Duncan’s pieces are also collage, tissue paper on art paper, watercolor, pencil, and ink. “I really liked the process with the tissue paper glued over the other. I’m going to be using that more,” she says. Her human images are balanced with geometric ones, creating a sense of juxtaposition that really works. She shows an image of a friend: “Jesse is a really big guy, so I wanted to sit him in this tiny chair that we got from a preschool. I added the video-gaming stuff, the soda, all the things that he tends to fall back on, and I didn’t want the color to be totally precise. “I think a lot of times people just assume there’s a huge personal story behind your art, but for me, I sometimes don’t think; I just go
to the canvas and start. I love making things, that’s all I can say.” Duncan hasn’t yet made any final decisions about what to do. Painting, fashion design, film design . . . it all appeals to her. “I’ve applied to colleges, lots of different ones. That can help me make the decision,” she says.
ANNIKA VIRDEN “I usually work with small paper, so this is really outside my normal bubble,” Annika Virden says. She sees the big pieces as a sketchbook explosion, in her case working with earthy tones and inspired by everyday objects like the wallet she bought on a trip to Germany, a lantern, and other pieces from daily life. Working in watercolor and collage is typical for her. “I’ve had sketchbooks since before I could write,” she says. “I have whole boxes of them at home, full of drawings and collages. I come from a really creative family. My mom is an art and French teacher; my dad and my brother both make things.” In Huttenberg, Annika created a clean black-and-white image of a fine dinner plate, with a simple home instead 98 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Annika Virden, Half-Rest, 2013, Watercolor, ink, graphite, 11” x 11”
ABIGAIL ("ABI") LEWIS Abi Lewis spreads out four pieces across a table, the accumulated work of a long-term assignment that began with twenty to twenty-five small sketches brought together in a series making use of the elements that developed from them. Her collage is a mixture of pen, pencil, Mod Podge and more, with muted coffee tones (“I made them with real coffee. Coffee is important for me; I’m a huge coffee drinker,” says Abi) and touches of blue and pink interspersed. “I usually like subtle tones, not really bright,” she says.
Annika Virden, Organized, 2013, Watercolor, graphite, ink, 24” x 18”
of a castle. Half-Rest presents a vividly colored abstract view of a park bench that began with layers of color around the edge and built inward to the bench itself. Organized features a collection of objects taken from her key ring. “It’s kind of a play on the whole idea of still life,” she says. While Virden isn’t yet sure of her career path, she plans on staying in the area and studying at someplace like Belmont or Lipscomb. “I’m interested in nursing and physical therapy,” she says. “I’m not sure yet how my art will play into that.” Perhaps she has a brilliant future in medical illustration. Time will tell.
Lewis hopes the portfolio she has worked to put together will get her into UT Chattanooga with its solid arts and photography programs. After interning with photographer Kristin Sweeting, she has developed her skills and hopes to work as a photographer herself. “Really, I just hope for a job that lets me be creative and work with a whole lot of people,” Abi Lewis, Building Yourself (“Castleness”), 2013, Pen and ink, 15” x 11” says Lewis. “I’m not sure I want to be stuck in an office.” She has also built herself a small personal business custom painting guitar cases, and now instruments, and she hopes that takes off further.
Abi Lewis, Nashville Bubble, 2013, Graphite, 8.5” x 22”
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Incoming Thunderstorm in New Rochelle, Oil on canvas, 20" x 36"
Field Notes
A Local Look at Global Art
Ilya Zomb Animal Magic by Betsy Wills
I
have always liked art that transports me to another world, and the fantastical work of Ilya Zomb does that in spades. Ballerinas and greyhounds, hawks and herons, bucks wading in the ocean passing the time of day fishing, they all exist side by side in these environments that are nonsensical but also strangely familiar. Who could resist the dancer balancing oranges in a figure four while the smart owl balances precariously on a pyramid? They have the lyricism of Alice in Wonderland and the foreboding narrative of Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. Zomb paints in the classical tradition but challenges us with his daring juxtapositions. I like to be challenged, and I like to smile, and this art does both.
Backyard Afternoon, Oil on canvas, 19" x 15" 100 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Betsy Wills admits that she is blissfully ignorant when it comes to art curation and selection. She is, however, an avid art lover and collector and maintains the popular art blog artstormer.com. Wills is proud of the fact that her art does not match her sofa.
ARTIST BIO – ILYA ZOMB Ilya Zomb received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in visual arts in his native country, Russia, but has built his career as a New York artist. His paintings depict fantastical worlds where wild animals and ballerinas coexist. The naturalistic style of the paintings creates a paradox with the unreal worlds he presents. He draws inspiration for his everyday interactions in New York City. To him, the large animals represent men, and the dancers represent women. Although not religious, they are his versions of Adam and Eve in their Garden of Eden. His art has been compared to masters such as Botticelli, Degas, and Magritte, but his work maintains his unique vision. With numerous international solo and group exhibitions as well as books and articles published about his art, Zomb’s popularity continues to grow. Several of his paintings belong to museum collections in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Siev, Ukraine. He is represented by Caldwell Snyder Gallery and Campton Gallery, New York City, and Bennett Galleries. www.zombart.com, www.caldwellsnyder.com, www.camptongallery.com. Two Baskets of Oranges, Oil on canvas, 40" x 38"
Great Fishing in Bradley Beach, Oil on canvas, 30" x 36"
NashvilleArts.com
January 2O14 | 101
Andrée Ruellan
APPRAISE IT
(American, 1905–2006)
A
ndrée Ruellan was a painter of the 1930s and ’40s whose complete body of work spans almost the entire twentieth century. She was born in Manhattan on
April 6, 1905, to parents who were ardent pacifists and members of the socialist movement. They had left France in order for Ruellan’s father to avoid compulsory military service. Andrée Ruellan began drawing very early. Something of a prodigy, at the age of 9 she was invited by the celebrated artist and leader of the Ashcan School, Robert Henri, to join a group show in New York City’s East Village. In that show, she contributed watercolors and drawings, which were sympathetic depictions of scenes from ordinary life that the young Ruellan observed on the streets of New York. That same year she even had an illustration published in The Masses, a progressive magazine dedicated to socialist political causes. In 1920, the then-15-year-old’s father, an aviator, was killed in an airfield accident, resulting in her need to sell her work to support herself and her mother. Later that year she received a scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York with the noted painters Maurice Sterne and Henri. From 1922 to 1929, Ruellan, supported by yet another scholarship and accompanied by her mother, traveled to study in Rome and then on to Paris where they settled. In Paris, under the influence of Sterne, Picasso, Pascin, and Matisse, her painting style evolved and her subject matter became figurative. It was also in Paris in 1929 that she met and married John W. Taylor, a fellow painter. In the 1930s the couple and her mother moved to Shady, New York, where for decades they were part of Woodstock’s vigorous artist colony. It was during the Depression that Ruellan and her husband, seasonal residents of New York City and fans of extended road trips, began traveling to the South, notably Charleston and Savannah. These trips and a short residency in New Orleans cemented an emotional bond for her with the Southern culture, which resulted in some of her most memorable works. Her paintings from that period are remarkable for their portrayals of ordinary African-Americans at work and at play.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JERRY ATNIP
What moved and inspired her was that in spite of the poverty and the constant struggle for existence that she witnessed during those Linda Dyer serves as an appraiser, broker, and consultant in the field of antiques and fine art. She has appeared on the PBS production Antiques Roadshow since season one, which aired in 1997, as an appraiser of Tribal Arts. If you would like Linda to appraise one of your antiques, please send a clear, detailed image to info@nashvillearts. com. Or send photo to Antiques, Nashville Arts Magazine, 644 West Iris Dr., Nashville, TN 37204.
Pop! Goes the Weasel, Gouache/Paper
travels, so much kindness and sturdy courage remained. That humanity is what she strove to capture in her painting. She continued to draw until she was well into her eighties, remaining a Realist with a Modernist’s sympathies, committed to the idea that art should represent solid, flesh-and-blood humanity. It was her desire to convey the warmer human emotions, never without strength and clarity. As it did for most female artists of her time, the experience of living and working in America and Europe provided both frustration and rewards. Among the rewards of a milieu conducive to creativity was the opportunity to study with her period’s greatest teachers in the world of the arts. The frustrations included imposed limitations of access and being persistently marginalized by her age and sex, and, like most women of that century, although she did receive awards and accolades she never fully received the level of recognition that she deserved. Mr. Taylor died in 1983. In 2006, Andrée Ruellan died at the age of 101 in Kingston, New York, eleven miles from Woodstock. This painting was gifted to the brother of the present owner by Andrée Ruellan. Similar paintings executed in this illustrative manner have sold at auction for $900 to $1200 dollars. While researching Andrée Ruellan, much to my surprise and then to the owner of this work, I discovered that the painting had been licensed to the American Artists Group, a still-active Atlanta–based greeting card company that “ . . . in 1935 with the encouragement of such famous artists as John Sloan, Grant Wood, John Stuart Curry, and Rockwell Kent . . . introduced art to greeting cards . . . ” Visit www.americanartistsgroup.com/aag_information.html to read the rest of their story. The Andrée Ruellan illustrated card is still available for purchase.
102 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
ON THE TOWN WITH TED CLAYTON
Nicholas and Alexandra, Peter the Great, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, Margaret Ann Robinson. So, you think, what does Margaret Ann have to do with these amazing biographies? Well, Margaret Ann is a living legend of the Nashville social history, and as the grand hostess she is, she hosted the kickoff of the 2013 Literary Award Weekend at her charming, stately home. The biographies I mentioned are all written by Robert K. Massie, this year’s recipient of the Nashville Public Library Literary Award. Co-hosting this annual patrons event Joe and Brenda Steakley, Jack Bovender – Literary Patrons Party often known as the Best Book Club in Town were Barbara and Jack Bovender, Nicky and Jim Cheek, Mary and Charlie Cook, Lee Pratt and Neil Krugman, Lynn and Jack May. As always at this fine evening, our very own John Seigenthaler hosted a conversation with the honoree, a most enlightening conversation and a Nashville tradition. Literary Gala Chairs Kate Satz and Jessica Viner were seen welcoming Dana and Tom Sherrard, Robin and Bill King, Beth and John Stein, Beth and Dave Alexander, Julia and Bob Lowe, Julie and Frank Boehm, Kay Cheek, Jean Ann and Barry Banker. Another most interesting and enjoyable Mary and Charlie Cook, Julia and Bob affair at the home of Lowe – Literary Patrons Party Margaret Ann the Great! Gary the Great, as in Gary Haynes of Haynes Galleries (I am on a Royal Russian Roll!) along with his lovely and charming wife Joanne (the Great!) hosted a holiday affair showcasing Small Things. Small Barbara Bovender, Jim and Nicky Cheek – Literary Patrons Party
Neil Krugman and Lee Pratt – Literary Patrons Party
Margaret Ann Robinson and Robert K. Massie – Literary Patrons Party
Rick Davis, Joanne and Gary Haynes, David Durham – Haynes Galleries Reception
Bill and Johnna Ford – Mad Men Party
works of original art would make for a most happy and joyful Christmas morning seeing that Santa is quite the sophisticated art lover, leaving such goodies in one’s stocking! Making their list and checking it twice were Rick Davis, David Durham, Stefan Hamulak, Jody Thompson, Sheila Baldwin, Linda Bird, Maureen Catalina, V Mammina, Lee Greathouse and Albert. Arrive on the red carpet, light up a Lucky Strike, indulge in a highball and Godiva truffles, shop till your credit card says stop at Tiffany and Gus Mayer, dine on a four-course dinner by Chef’s Market, dance to the tunes of the Rat Pack by Joe and Judy Barker, Carole and H. the Craig Duncan twelve-piece James Williams – Mad Men Party orchestra. Sound like a dream? Well, that it was at the first and only “Mad Men Affair” benefiting the Nashville Opera, held at the new Lexus dealership in downtown Nashville. Hundreds of patrons filled Madison Avenue, circa 1960. Host couples Joy and J.R. Roper, Judy and Joe Barker, Barbara and Jack Martha Ingram and Judge Gil Merritt – Bovender, Sue and Earl Mad Men Party Swensson were front and center. Chic ’60s attire was oh so well seen on Anne and Bill Whetsell, Tooty Bradford, Anne Sheppard . . . now just let me tell you how clever Anne is: instead of sporting one of her many Sue and Earl Swensson, Carol Penterman jeweled pendants she was – Mad Men Party
Glen and Lynn Civitts, Melissa and David Mahanes – Symphony Ball
NashvilleArts.com
Anne and Michael Saint – Mad Men Party January 2O14 | 103
David and Michelle Thornton, Jackie Smith and Robert Sharp – Symphony Ball
Francis Guess and Vicki Yates – Symphony Ball
sporting a Goldwater for President button. Now that took some thinking, folks! Also outstanding among the patrons were Larry Lipman with his comb-over and black, thick-rimmed glasses and the snappy Morel Harvey looking as smart as she would have in the ’60s only she was five years old then! Speaking of Lucky Strike cigs—well, to be honest, these were the new water vapor thingies that have no tobacco but are so much fun to play with. One lovely lady that shall remain nameless whispered to me, “I have the most gorgeous hands; I need to start smoking again so people will see them and this diamond!” The sparkling new Lexus service department (no cars) was filled with draped tables where guests enjoyed the dinner, a quite tasty ’60s menu. Dancing on the blackand-white tiled floor were Prince Charming, Dr. Bert Parrish and Joyce Vise – Symphony Ball Bill Ford, with his new Cinderella, wife Johnna Watson Ford; Debbie and Donald Holmes, Ann and Michael Saint, Sissy and Mark Simmons, Doris and Dennis Wells, Laurie and Steven Eskind . . . you know, that A-list of ’60s socials that still know how to have fun without that high-tech computer. I would much rather dance with a lovely, sexy lady Joyce and David Hitt – than a computer mouse any given night! Symphony Ball I had the best visit with my new friend the glamorous Elizabeth Locke at a holiday showing of her jewels at Ward-Potts Jewelers. From the enamel, nineteenth-century, micromosaic pendants to the Venetian glass intaglio earrings, this was quite an exceptional collection. In fact, as owner Bill Sites told me, this was the largest Elizabeth Locke collection ever viewed in Nashville. Elizabeth and Jack Wallace were collecting some Christmas thoughts, as were Katherine Delay, Barry Caldwell, Mary Clark, Henny Morris, Rhodes Hart, and, of course, the jeweled hostess, Cyndi Sites. OK, I move fast when I meet a lovely lady—Elizabeth Cyndi Sites, Elizabeth Locke, Bill Sites – and I have a dinner date in Ward-Potts Trunk Show
Clark and Norah Spoden, Kevin and Katie Crumbo – Symphony Ball
January at the Brazilian Court in Palm Beach! After a year of financial challenges, the 29th Annual Symphony Ball emerged as one of the finest. Patrons were overwhelmingly excited to be there to witness that our Nashville Symphony is focused on the future as one of the jewels in our city’s crown! Despite the challenges, Chairs Jane Anne Pilkinton and Jennifer Puryear, along with the design team Melissa Mahanes and Lynn Civitts, created “A Midwinter Night’s Dream” throughout the Laura Turner Hall. Tall, leafless trees with a light dusting of snow, accented every so often by a red cardinal, lined the perimeter of the hall. White orchids graced glittered, freshly cut birch logs as stunning table decor. Speaking of décor, it must be mentioned that this Midwinter Night’s Dream was designed and created by an all-volunteer force—that is correct, all volunteers—once again showing the concern by the chairmen to raise as much money as possible for our Symphony. On Chairs Jane Anne the same note, the Nashville Symphony Pilkinton and Jennifer Puryear – Symphony Ball outshone itself before, during, and after dinner with continued festive, classic, holiday tunes. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this month, the Nashville Symphony Chorus performed, with more than 160 voices in concert to standing ovations! My favorite gown of the evening was a vintage beauty elegantly designed by Count Ferdinando Sarmi and worn by the lovely Nichole Huseby: a 1965 sleeveless, red passementerie lace gown with a pleated, red silk charmeuse cummerbund and rosette waist with red faceted sequins throughout. Jackie Smith appeared in a custom tuxedo designed by Rober’ and enhanced by an extravagant diamond and ruby necklace. This was such a lovely holiday affair, summed up by my close friend Nancy Hearn, who is never Nichole Huseby in without a quote for me: “Simply delicious Ted’s favorite gown – and spectacular evening,” and that, my Symphony Ball friends, it was! As always I wish you a most exciting and artful 2014. My New Year’s resolution is to continue to furnish you with the most detailed of social events in our most loved city!
104 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
Join
ir annual
L W O B SUPER
E L SA
Sunday, Saturday, February 1 February 2 10am to 5pm
1pm to 4pm
ALL PAINTINGS in the galleries are
% 10-50 OFmFore!) (and
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We look forward to seeing you here for the fun!
Gary C. Tisdale 1912 Broadway 615.322.9966
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The Grand Ole Opry . . . now and then PHOTO: ANTHONY SCARLATI
LOCAL CO & MIDT LOR GALLER OWN G Y A L LERY for the
BEYOND WORDS BY MARSHALL CHAPMAN
In January 1967, I flew to Nashville from South Carolina with my mother to look at Vanderbilt. I was a senior in high school. I
had already visited Agnes Scott, Converse, and Hollins—three women’s colleges that my parents favored. They weren’t as keen on Vanderbilt because of its location. People in South Carolina think anything west of the Blue Ridge Mountains is uncivilized. A Vanderbilt student named Carmi Carmichael (now Carmi Murphy) showed me around. That first night, Carmi took me to Ireland’s for steak and biscuits, then to Memorial Gym for a Vanderbilt basketball game. Afterwards, we headed downtown for the Grand Ole Opry.
In those days, the Opry was broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium. Carmi and I were seated in a pew underneath the balcony where someone had spilled a Coke. It was all I could do to focus on the show while ducking the drips from above. Not to mention, trying not to stare at the large woman seated directly in front of us who was nursing a baby. This was my first exposure to bare bosoms in public.
Watching the Opry was like being on a train. I sat there mesmerized while artists and musicians shuffled on and off the stage and backdrops advertising Martha White Flour descended from the ceiling behind them. Everyone—performers and patrons alike—just seemed so happy to be there. Little did I know that forty-six years later I’d be standing on that same stage, where so many of my heroes have stood, as an Opry guest performer. It all started last May when I received a text from Paul “Woody” Chrisman of Riders in the Sky. Paul and I were in the same class at Vanderbilt where we often played music together. “We need to get you on the Opry,” he said. A few months later, I made my Opry debut. Since then, I’ve played it twice more, most recently at the Ryman, where the Opry is held during winter months.
When I first started out playing music, the Opry was not on my radar. I was a wild rock & roller and the Opry seemed too square. But time has a way of mollifying things. Playing the Opry these past few months has felt right as rain. Someone recently asked what it was like. “Like being on a train,” I said.
www.tallgirl.com
MY FAVORITE PAINTING
J oseph M ella
Alfred DeCredico, 1991, Indomeneo: Echo, Mixed media on canvas and wood, 41" x 65"
Director, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
making the picture; primarily the issue of a strong character (the ruler, Indomeneo) caught in a trap which is the consequence of rashness.” For DeCredico, the challenge was to take these sensations, as well as the spirit of the tragedy itself, and reduce it to a two-dimensional work of art. It is a work in which the use of material holds metaphorical meaning. In one of the painting’s three panels, DeCredico layered encaustic, or wax, on the surface in order “to reference a thin, cold atmosphere—a space of transition” that the king, Indomeneo, was forced to confront with the sacrifice of his son.
DeCredico’s interpretation of the opera is pure, lyrical abstraction that can be appreciated on its formal qualities as much as its ability to illuminate Mozart’s opera. In a letter, DeCredico observed that “the form of the painting . . . is derived more from the sound sensations constructed by Mozart in his opera than the actual content of the legend. There are key psychological issues raised in the story that I thought about when 106 | January 2O14 NashvilleArts.com
PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN JACKSON
W
hat does sound look like? The artist Alfred DeCredico, in his painting Indomeneo: Echo, tries to tell us. In doing so, he creates a powerful, complex work of art that is a visual response to Mozart’s opera Indomeneo, Re di Creta (Indomeneo, King of Crete). In the story of Indomeneo, which is also found within the Iliad and may be a piece of Cretan folklore, this king of Crete makes a promise to Poseidon to sacrifice the first person he meets when he returns home in gratitude for the god’s saving the king’s ship from a storm. Tragically, the first person Indomeneo encounters is his very son.
For me, the idea of visualizing this transformative moment that ends in tragedy, along with the actual character of Mozart’s opera, music that is in DeCredico’s view at once “grand and impulsive, regal and authoritative and yet sympathetic,” is brilliant. This painting, not unlike works by masters of modern art such as Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and Jackson Pollock, concerns itself with a sense of interiority and for that very reason is, in the end, a reflection of the self.
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