Renée FLEMING Kip WINGER Anne SIEMS Susan DeMAY Corrine COLARUSSO NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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H AY N E S G A L L E R I E S PRESENTS
ANTON WEISS: ABSTRACTION N O V E M B E R 3 , 2 0 1 7 TO DECEMBER 2, 2017
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CALL 615.312.7000 TO SCHEDULE YOUR VISIT. HAYNESGALLERIES.COM
SMILE Debuted Statewide in Nashville New and Minimally-invasive Surgery for Myopia (Nearsightedness) is First Major Advance in LASIK Technology in 25 Years, Reducing Dependence on Glasses and Contacts which causes the corneal shape to change, permanently changing the prescription. SMILE has a proven track record of success. It has been used internationally since 2011 and more than 750,000 procedures have been performed worldwide. Dr. Wang noted that currently, the procedure has not been approved to treat large amounts of astigmatism and cannot treat farsightedness and that LASIK is still a better option for a majority of the patients seeking laser vision correction.
The first major advance in LASIK technology in 25 years, the SMILE procedure, was performed in Nashville recently at Wang Vision 3D Cataract & LASIK Center by its director, internationally renowned ophthalmologist Dr. Ming Wang, Harvard & MIYT (MD, magna cum laude); PhD (laser physics). “We are extremely very excited to be the first again to introduce the next generation laser correction procedure to the state, helping out patients with this new and minimally invasive procedure,” said Dr. Wang. Myopia is a common eye condition in which close objects can be seen clearly but distant objects are blurry without correction. LASIK and PRK have been the main stay treatments for myopia for over two decades. But SMILE, which stands for SMall Incision Lenticule Extraction, has unique advantages over LASIK. The SMILE surgery is minimally invasive as the surgeon needs only to create a small, precise opening to correct vision. No flap is needed. The laser incision is smaller than 5 millimeters for SMILE, compared to approximately 20 millimeters for LASIK. This helps the cornea to retain more of its natural strength and reduces
the risk of rare flap complications. Dry eye after SMILE is also reduced compared with LASIK, as nerves responsible for tear production during the cornea remain more intact in SMILE. One of the state’s first SMILE patients was Margaret Coleman, 34, a manager of the world-famous Bluebird Café, in Nashville, which was prominently featured in the ABC TV drama Nashville, among others. Ms. Coleman has had poor eyesight all of her life, legally blind in both eyes without correction. Ms. Coleman’s 3D Laser SMILE procedure went beautifully and she is thrilled to have her crystal clear new vision and newly gained independence on glasses or contacts and being one of the first patients in the state to receive SMILE! “I am so happy!!!” exclaimed Margaret at her postop visit. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the VisuMax Femtosecond Laser for SMILE procedure for -1 to -8 D myopia with up to 0.5D astigmatism. During a SMILE procedure, a femtosecond laser with precise short pulses is used to make small incision in the cornea to create a discshaped piece of tissue. This tissue is then removed by the surgeon though the opening
Dr. Ming Wang, a Harvard & MIT graduate (MD, magna cum laude), is the CEO of Aier-USA, Director of Wang Vision 3D Cataract & LASIK Center and one of the few laser eye surgeons in the world today who holds a doctorate degree in laser physics. He has performed over 55,000 procedures, including on over 4,000 doctors. Dr. Wang published 8 textbooks and a paper in the world-renowned journal Nature, holds several US patents and performed the world’s first laser-assisted artificial cornea implantation. He established a 501c(3) non-profit charity, Wang Foundation for Sight Restoration, which to date has helped patients from more than 40 states in the U.S. and 55 countries, with all sight restoration surgeries performed free-of-charge. Dr. Wang is the Kiwanis Nashvillian of the Year. Dr. Ming Wang can be reached at: Wang Vision 3D Cataract & LASIK Center, 1801 West End Ave, Ste 1150 Nashville, TN 37203, 615-321-8881 drwang@wangvisioninstitute.com www.wangcataractLASIK.com
THE RYMER GALLERY presents
Unconstrained
Paintings by Lela Altman
November 4–30, 2017 The Rymer Gallery / 233 Fifth Avenue / Nashville 37219 / 615.752.6030 / www.therymergallery.com
5 T H AV E N U E O F T H E A R T S DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE
PUBLISHED BY THE ST. CLAIRE MEDIA GROUP
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Columns HUNTER ARMISTEAD FYEye MARSHALL CHAPMAN Beyond Words ERICA CICCARONE Open Spaces LINDA DYER Appraise It RACHAEL MCCAMPBELL And So It Goes JOSEPH E. MORGAN Sounding Off ANNE POPE Tennessee Roundup JIM REYLAND Theatre Correspondent MARK W. SCALA As I See It
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Nashville Arts Magazine is a monthly publication by St. Claire Media Group, LLC. This publication is free, one per reader. Removal of more than one magazine from any distribution point constitutes theft, and violators are subject to prosecution. Back issues are available at our office, or by mail for $6.65 a copy. Email: All email addresses consist of the employee’s first name followed by @nashvillearts.com; to reach contributing writers, email info@ nashvillearts.com. Editorial Policy: Nashville Arts Magazine covers art, news, events, entertainment, and culture in Nashville and surrounding areas. The views and opinions expressed in the magazine do not necessarily represent those of the publisher. Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available at $45 per year for 12 issues. Please note: Due to the nature of third-class mail and postal regulations, issues could be delayed by as much as two or three weeks. There will be no refunds issued. Please allow four to six weeks for processing new subscriptions and address changes. Call 615-383-0278 to order by phone with your credit card number.
TINNEY CONTEMPORARY
©Joel Daniel Phillips
WELCOME TO THE ORANGE WEST NEW WORK BY JOEL DANIEL PHILLIPS October 7 - November 11, 2017
237 5th Ave N . Nashville 37219 . 615.255.7816 . tinneycontemporary.com
5 T H AV E N U E O F T H E A R T S DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE
HISTORY EMBR ACING A RT
The Songs in the Wood, Oil on canvas, 28” x 36” “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.” — Wendell Berry This show is a body of work from the collected images of an individual’s responsibility and cultivation. It is one woman’s active participation in the art of the earth.
SUSA N
BL A I R
T RU E X
Artist Reception • November 3, 6-9pm 202 2nd Ave. South, Franklin, TN 37064
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INTRODUCES HOLLIE CHASTAIN & CHRIS BRUNO NOVEMBER 4 - 22
“Dawn Launc h” ©Hollie Chast ai n
“Pi n k Ho rse” ©C h ri s Br u n o
PLUS, STOP BY FOR A CHAMPAGNE TOAST TO KICK- OFF THE HOLIDAYS WITH OUR
FRESH ART HOLIDAY PREVIEW NOVEMBER 17 & 18, 11-5PM ©LAURA NUGENT
FRESH. ORIGINAL. CONTEMPORARY. 215 5th Ave of the Arts N. Nashville, TN 37219 • 615.254.2040 • theartscompany.com
5TH AVENUE OF THE ARTS • DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE
On the Cover
November 2017 22
Features 20 Alex Lockwood Captures Natural Beauty at the Elephant Sanctuary 22 Endurance in Form A Retrospective by Tom Rice
Dori Pechianu
Photograph by Hunter Armistead See page 104.
80 Angie Renfro: Emotive Equivalencies
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26 Kip Winger The Composer Rocks 30 The Art of Living Large in Small Spaces Nashville-based New Frontier stakes a claim in the expanding tiny house landscape
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86 The Unblinking Persistence of Susan DeMay
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90 St. Francis Elevator Ride Lush Interiors 36 Anne Siems Awakening the Spirit 43 Morgan Craig At Sarratt Gallery 48
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Envisioning Statehood: A New Exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art Explores the Cultural History of the Magnolia State
53 Don Shull Woodcarvings and Whirligigs 58 And the Nominees Are… Inaugural Nashville Fashion Alliance Honors 60 Rory White To Fold a Paper Universe: The Tesseract Worlds of Rorshak’s Photography 64
Hoosier Daddy: My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel spills the beans and gets ready for his show at the Basement East November 14
98 Mary Ferris Kelly Bridges the Spiritual and Everyday at Pray to Love
Columns 16 Crawl Guide 42 The Bookmark Hot Books and Cool Reads 92 Art Smart by Rebecca Pierce 96 Theatre by Jim Reyland 99 Sounding Off by Joseph E. Morgan 100 Studio Tenn 102 As I See It by Liz Clayton Scofield 104 FYEye by Hunter Armistead
70 Shaking the Twilight New Work by Corrine Colarusso
106 NPT
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113 Beyond Words by Marshall Chapman
Renée Fleming Superstar soprano Renée Fleming performs at OZ Arts Nashville on December 1
110 ArtSee
114 My Favorite Painting
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A Fine-Artisan Gallery Located in the Historic Village of Leiper’s Fork, TN 4136 Old Hillsboro Road 37064 www.thecopperfoxgallery.com (615) 861-6769
Publisher’s Note
A Great City Deserves Great Art Since issue number 1 we have plastered the walls of our office with Nashville Arts covers. We like to see where we've been as we figure out where we are going. But we're running out of room and will soon have to invade the adjoining office space. Of course when we started nine years ago the future of an art magazine was tenuous at best, and yet here we are today at our 100th issue. And whereas we would scramble to find art stories in the early days, we now face a different challenge—what to leave Paul (art by Amy Dean), Rebecca out. There is so much going on in the (art by Ted Jones), Sam (art by Nashville art world that we simply Jorge Yances) and Beano can't cover it all each month. But that's a great problem to have, for us and for our city. I always say, "When it comes to art, it's better to be looking at it than looking for it." I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote address at this year's ArtCamp. Kudos to Joe Smith and his team for putting on an event that is meaningful and relevant for our artists. For not much more than the cost of a cheap dinner, you can spend the day immersed in the arts, attend workshops and lectures, and rub shoulders with likeminded art addicts. I had a blast, and I hope that next year you will make it a priority to attend ArtCamp 2018. I leave you with one last thought for the approaching holiday season: If in doubt, buy art! Paul Polycarpou | Publisher
PhotoArt 707 Online PhotoArt Gallery
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Art Up Nashville is a comprehensive fine art service provider dedicated to the professional installation of items such as art and antique objects, heavy mirrors, posters and photographs. No job is too big or small. Our staff consists of museum-trained art handlers who for years have regularly handled precious, irreplaceable items of all classifications for museums and galleries as well as commercial and residential clients. Additionally, our staff is made up of artists who possess a special appreciation for art and whose refined aesthetic sensibilities optimize the clients’ experience.
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CHARLOTTE TERRELL Diviner Air mixed media on board 36x36
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
November Crawl Guide Franklin Art Scene
the Orange West, an exhibition of hyperrealistic charcoal and graphite drawings. The Rymer Gallery is presenting Unconstrained, paintings by Lela Altman.
Friday, November 3, from 6 until 9 p.m. Experience historic downtown Franklin and enjoy a variety of art during the Franklin Art Scene. The featured artist at Gallery 202 is Susan Blair Truex, who works primarily in oil, but also enjoys watercolor, pastel, charcoal, graphite, acrylic, and most recently, painted fabric. Parks on Main is showing paintings by Eric Droke. Enjoy abstract resin art by Summer Dobbins at Hope Church Susan Blair Truex, Gallery 202 Franklin. Williamson County Visitor Center is exhibiting narrative paintings by Nathaniel Mather. Finnleys is hosting self-taught embroidery artist Jessica Melton. Williamson County Archives is dispaying work by photojournalist and artist Debbie Smartt. See photographs of small town life by Don Jackson at Academy Park Enrichment and Performing Arts. There will be a Christmas open house with demonstrations on holiday arrangement making by Kris Bagbey at Bagbey House. Early’s Honey Stand is presenting photography by Jeanne Drone. Artist, poet, author, and actor Cory Basil is Nathaniel Mather, Williamson featuring his work at Imaginebox Emporium. County Visitor Center In her exhibit titled In the Beginning at Wellspring Financial Solutions of Raymond James, photographer Jennifer Stalvey is unveiling a new collection of ten hand-printed images created from her early photographs inspired by the beauty of Tennessee. Stop by Savory Spice Shop to see work by AJ Anderson. For more information and the trolley schedule, visit www.downtownfranklintn.com/thefranklin-art-scene.
First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown
Enjoy an evening of art under the lights on 5th Avenue. The Arts Company is introducing Hollie Chastain and Chris Bruno in two exhibitions that highlight their individual approaches to working in mixed media through paintings, paper art, illustration, and collage, and combining vintage materials with contemporary observations. Tinney Contemporary is showing Joel Daniel Phillips: Welcome to
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Will Branham, Blend Studio
Hollie Chastain, The Arts Company
Saturday, November 4, from 6 until 9 p.m.
In the historic Arcade, Will Branham is debuting his show Subsidized at Blend Studio. Inspired by Waldo Emerson, science, math, ego, love, hope, and now, his show consists of 24 paintings with no common thread but the attempt to capture the notion that all is fluid and nothing is fixed. Blue Fig Gallery is exhibiting hand-pulled woodcuts by printmaker artist Mike Martino along with the original wood blocks used in the process. “O” Gallery is featuring the intricate designs of new artist Brittany Molnar. Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery is displaying Setting West: From Print to Film to Print, work by this year’s Artist in Residence Judith Poirier. While at Hatch Show Print guests are invited to participate in Block Party where they can work with the shop’s image blocks and ink to create a design to hand print onto paper, a tote bag, or a T-shirt. Mary Hong Gallery at 414 Union Street inside the Bank of America building is featuring fine art painting with glass. For parking and trolley information, visit www.nashvilledowntown.com/play/firstsaturday-art-crawl.
Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston Saturday, November 4, from 6 until 9 p.m. From Hagen to Houston to Chestnut and beyond, Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston offers a broad range of artistic experience. Zeitgeist is hosting an opening reception for Megan Lightell’s Saving Space, an exhibit of large-scale paintings and small studies that preserve the beauty and mystery of public and private properties protected by the Land John Dilg, mild climate Trust for Tennessee. Channel to Channel is unveiling Lush Interiors by St. Francis Elevator Ride (see page 90). Fort Houston is presenting Work in Transit, a new photography exhibition from Wrenne Evans and Elena Franklin, curated by Alyssa Beach. See after the reconstruction by Mark Megan Lightell, Zeitgeist Bradley-Shoup and paintings and drawings by Wolf Kahn at David Lusk Gallery. Julia Martin Gallery is showing Yard Sale by Devin Goebel. Open Gallery is featuring Erin Potter’s Watermelon, paintings and prints that incorporate found objects, found photos, and staged scenes to explore the intersection of absurdity and beauty. See Lorne Quarles: Repeating Pattern, large-scale mixed-media work at abrasiveMedia. Mild climate is displaying paintings based on nature and the state of our planet and wilderness
by John Dilg. East Side Project Space is showcasing Sarah Mason Walden’s exhibit Spooky Action At A Distance, which focuses on time travel and explores the theory of quantum entanglement and how once two things become entangled, they inform each other’s state. For more information, please visit www.artsmusicweho.wordpress.com.
East Side Art Stumble Saturday, November 11, from 6 until 10 p.m.
on the East Side Art Stumble, visit www.facebook.com/ eastsideartstumble.
The Marnie Sheridan Gallery November 16 through December 20
Michelle Farro, Marnie Sheridan Gallery
An opening reception for Michelle Farro’s solo exhibition Dream Catalogue is slated for Sunday, November 19, from 3 until 5 p.m. at The Marnie Sheridan Gallery on the campus of Harpeth Hall.
Germantown Art Crawl
Saturday, November 18, from 6 until 9 p.m.
Jodi Hays, Red Arrow Gallery
Megan Little, Turnip Green Creative Reuse
Take a drive down Gallatin Pike to Red Arrow Gallery for the opening of KEEPER, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jodi Hays. In KEEPER Hays responds to many walks through her neighborhood and how everyday issues like racial bias, class, and gentrification affect her through that lens. Michael Weintrob Studio is hosting an open house featuring INSTRUMENTHEAD work. At Turnip Green Creative Reuse see the unique sculptures of Megan Little. Crafted from materials and daydreams collected along the way, these floating art creations offer a whimsical artistic experience. For updates
Tour the non-traditional art spaces of Germantown to see an array of artworks by a variety of artists. As you make your way through the neighborhood, stop at these key art spots: 100 Taylor Arts Collective, Abednego, Wilder, Bits & Pieces, Bearded Iris Brewing, and Alexis & Bolt. For updates and more information, visit www.facebook.com/germantownartcrawl.
Jefferson Street Art Crawl
Saturday, November 25, from 6 until 9 p.m. This month the Jefferson Street Art Crawl takes place on Small Business Saturday so get out early and shop local. Woodcuts Gallery and Framing is exhibiting realistic acrylic paintings by Emery Franklin. One Drop Ink, Garden Brunch Cafe, and The Loft at Ella Jean’s Café are also participating. Stay posted on event details at Facebook.com/jsactn.
Community Education
registration for spring classes opens December 1st
W.
STACY BEAM
Red Dirt, Oil on canvas, 36” x 60”
GINGER OGLESBY
DENISE HAWKINS
Sweet Wrendition, Oil on linen panel, 6” x 6”
JOHN CANNON
Dream It Over, Acrylic on canvas, 60” x 36”
Nellie, Commissioned pet portraits, Oil on canvas
YORK & Friends fine art Nashville • Memphis
Featured Artist
POLLY COOK
Ask me for the moon, and I’ll give it, Acrylic on canvas, 48” x 36”
Please join us for our
Annual Holiday Open House Saturday, November 11 Featuring Nancy Scofield - Germyn's Bella Baroque Jewelry Trunk Show 10-5 • Featured Artist's Reception 2-5 107 Harding Place • Tues-Sat 10-5 • 615.352.3316 • yorkandfriends@att.net www.yorkandfriends.com • Follow us on
at York & Friends Fine Art
ALEX LOCKWOOD CAPTURES NATURAL BEAUTY AT THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY
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To engage audiences and capture something of their residents’ outstanding presence in a sustainable way, the sanctuary has installed a lifesized elephant statue made of tires. The sanctuary selected Alex Lockwood, a Nashville-based sculptor who specializes in using recycled material, to deliver this one-of-a-kind piece. Lockwood’s work has been showcased at OZ Arts, Zeitgeist, and First Tennessee Park, consistently demonstrating the clever, unexpected use of material that the sanctuary sought. In pure coincidence, Lockwood had named his North Nashville art space “Elephant.” “Alex is excellent at communicating complicated ideas through recycled materials,” explains Janice Zeitlin, the sanctuary’s CEO and executive director. “His enthusiastic approach to new
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subjects easily engages a wide audience of all ages. He took the challenge to create a life-sized Asian elephant from recycled materials and brought a fresh and new perspective that inspires viewers to think about reusing materials and reducing our impact on the environment.” Using tires collected during a community drive, Lockwood’s 7-foot-6 creation is remarkably realistic, the dark rubber providing a material that mimics the tough, wrinkly skin of an elephant. “I hope that my elephant, while not a replacement for the real thing, will bring visitors joy for what it is: a unique work of art that visitors can’t see anywhere else in the world,” Lockwood says. “Like lottery tickets, shotgun shells, and bottle caps—all objects I’ve used in my practice—used tires have a history before they reach me . . . So, like much of my past work, what I am trying to do
here is to draw attention to the beauty of a valueless object when seen in an unfamiliar arrangement.” The statue is set to serve as an ambassador to the sanctuary’s new Elephant Discovery Center, scheduled to open next summer. But in the meantime, it has been fulfilling its mission of engaging visitors and reminding them of the unique beauty of elephants. na Lockwood’s statue can be seen at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, 27 East Main Street in Hohenwald. For more information, visit www.elephants.com.
Photograph by Aaron Rosburg
The habitats are closed to the public, but an outdoor classroom takes visitors through a self-guided tour to educate them about elephants’ roles in their native environments, unique behaviors, and ongoing conservation efforts. That visitor’s center is also home to a uniquely engaging piece of art, one that gives visitors a sense of these creatures while maintaining their right to seclusion.
Photograph by Alex Lockwood
hose visiting the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee—a 2,700-acre haven in Hohenwald that has provided a home for 27 elephants retired from performance or exhibition—have a chance to learn about these massive mammals while supporting and respecting their privacy.
A Retrospective by Tom Rice Customs House Museum
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November 2–January 7
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sing only the basic tools, a chisel and a mallet, stone sculptor Tom Rice creates works that are a study in simplicity of form, mass, line, texture, and movement. His latest show, titled Endurance in Form—A Retrospective, features a collection spanning his almost-50-year career and will be featured at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville November 2 to January 7.
Sleeping Bird, Indiana limestone with mineral deposits
Rice works in a variety of mediums, including clay and wood, but he is best known for his stone sculptures. Carving stone is an ancient art that has been largely replaced by air hammers and other pneumatic tools, but Rice prefers the venerable approach deserving of its antiquity. “I’m one of few stone carvers around that use a mallet and chisel. I still do all the carving by hand,” he says. “I like the more direct approach of handling the material,” he continues, speaking the verb in an almost poetic onomatopoeic way that reveals his connection to the stone and its hidden purpose. Blocks of solid soapstone, limestone, marble, sandstone, and alabaster are tapped and pounded and reduced into vessels, birdbaths, fountains, benches, seashells, and stylized birds. “I continuously design as I carve. I don’t even sketch anymore. I draw directly on the stone and make decisions as I go. Sometimes the stone suggests which way to go; other times I have in mind what my subject is,” Rice explains. This is an abrupt departure from his original work process of meticulous paper designs and edits. Rice’s work pulls the viewer in closer with its intricate details that create the optical illusion of a stone that moves. “When people see a vessel, they want to look inside. It’s a natural
Sleeping Bird, Indiana limestone with mineral deposits
WORDS Catherine Randall Berresheim
Endurance in Form
Sleeping Bird, Indiana limestone
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
Library Bird, Indiana limestone
Tom Rice in his studio Vessel and Sleeping Bird, Indiana limestone
instinct. I started to carve the design into its center, then added more carvings, and then it started growing up and over, making that cone shape.” An example of this effect can be seen in his mixed-media fountain. This perfectly smooth limestone vase, sitting atop assembled chunks of wood and textured stone pedestals, takes on an almost angelic tone and beckons the viewer to become more intimate with the art. “By making the bottom of the vessel smaller and the piece larger as it goes up, I am able to create a flowing movement that makes it more visually interesting. It’s kind of a way to force the viewer to really look at your work,” Rice says. The result is a fascinating totem-like fountain structure that defies gravity, or small sculptures that play with the uncommon couplings of the lightness of a bird or seashell and the heaviness of a rock. Rice uses reclaimed materials from demolished buildings, stone mills, salvage yards, and even graveyards. In fact, some of his structures are reminiscent of the monuments found in old cemeteries. “I’m big on recycling. I’m always looking for
things to incorporate,” he says. Abandoned gravestones and keystones from archways of older homes become treasure to a sculptor.
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My approach to art is simple: Choose an ordinary subject, like a bird, and an ordinary surface, like a stone, and produce something extraordinary.
Rice’s works are part of permanent collections throughout the country. To see his work locally, visit Centennial Art Center, Cheekwood Museum, or the Tennessee State Museum. na
Endurance in Form—A Retrospective by Tom Rice is on view at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville November 2 through January 7, 2018. For more information, please visit www.customshousemuseum.org.
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The Composer Rocks With two ballets and a Grammy nomination, Kip Winger makes a bid for the classical big time
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C
INGE
Photograph by Denise Truscello
WORDS John Pitcher
harles Frederick “Kip” Winger seemed lost in thought. Seated in the darkened concert hall of Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, his face and neatly trimmed beard illuminated by only the faint glow of a music-stand light, Winger stared intently at the complex orchestral score in front of him. At first, he didn’t seem to notice Giancarlo Guerrero, the orchestra’s music director, walking onstage to begin rehearsal.
KIP
Wasting little time, Guerrero gave the orchestra its downbeat, and his musicians dug into a jaunty rendition of Winger’s Conversations with Nijinsky. Winger composed this piece as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky, the famed—and deeply troubled—20th-century Russian choreographer who had collaborated with Igor Stravinsky on many of his landmark ballets. The first movement, titled “Chaconne de feu” (“Chaconne of Fire”), seemed to conjure the legendary choreographer’s spirit, with the music’s vibrant opening theme rushing forward with the energy of a great dancer taking the stage. This sudden, sparkling tintinnabulation of sound prompted Winger to look up from his score. Soon, he was out of his seat and walking to different locations in the hall, searching for the ideal vantage point to listen to his music. Wearing a black blazer and jeans, he looked like a college professor strolling through his classroom. And he spoke with professorial authority when answering questions from Guerrero about tempo and dynamics. Surely, no one would have guessed that this composer had once been lead singer of a 1980s heavy-metal band. At that moment, he looked like a paragon of classical seriousness.
As the rehearsal neared its conclusion, several musicians raised their hands, alerting Winger and Guerrero to a few minor flaws in the score. The French horn rhythms were out of whack in one measure, one of the horn players noted. The cello parts didn’t have measure numbers at all. “You should let your copyist know about that,” remarked Guerrero. Winger took it all in stride. “I really live in two different worlds,” the rocker-turned-classical-composer said later. “Somehow, I’ve got to get used to people telling me I’ve got a single wrong note in measure one billion.”
In almost any other city in the world, a composer like Winger might be viewed as a poseur, as a dabbler producing yet another crossover gimmick. Not in Nashville. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Nashville has emerged as one of America’s foremost fine and performing arts cities. Indeed, a 2017 study from Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research ranked Nashville alongside cities like New York and Los Angeles as one of the top five hotbeds of American arts and culture. Few cities are home to as many fine and performing artists, and fewer still are producing as much original work. In Nashville, Winger is just one of many commercial musicians, including Ben Folds, Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, and Victor Wooten, who cross genres with seeming impunity. “In most American cities, commercial arts and nonprofit arts have diverged,” notes Jennifer Cole, executive director of the Nashville Metro
Nashville had yet to become the “It City” when Winger moved to town in 2002. The arrival of Whole Foods was still several years away. And the sort of adventurous restaurant scene that would one day draw Anthony Bourdain had yet to take off. “It was a bit of a culture shock,” concedes Winger. “Everywhere you’d look there would be a meat-and-three.”
Photograph by Amy Richmond
Still, there were some distinct advantages to living in Nashville. Unlike New Mexico, where Winger had lived prior to his move east, there were no juniper trees to inflame his allergies. Housing was still affordable, something that appealed to the thousands of musicians and artists who migrated from the coasts to Nashville during the late 1990s and early aughts. And Music Row provided plenty of opportunities for songwriting, publishing, and recording.
Arts Commission. “In Nashville, the commercial and the nonprofit have tended to converge, which has produced an incredibly vibrant arts city.” Keel Hunt, a longtime civic leader who was an early proponent of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, says Nashville’s sudden ascendance as an arts city is due to two major factors. “Over the decades, Nashville had tremendously important arts philanthropists, people like Martha Ingram and Steve Turner, who had thoughtful visions of how to move our city forward,” says Hunt. “At the same time, there was an important realization
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on the part of our civic leaders that the definition of Music City needed to evolve to encompass all kinds of music and the arts.” As a result, Nashville quickly emerged as a kind of Third Coast. The city’s 180 recording studios, 130 music publishers, 100 live music clubs, and 80 record labels ignited what the urbanist Richard Florida referred to as “the Nashville Effect.” An economic phenomenon known as “talent clustering” began to take effect. As more artists from various genres and disciplines moved to the city, their numbers exerted a sort of gravitational pull, bringing in even more artists to the city.
For Winger, there was also a less obvious appeal. As the Athens of the South, Nashville was home to some of the finest colleges and universities in the region. There was no better place for Winger to indulge his decades-long obsession with studying classical music. He came to classical music somewhat late. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1961, he grew up the son of jazz musicians. He took up the bass at an early age and played in rock bands. His first real exposure to classical music came at age 16, when he attended ballet class with his then-girlfriend. He soon found himself enthralled with the music of Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Stravinsky. His single-minded determination to become a rock star, however, had not diminished. So in his 20s, he moved to New York and eventually landed a plum gig playing bass for Alice Cooper. He played on a couple of the shock rocker’s albums and accompanied the star on one of his most successful tours. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Winger quit to form his own glam metal band. “I’d been trying to get a record deal since I
Winger’s eponymous debut album featured a string of hits, including one boasting the sadly prophetic title “Headed for a Heartbreak.” By the early 90s, metal was out and grunge was in. Winger became a target of derision, his name ridiculed in an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head. “We couldn’t even get a gig after that,” Winger recalls. When the market for operas in London tanked in the early 1740s, George Frideric Handel began writing oratorios—his famed Messiah was a product of this changed emphasis. Winger found himself in a similar situation. A rock ‘n’ roll has-been at 35, he made the unorthodox choice of switching genres and pursuing classical. He moved to New Mexico and began plowing through the orchestration textbooks of Walter Piston and Samuel Adler. At the University of New Mexico, he began studying privately with Richard Hermann, a theorist and composer with a penchant for abstruse modern harmonies. Winger learned a
lot, but this wasn’t his style. He had more luck when he moved to Nashville. A big turning point came in 2004 when he attended one of Nashville Ballet’s early Emergence series concerts at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. One of the dances on the program was “Ploughing the Dark,” set to a piano trio by Blair composer Michael Kurek. Winger was transfixed and approached Kurek after the concert. “I have to admit I didn’t know who he was when he came up to me,” says Kurek. “He had been seeking out classical teachers, but they hadn’t been resonating with him because they were too academic. He ended up enrolling in the adult division at Blair and began studying with me. I was impressed. He had a fantastic ear and fabulous ideas.” For the first time, Winger felt he had been given permission to write in a style that was meaningful to him. He began working on a longer piece that eventually became his breakthrough work. It was a movement for string quartet that he later expanded for
Concertmaster Jun Iwasaki, Kip Winger and Maestro Giancarlo Guerrero
orchestra. Through a mutual friend, Winger sent the piece to the young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who was impressed and wanted more. Winger obliged, expanding the piece into a multimovement ballet titled Ghosts. Wheeldon choreographed it, staging it in 2010 with San Francisco Ballet. The success of Ghosts led to the creation of Winger’s latest ballet, Conversations with Nijinsky. San Francisco Ballet Orchestra’s recording of those works last year resulted in a Grammy nomination for best contemporary classical composition. That recognition finally caught the attention of Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony, which played Nijinsky with fire and emotion in September. “Among new ballet scores, Kip’s Conversations with Nijinsky is one of the best,” Guerrero said after the concert. “I have no doubt we’ll be playing a lot more of his music in the future.” na For more information, please visit www.kipwinger.com.
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Photograph by Kurt Heinecke
was 15 years old,” says Winger. “It was time to move on.”
The Art of
LIVING LARGE
in Small Spaces Nashville-based New Frontier stakes a claim in the expanding tiny house landscape
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Pioneering is expensive, but I know this is the future of housing.
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WORDS Carrington Fox PHOTOGRAPHY StudioBuell Photography
G
iven how charismatic and engaging David Latimer is when speaking on the topic of micro-housing, it’s no surprise that HGTV based an episode of reality program Tiny House, Big Living on his company, New Frontier Tiny Homes. Nor is it surprising that glossy publications such as Architectural Digest and House Beautiful followed up with glowing articles about Latimer’s stylish signature product, a 240-square-foot mobile structure known as the Alpha. What is surprising, however, is the fact that the Alpha—painstakingly and gorgeously embellished with subway tile, barnwood, dishwasher drawer, Jacuzzi, farmhouse sink, and glass garage door—was Latimer’s first endeavor of the sort. Latimer’s rapid rise from tiny-house enthusiast to telegenic champion for the architecture of a pared-down and intentional lifestyle began in 2015, when he was building a couple of microhouses from plans, as a way to dip his big toe into tiny waters. He stumbled into a dinner party conversation about tiny houses with a guest from Los Angeles. Get Latimer rolling on the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and David Shi, author of The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, and it becomes immediately clear that he is interested in more than just the bricks and mortar of the twee architectural movement. So, while he had never designed a house from scratch, he was so passionate and confident about his ability to craft beautiful dwellings for intentional living that his dinner companion relayed his story to a producer in California.
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Since the HGTV debut, New Frontier partners Latimer and Thomas have completed four tiny houses based on Latimer’s custom designs. Aided by ebullient national media—including Huffington Post, New York Post, and Curbed.com, which dubbed Latimer’s flagship Alpha model “the fanciest tiny house around”—nascent New Frontier has quickly staked a huge claim on the tiny-house landscape. In college, Latimer, now 35, studied philosophy and played football. His disparate athletic and academic credentials merge seamlessly at New Frontier HQ, where heavy machinery and existential literature sit side by side in the workbarn and Latimer quotes Winston Churchill while fourwheeling across a pasture to inspect his handmade structures. After college, he traveled across Europe and Africa, worked in fashion in New York, and designed restaurant interiors in Chicago before coming to Nashville to open the short-lived Music City Tippler. Upon returning to his hometown, Latimer also took an unexpected turn toward the family business, so to speak. His father, Eddie Latimer, CEO of Affordable Housing Resources, is an outspoken advocate for increasing the city’s stock of workforce housing and levels of home-ownership. Having seen the tiny-house movement take hold on the West Coast, Eddie wanted to explore micro-housing as a way to deal with ever-escalating real estate costs in It City Nashville. He introduced the subject of tiny houses to David, who wanted to merge his own interests in sustainable design and intentional living. To see if father and son could pursue their interests under the same tiny roof, Latimers elder and younger attended a Tumbleweed Tiny House Workshop, then Eddie provided capital for David and some friends to construct two tiny houses from Tumbleweed plans. Those early efforts, finished with clean lines of white-painted tongue-and-groove and dark-stained barnwood accents, now sit on rolling pastureland at a Bells Bend farm, where New Frontier’s office and workshop occupy a grand barn. With two practice structures under his belt, David partnered with builder Zac Thomas—who is also managing partner at Nashville-based Paragon Group builders—to bring his high-design aesthetic to the positive constraints of moderated consumption. The results include the Alpha, which was profiled on HGTV, and the slightly larger and more embellished Escher, which Curbed.com called “a new embodiment of tiny house as art.” Next thing Latimer knew, he was executing his first proprietary tiny house model in front of a camera crew, with help from technically savvy business partner Zac Thomas, who made sure Latimer’s blue-sky designs were grounded in reality. To watch the episode, which first aired in June 2016, you’d have no idea that Latimer was a newcomer to both tiny-house design and reality television.
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But while the New Frontier team—including architectural consultant Taylor Mallon, director of operations Stevee Curtis, and sales director Mary Dockery—have demonstrated remarkable passion, ingenuity, and craftsmanship in their creative enterprise, they still wrestle with the economics of the fledgling tiny-house industry. Here’s where the math of
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At $500 per square foot, New Frontier’s tiny homes are more luxury living than affordable housing. Latimer’s first signature models have found buyers on the West Coast, and his next custom project is a writing studio and library for best-selling children’s author Cornelia Funke.
David Latimer
Latimer hasn’t given up on extending the common-sense beauty of tiny living to a larger audience. For a six-unit tinyhouse hotel in the works for East Nashville, he’s exploring cost-effective variations, such as eliminating the trailer base and streamlining the interior design. But he’s not prepared to sacrifice too much design. Latimer feels strongly that housing, no matter what size, should be beautiful and inspiring. It’s just of question of how to make it economically scalable. He cites Tesla’s Elon Musk, whose effort to bring electric cars to the masses began with luxury automobiles. “Pioneering is expensive,” Latimer says, cataloging the many time-consuming lessons he has learned along the way. “But I know this is the future of housing.” na
For information on the Alpha and Escher tiny-house designs, please visit www.newfrontiertinyhomes.com.
Photograph by Jessica Steddom
tiny living gets tricky: The original Alpha was budgeted to cost $60,000 to build, but actual construction costs came in significantly higher. As Latimer says cheerfully on the HGTV segment, “I envisioned it going a little smoother than this.” Of course, he was talking specifically about the installation of an elegantly ingenious overhead storage system designed to give a compact kitchen outsized functionality, but little luxuries designed to lure homeowners toward a radically edited lifestyle can add up fast. Innovative spacesaving furniture that collapses into the floor or slides into the walls costs more to build than off-the-shelf stock, so tiny living can cost big bucks. As listed online, a 250-square-foot Alpha costs $124,000, while the 325-square-foot Escher starts at $185,000.
4107 Hillsboro Circle | 615 297 0296 | www.cumberlandgallery.com
WORDS Sara Lee Burd
Anne Siems Awakening the Spirit David Lusk Gallery
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November 14–December 23
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Sometimes I feel like something is coming through me that maybe I should take the time to explore.
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A
nne Siems considers herself a conduit of visual communication, as she says, “a visceral prophet.” She transmits inner and outer worlds as figurative artworks filled with feeling and intrigue. External factors such as her role in her family, her health, social political upheavals, the environment, spiritual practices, and technology affect her artworks unconsciously as she focuses her attention on making compositions
Porcupine, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 48” x 36”
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My interest is in using the part of our brains that can make that connection with spirits. There is more to life than what we can see, and I use journey as a way of being more connected to the web of life.
The Bear, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 60” x 60”
that resonate on their own. She explains, “I like my work to be a mystery and that it expresses itself through discernment. It’s obscure, and I don’t really work from my brain, which allows me to make a bigger statement. I want it to really meet all of us at a level where we aren’t analyzing it. Where we are just letting it penetrate us.” Siems moved to the United States from Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship to study at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her experience there combined her interests in spiritualism, nature, and art. She exclaims, “The South is so awesome! There is so much mystery and history in Tennessee. When I moved to Seattle I missed history. There’s no Howard Finster and unique outsider art out here. I had to dig deeper to find out about the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest.” A seemingly unlikely inspiration for Siems, the art of the Pacific Northwest tribes impacts the artist on many levels. She proclaims,
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Markhor Goat, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 60”x 48”
Pollen, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 48” x 36”
“Their art is exactly what I am doing, but in a different way. They’ve pulled all of this knowledge together, squeezed it through discernment of visual refinement, and the outcome is images of spirits, animals, entities, and energies. Regardless of whatever animal is represented, they have an immediate, intense energy. They are a visual medicine that shakes your soul and reverberates inside you. You feel the power coming out from it. It has brought me to tears.” In indigenous art, she admires the timeless spiritual echoes from the past. She explains, “In a way I would love for my work to have that kind of effect on people, not that they have to cry. I want to create work that wakes up this [connectedness] in people; that the art fills them.” Missing spirituality and ritual in her life in Seattle, Siems read a book suggested by a friend in Germany, Magic Everyday by Luisa Francia. While the content fascinated Siems, it was the author’s freedom and attitude that really motivated her. “She’s an anarchist. She’s not someone who fits into a dogma. She’s into anything witchy and herby and just runs freely with anything that she wants to explore.” Siems immersed herself in Shamanism and the practice of shamanic journeying. She has participated in spiritual workshops incorporating ancient ceremonial techniques
The Birds, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 48” x 36”
for years and is now teaching. Clarifying her work: “My interest is in using the part of our brains that can make that connection with spirits. There is more to life than what we can see, and I use journey as a way of being more connected to the web of life.” The first work Siems made in this series was Porcupine. “For some reason ‘porcupine’ had just popped up from a story of a friend whose dog had just had a violent encounter. Then I received a card with a porcupine on it, and just thought, OK, porcupine it is.” In the resulting painting, Siems presents a play between the heavy, wild beast in the foreground and the light, ethereal woman who occupies the top quarter of the composition. Siems presents the female with a direct outward glance and a delicately rendered hand clasping a quill, which appears lovely and also menacing when considered with the accompanying porcupine’s mess of fur made of dynamic pointing needles alert to danger. Showing off their defenses or perhaps working on offense, Siems illuminates a commonality amongst all life on earth. Siems explains that approaching her art as the artist and as a shamanic practitioner are quite different for her. “Sometimes I feel like something is coming through me that maybe I
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By approaching the bizarre and indeterminable, the artist provides a space for considering the universe unrestricted by the rules of nature as we know them. Pollen features a youth depicted in a cloud-filled space. Nude except for his heavy boots, his body is cloaked in undulating waves of colors, lines, and drips and drops of color. Thorn-like points surround the boy’s neck and shoulders, and coupled with the radiant mystical shroud, he appears enveloped in protective energy. Hummingbirds approach the figure as though drawn to his being like nectar. The meaning of these juxtapositions remains ambiguous and compels curiosity.
Squirrel, 2017, Acrylic on panel, 30” x 24”
should take the time to explore. What does porcupine mean, I wonder? Shamans would say, ‘What is the medicine of this animal?’ If I were to journey on the question of porcupine, I would wonder what I could learn from the porcupine. In the studio, I am working from a different place to make art.” She frees herself from associations to select imagery intuitively rather than with an expectation of singular meaning. That, she leaves to viewers to interpret and resolve the works for themselves. An example of free association, in The Bear Siems references the visage and signature coif from Velazquez’s portraits of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain. Plucking the monarch from her original palatial and equestrian contexts, the artist disconnects the queen’s likeness and biography. As she explains, “I have several photocopies of paintings of her by Velazquez at various ages. There’s something about her face that is just really intriguing.” Playing with the European style of courtly portraiture, Siems replaces the standard gallant horse topped by a noble with a downward-gazing brown bear carrying a semi-dressed young woman. In this case, however, the harried beast and the stoic maiden do not exude a sense of regal honor and pride.
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Through process or by her own artistic inclinations, Siems’s art has an emotional intensity that is rendered so subtly it is hard to unravel which elements produce the effect. In Markhor Goat, the figure’s doll-like face appears peaceful, yet with a distant gaze. Circles dotted with pink and black placed in a vertical line from her head down indicate five chakra points. The Easternbased belief is that each one relates to energy centers. The goal is working to align these energies through physical and spiritual work to achieve inner peace. Considering this significance, it could be noted that the figure is suffering an imbalance indicated by the black spots in the bottom and top circles. These generally represent the root chakra, which relates to foundation and feeling grounded, and the crown chakra, which indicates spiritual connection and equilibrium between inner and outer beauty. The fantastical, horned beast is a real goat from Asia, but Siems is quick to remind that it was selected because of its appearance, rather than significance. Her latest series of artworks reflects a shift in aesthetics and tone. Coping with the glaring divisiveness of contemporary life since the tumultuous 2016 election, Siems feels called to act. “I find that the work that I do now is less delicate and naive. It has more an element of certainty. Even if they are young and innocent. After the Trump election I thought, the dresses have to go. They are too sweet, too lovely right now. I needed to be more raw.” While Siems offers minimal explanations, she differentiates the new figures, calling attention to their “accusatory glances, as if to say, What are you people doing with our future!” As you engage Siems’s art more deeply, notice what it evokes within you. Perhaps you will find an inexplicable connectedness; perhaps you will take pause at the high quality and beauty that define Siems’s artwork, and perhaps you will fancy it for reasons all your own. na Inquiry by Anne Siems is on exhibit at David Lusk Gallery, November 14 through December 23. An opening reception is scheduled for November 18 from 5 until 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.annesiems.com and www.davidluskgallery.com.
1607 18th Ave. S.
3624 Westbrook Ave.
3622 Meadowbrook Ave.
HILLSBORO VILLAGE/VANDERBILT 5 BED | 4 BATH | $1,350,000
HISTORIC RICHLAND-WEST END 3 BED | 3 BATH | $899,000
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ACTIVE
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ACTIVE Allen DeCuyper allen@parksathome.com • 615.300.5971
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leah@parksathome.com • 615.478.6333 The DeCuyper Team
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THEBOOKMARK
A MONTHLY LOOK AT HOT BOOKS AND COOL READS
The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art This timeless coffee-table book contains essays by contemporary artists discussing iconic pieces at the MET, taking you on a detailed tour into the heart of the museum and capturing the works that inspired them to create. Artists and art lovers will cherish this look at the creative process and the art of influence, complete with stunning images.
Grant Ron Chernow Don’t let the heft of this new volume discourage you—Grant is a readable, compelling biography from the author who inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Chernow is a master at digging into the humanity and truth of historical figures, and this biography is his next must-read for anyone with an interest in history, and it’s the perfect gift for the history buff in your life.
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West Nate Blakeslee Ultimately a dissection of our relationship with the “wild,” American Wolf is a mesmerizing, propulsive tale of the American West told through the story of one of the most iconic and unlikely American protagonists in recent history—a wolf. Best read in a desert or around a campfire with howling in the distance.
Uncommon Type: Some Stories Tom Hanks You may have heard that Tom Hanks (yes, THE Tom Hanks) had written a book of short stories. Well, let us be the ones to tell you that it’s brilliant. Whimsical and humorous, Hanks has a keen eye for humanity that will suck you into his imagined worlds and not let go.
WHO NEEDS MISTLETOE? H O L I D AY L I G H T S NOV 24 - DEC 31
Co-Presented By
Made possible by the AWC Family Foundation with additional support from The Frist Foundation and The Memorial Foundation.
Photograph by Aaron Farrington
Morgan Craig Sarratt Gallery
WORDS Bob Doerschuk
|
November 6–30
F
rom a distance, Morgan Craig’s paintings beckon with lustrous colors. Golds glisten like Christmas tinsel near patches of crimson or aquamarine. Draw closer, though, and these rainbows convey a darker imagery—a decrepit abandoned factory, a schoolroom haunted by ceiling rot and the absence of children. This is the foundation of Craig’s artistry. He is, first of all, a superb technician, his lifelong inclinations to draw refined at Philadelphia’s Temple University and University of the Arts. He is also a man of strong opinions, which are rooted in both his voracious reading and observations of life’s inequities. The union of these passions defines who he is and the mission he sets for himself.
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The Politics of Pork, Fat with Fallacy, 2015, Oil on Linen, 60” x 45” Empty Pact, 2016, Oil on Linen, 60” x 45”
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Craig traces his social and creative epiphany to a landscape class he took in college. “The professor took us to myriad locations,” he remembers. “We would paint what we saw, either en plein air or back at school through drawings or photographs. One day we went to the St. Nicholas Coal Breaker, which prior to World War II had been the largest coal breaker in the world. Looking around and seeing the environmental devastation it had wrought through the exploitative nature of coal extraction, I understood there had to be more to this story. It couldn’t be just about obsolescence.”
Now is not the time to paint flowers. Now is the time to help people wake up.
The search for a deeper meaning led Craig to the library. The writings of French philosopher Louis Althusser and Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta steered him to Marx and Engels, which helped him put his observations into the context that endures in his work today. “To me, all of this industrial wreckage is a kind of modern sublimity,” he explains. “As much horror as there was at St. Nicholas and places like that, where so many people suffered with the tedium of labor on assembly lines or in steel mills, where they fell into pits and were injured or burned alive, at the same time these places
Imbrications of Influence and Illusion, 2016, Oil on Linen, 72” x 54”
Cadaver of Capitalism, 2015, Oil on Linen, 54” x 72”
have a kind of beauty that inspires a sense of awe. I wanted to form a cohesive work around that amalgam.” And so he has, as demonstrated at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Gallery, where an exhibition of his works, For all that we have been taught, all that we’ve learned, will be displayed November 6–30. Most of it conforms to Craig’s aesthetic of vivid colors, industrial wreckage, and implicit but undeniable commentary. “My use of color, light, and perspective is to draw you in, to make you think about or question what’s going on,” Craig says. “If you use chiaroscuro, with lots of darks, people will quickly pass it by. But if everything is right there in your face, it stirs up the emotions. And if more people were to wake up to a more egalitarian or socialist way of thinking, then perhaps we might be able to turn this sinking ship around.” One work at the Sarratt, Cadaver of Capitalism, illustrates Craig’s point especially well. It depicts the inside of an abandoned Armour meat-packing plant in East St. Louis—a mausoleum now of rusted machinery and brilliantly tinted decay. “There are different levels here,” he notes. “It’s not just the death of capitalism; it’s also an abattoir of sorts. The meat-packing industry was all about profit, which leads
to consolidation so that you have fewer and fewer workers as profits increase. People are out of work. Families are devastated. To me, this is truly the cadaver of capitalism.” At Moscow’s Proekt Fabrika, exhibitions at New York’s OK Harris Gallery, and the Australian National University, through residences in Paris, Prague, and at New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony, Craig’s mission has taken on an international dimension—which, he insists, is as it should be, as the crises he targets know no borders. “Look, by no means am I standing on some soapbox and being righteous,” he insists. “I have my faults. You could argue that I enjoy the perks of the capitalist framework as much as anyone. But people have got to become informed. They shouldn’t just be riled up; they should be outraged. If they become complacent and compliant, then they are complicit. So now is not the time to paint flowers. Now is the time to help people wake up.” na Morgan Craig’s exhibit For all that we have been taught, all that we’ve learned is on display November 6–30 at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Gallery. For more information, please visit www.vanderbilt.edu/sarrattgallery. See more of Morgan Craig’s work at www.morgancraig.org.
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York & Friends Fine Art Hosts Holiday Open House
John Cannon, Lemon, Oil on canvas, 12” x 9”
Polly Cook, Train to Paris, Acrylic on canvas, 36” x 24”
On November 11, York & Friends Fine Art in Belle Meade will hold its annual holiday open house, a yearly celebration for one of Nashville’s preeminent galleries with a focus on featured artists.
Through paintings and ceramic representations reminiscent of Modigliani, Cook captures pivotal moments of romance.
This year’s event will take place all day, host a jewelry trunk show, and introduce visitors to six local and regional artists. “As always, we hope to introduce our gallery to new faces as well as remind our regular clientele of the wonderful selection of artists we offer,” says Ron York, who has been in the gallery business for more than 25 years, six of them with his latest gallery. “Although we change out our featured artists on a monthly basis, we’ve realized customers can become overwhelmed with reception invitations . . . The holiday open house is a great way to kick off the gift-buying season.” Though York stopped offering jewelry some time ago, he decided to feature a one-day trunk show last spring and, following its success, will do so again for this open house. The jewelry has been made by Nancy Scofield-Germyn, who lives in China parttime and purchases her material through pearl markets there. One of the featured visual artists, Nashville native Polly Cook, has been working with York for more than 20 years, introduced to him by Tennessee’s poet laureate Margaret Britton Vaughn.
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“In a town where artists’ styles seem to overlap often, Polly has remained unique and true to herself,” explains York. “I have not seen anyone with a similar painting style or who can match her pottery pieces.” The open house will feature over 25 paintings and ceramics by Cook. York anticipates that visitors to the gallery will be able to sense Cook’s feelings as she created the work they see. “I think of Polly’s work as emotional,” he says. “In my first years of representing her, I would find her work would often reflect her relationships. Colors would be bright and happy when in love and then dark and moody when a relationship came to an end. Titles are often a line from poetry and there are hidden meanings in many of the works if you look closely.” Attendees of the open house are sure to discover much that they did not know before, whether that be new artists or the layered mysteries within the works themselves. York & Friends Fine Art, 107 Harding Place, will feature its holiday open house from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, November 11. For more information, please visit www.yorkandfriends.com.
WORDS Jochen Wierich
Envisioning Statehood: A New Exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art Explores the Cultural History of the Magnolia State
Eyre Crowe (1824–1910), After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond, 1853, Oil on canvas, 27 1/8” x 36 1/8”. Chicago History Museum
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With all its problems and traumatic history, Mississippi has always tended to be a powerful source of identity for artists.
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ississippi and Tennessee have their share in the history of American roots and popular music, from Blues to Country. In a bit of friendly rivalry with Tennessee, Mississippi claims Elvis, whose birthplace is in Tupelo, as its native son. But, as Andy Warhol’s portrait of the pop star dressed as a Western gunslinger shows, movies and stardom transformed Elvis from local hero into a global icon with mass appeal. Warhol’s Triple Elvis is among one of the many major loans that the Mississippi Museum of Art will bring to Jackson, Mississippi, for its bicentennial exhibition Picturing Mississippi, 1817–2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise. Other celebrities from Mississippi who will have a homecoming on canvas for this bicentennial are the writer Eudora Welty and the opera singer Leontyne Price, whose portraits will be on loan from the National Portrait Gallery. But beyond a portrait hall of fame, how can the visual arts be a special lens in explaining the identity of a state? As this large survey of the art of Mississippi reveals, there is much to be learned about the intersection of artistic expression—what we call picturing—and the complicated history and regional identity of a place. While the premise of the exhibition is focused on one state, the art featured in it tells a much wider story of local and global artistic exchange.
Bradley Phillips (1929–1991), Leontyne Price, 1963, Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
In its first few decades of statehood, Mississippi relied on the migration of artists from Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and New York. James Tooley was one of the first Mississippiborn artists who received professional training with noted portrait painter Thomas Sully in Philadelphia. Tooley painted a brilliant miniature portrait of his teacher. Natchez, with a booming cotton economy, was the cultural center of antebellum Mississippi. Its elite of planters and professionals, many of whom had roots in the Northeast, shared a taste for Greek revival architecture and fine arts to match their wealth. John James Audubon, best known for his bird illustrations, painted his first major landscape here. View of Natchez is a remarkably open and panoramic composition unlike his closeup views of birds. Other artists arrived by steamboat via New Orleans, including the French academically trained portrait and landscape painter Joseph Bahin, who demonstrated his skills in the atmospheric sunset view of Natchez under the Hill, the commercial part of the town at the bottom of a bluff. Natchez was the second largest slave market in the Deep South, next to New Orleans. One painting in the exhibition, After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond by British Andy Warhol (1930–1987), Triple Elvis, 1963, Aluminum paint and printer’s ink silk screened on canvas, 82 3/8” x 71 1/8”. Collection of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis NASHVILLEARTS.COM
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John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), Mississippi Noah, 1935, Lithograph. Mississippi Museum of Art
George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), The Jolly Flatboatmen, 1877–78, Oil on canvas. Terra Foundation for American Art
Bob Thompson (1937–1966), Homage to Nina Simone, 1965, Oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Art
artist Eyre Crowe, presents a rare view of the domestic slave trade between Virginia and the Deep South. One slavetrading company with connections to Nashville specialized in this trade between the Upper South and the new Cotton Kingdom. During the Civil War, Tennessee and Mississippi were connected by the military battle for control of the West, especially the Mississippi Valley. When Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign slowly advanced from Fort Donelson to Vicksburg, Shiloh and Corinth lay on the way. Artist illustrators and
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photographers followed in the wake. One unknown photographer set up his camera outside of Corinth where he made his lens survey the battlefield littered with corpses, what observers called the “harvest of death.” The art that was produced in and of Mississippi after the Civil War reveals both the promise and pain alluded to in the exhibition title. The German-born artist Theodor Kaufmann created the distinguished statesman portrait of Hiram Revels, the first African American who served as U.S. Senator. Only two decades later, the artist William Aiken Walker made a career for himself painting stereotypical images of Southern blacks
Benny Andrews (1930–2006), Mississippi River Bank (Trail of Tears Series), 2005, Oil on canvas with painted fabric collage. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC
that reinforced white prejudices. Other artists of the late 19th century turned toward the Mississippi landscape, where they explored the beaches, swamps, old oak trees and Spanish moss along the Gulf Coast and other waterways. Landscape and the concern for the environment continues as a theme in the visual arts of the state throughout the 20th —and 21st—centuries, yet this is also a time when artists grapple with the racial tension, inequality, and the search for reconciliation that runs through the history of Mississippi and the South. The civil rights struggle that gripped the entire South seemed to boil over in Mississippi. Here, a black teenager, Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago was brutally murdered; James Meredith sought admission to the University of Mississippi and was escorted onto campus by U.S. marshals; civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were killed; Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his home; and the list goes on. In her song Mississippi Goddam (which contains the line: “Tennessee made me lose my rest”), the jazz singer Nina Simone expressed the anger and frustration felt by many artists. It inspired Bob Thompson, an African-American artist born in Kentucky, to paint his Homage to Nina Simone in a composition reminiscent of European artists such as Poussin and Cézanne. Sam Gilliam, who was born in Tupelo,
James Dallas Parks (1907–1983), Riverman on the Mississippi, 1940, Oil on canvas. Muscatine Art Center
Mississippi, was active in the Washington Color School in the late 1960s when he began to create his iconic soaked canvases. His large color-stained canvas Red April was painted in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. With all its problems and traumatic history, Mississippi has always tended to be a powerful source of identity for artists. Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, reinterprets Native American beadwork traditions in distinctly contemporary sculptural form. His beaded punching bag is a work that honors his grandparents, who were sharecroppers in Mississippi and Oklahoma. Chickasaw artist Joanna Underwood Blackburn, who lives and works in Oklahoma, turns to her ancestral roots in Mississippi. In designing her ceramic vessels, she is inspired by Mississippian pottery that predates the beginnings of statehood, thereby allowing ancestral traditions of the past to be reimagined for contemporary audiences. na Jochen Wierich is Interim Chief Curator at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Picturing Mississippi, 1817–2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise runs from December 9, 2017, through July 8, 2018. An illustrated catalog is published by the museum in partnership with the University of Mississippi Press. For more information, go to www.msmuseumart.org.
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February 2-4, 2018 featuring
CHARLES, 9TH EARL SPENCER GIL SCHAFER R I TA K O N I G LEWIS MILLER RICHARD KEITH LANGHAM S TA C E Y B E W K E S SUSANNA SALK TIMOTHY CORRIGAN
T I C K E T S AT
AntiquesAndGardenShow.com A L L T H E B E S T I N F I N E J E W E L RY 5101 Harding Road Nashville, Tennessee 37205 615.353.1823 s cindiearl.com
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Woodcarvings and Whirligigs
Meet the Shull Family
An Appeal to Simple Wonder at the Elephant Gallery through December 2
WORDS Noah Saterstrom
Don Shull
I
don’t know about you, but if I look at Contemporary Art too much, fatigue sets in.
I asked Don how he’s feeling about having a show. “A little apprehensive,” he told me, “but excited to see what they do.”
Identity politics are offered. The status quo is challenged. Expectations: denied. Hybridity and displacement and transgressions abound. Certainly, these are all important themes for artists to pursue, but sometimes Art needs to be a species of the carnivalesque—an appeal to simple wonder. And thankfully, wonderfully, here we go.
After a decade (1955–65) working at a Caterpillar factory making jigs, dies, molds, and machine tools, Shull taught himself construction. The next forty years were filled with building dozens of buildings, all independently. As he tells it, he would have somebody dig the hole and do the rest himself.
Don Shull is 83 and his first solo exhibition is a retrospective: 25 Years of Woodcarvings & Whirligigs at Elephant Gallery through December 2. It represents a quarter century of carved and painted human figures, many with moving and spinning parts. In the gallery, these art machines are brought to life with the addition of large fans that blow steady streams of air toward attached fans, which in turn power each carving.
In the early 1990s, between large-scale construction projects, he started making whirligigs. The kinetic wind-powered wooden contraptions are a staple of American Folk Art, and along with pinwheels and weathervanes, whirligigs are an appropriately silly form for vernacular art’s often fanciful figuration. When asked, Shull tries to recall how his work developed.
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His understated manner of speaking belies the magic of his imagination. The life in the gallery is bountiful. The fans power dozens of dynamic sculptures which whir, grind, and tap in teeming simultaneity. A herd of runners run, carpenters saw and hammer, horses gallop, a man does manic pushups, a centipede’s legs clickity-clack. A large congregation of carved figures (which double as coin banks) with affable smiles and friendly gestures gather nearby: an ordinary guy in a cap; a devil with a pitchfork and a gentle stride; a woman talking on the phone; a reclining leopard girl. Shull’s vision serenely meanders in and out of the everyday. A man in a turquoise shirt and blue pants rides a unicyclepedaling tiger, rendered as normally as a papa carrying his son. Both have contented smiles. I wondered—does he know what he’s going to do before he starts? “No, I just wing it. Don’t do sketches or anything.” Most of his figures are improvised from his materials as he follows his whim and curiosity, without a whiff of the self-regard that comes with being an “artist.” Seriousness and self-doubt are frequent companions for artists, and self-awareness, like an infestation, once set in is not easily abated. Many artists project innocence, but their attempts are spurious, too restless, or cynical. Shull’s figures appear free of those burdens, in the otherworldly tradition of puppetry. The
figures and features are not crude or refined. They get the point across. All those years of building with function in mind is detectable in his work—all the parts that need to spin, spin; all the necks are big enough for coins to go through. The rest is play. The figures’ postures are brought to life with a calmness that comes with experience. Shull isn’t burdened by his context in the art realm. He doesn’t need or want acclaim, which makes me curious. Why have a show at all? “I guess everybody wants people to see what they’ve made.” Shull’s grandson, Brett Douglas Hunter (a wildly inventive sculptor in his own right), was influenced by his grandfather’s shop. “I was about 10 when he started carving and experimenting with whirligigs. He would let me tinker around with him in his shop and use power tools, even though Grandma told him not to. As a young boy, things are rarely calm and quiet, but his shop was so relaxing, something I try to recreate as an adult in my studio. It has been very inspiring for my own artwork.” (In fact, my own four-year-old, on seeing Shull’s show, proclaimed, “I love art.”) Elephant Gallery is teaming up with Third Man Books to produce a monograph of Shull’s mechanical sculptures. I asked him if, apart from that, he has an idea of what he’ll make next. He replied with a question: “Have you seen my praying mantis on a bike?” I have; it’s an anthropomorphic insect riding an actual bicycle. “Well, I’ve got another bike. I hope there are many more things this old man can make.” na See 25 Years of Woodcarvings & Whirligigs by Don Shull at Elephant Gallery through December 2. For more information, please visit www.elephantgallery.com.
Photograph by Kristine Potter
“At some point, somebody gave my son a coin bank in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s head.” He started making figures that doubled as coin banks, with slots on top of their heads. “I realized I needed to make the necks an inch-plus just to accommodate a quarter. And that dictated some things about the size of the heads and bodies.”
The Painter and the Skater
Coin Slot
Cowboy and Indian
Far Side
Rosie and Don
Amanda Valentine
Andrew Clancey
Ashley Balding
Savannah Yarborough
Barrett Ward
Bethany Wilson
Brooke Seraphine
Caitlin Stolley
Cara Jackson
Cavanagh Baker
Ceri Hoover
Christina Chapman
Connie Cathcart-Richardson
Elise Joseph
Emil Congdon
Eric Bornhop
Jeff Loring
Libby Callaway
Lindsey Stewart Sherrod
Liz Pape
Maria Silver
Natalie Chanin
Patrick Woodyard
Sarah Bellos
Taylor Gilkey
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WORDS Elaine Slayton Akin
A
fter the unfolding of a rigorous nomination and voting process over the past few weeks, the Nashville Fashion Alliance (NFA) will finally see its inaugural NFA Honors, an industry-voted award program and fundraising event planned for November 16 at Marathon Music Works. Creatively directed by Elizabeth Williams and Kelly Diehl of New Hat Projects, an art and design studio specializing in multimedia installations, this year’s NFA Honors will be an arts-immersive experience, pulling references from Nashville’s rich histories of music, food, and art, and will represent the theme “Art and Commerce: Tradition and Transformation.” This theme is quite timely, considering the NFA’s economic impact study released this past January confirming our city’s growing prominence in the larger fashion industry.
And the Nominees Are… Inaugural Nashville Fashion Alliance Honors Marathon Music Works
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November 16
“Regionally, we hold the largest concentration of fashion companies in the nation per capita outside of New York and Los Angeles,” says NFA CEO Van Tucker. “Nashville was once an afterthought, but as our designers scale their businesses to accommodate demand, it’s time for people to pay attention to our economic potential.” Tucker compares NFA Honors to other peer-recognized awards, such as the Grammys for music, the Oscars for film, the ADDYs for marketing, and the long-standing Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Fashion Awards held annually in New York. The purpose of NFA Honors does not end with voting and awards, but extends beyond hopefully to generate sales for nominees, to increase traffic on NFA member websites, and to bring awareness of the luxury of local independent designers. “I’ve worked in fashion media for over two decades and know firsthand the great power of promotion,” says Libby Callaway, NFA Honors nominee and principal of communications consulting firm The Callaway. “Finding ways to inject Nashville’s creative community into more local conversations will only help the industry grow.” Designer Maria Silver of label Black by Maria Silver says of her nomination, “You’re just hustling with your head down, trying to keep up with it all, and it’s nice to look up once in a while and see that people are in fact noticing your work.” Silver also mentions the battle of independent designers with cheap, poorly sewn “fast fashion.” When larger institutions like the NFA speak up, however, it normalizes the idea of waiting for a higher quality product. Final voting on nominees ended on October 2. Award categories include Emerging Talent (publicly voted) and Womenswear Designer of the Year, Menswear Designer of the Year, Accessory Designer of the Year, NFA Triple Bottom Line, and NFA Fashion Insider (NFAmember voted). The NFA Art and Commerce and the NFA Founder’s Awards are boarddirected awards. All proceeds from ticket sales benefit the NFA and its mission. na For more information, visit www.nashvillefashionalliance.com/nfahonors.
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Rory White Gets Lassoed in the Wild West
Photograph by Rory White with Bolo Brothers Creative
WORDS Megan Kelley
Rory White To Fold a Paper Universe: The Tesseract Worlds of Rorshak’s Photography
Detroit Urban Hipster Uprising
Gallery 121 in the Leu Center for Visual Art through December 8
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hey are tesseract worlds, transmitted flat and yet expanding into life and action: Paper Dolls by Rorshak—the world-building artist known by day as Rory White, photographer—pulls together large-scale photographs of the artist’s elaborate and dedicated miniature sets, their landscapes wandered by epic characters disguised as tiny paper dolls. Though the photographs themselves are singular images, the detail of their construction enhances this feeling of expansiveness. The works feel like the covers of comic books, their striding figures and infinite spaces telling immediate tales with the recognizable posture of a longstanding (if
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Barrio Pit Bull Master
hidden) origin story. Part of this is due to White’s extensive construction process, world-building in its most direct form. “I have big ideas, expressed in an economy of scale.” A “quick” idea is still a week-long endeavor. An entire day is devoted to the photographing and styling of the model, capturing as many variants in pose and prose as possible. Another day is spent on processing the images, preparing them to be made into paper dolls. The images often go through transitions and visual transformations through handdone alterations of cutting, taping, wiping, scratching— another day or two—rather than Photoshop. “It’s a process of 3D collage but done in real time,” with meticulous cutouts and fabricated additions whose final forms unfold in a final burst of set preparation, problemsolving, and photographing. White builds all the sets by hand—folded paper, broken stones, model-railroad paint, plant clippings, cinnamon sticks, distressed fabric, all teased across as much as fifteen feet of space—while incorporating age-old techniques of perspective, optical illusion, lighting alterations, and just the right insertions of blur. “It’s all transitions and trickery. I watched old stop-motion animations—the Claymation, the old Christmas specials—
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and I looked at how they did it: sugar crystals to show where the paddle of a boat stirs up the oxygen in the water, potato flakes for snow.” His YouTube videos showing his process explain his choices, the material conversations he improves and challenges. Even the smallest moments—a flake of snow on a background bench, brand-new pants distressed before a shoot, the exact casting of eyes—become objects for magnification. In his quest for just the right moment, White reexamines even the printed work through this intensive revision process. “I loved the [first iteration of] Phoenix of Detroit, but she wasn’t at her full power yet; her flames needed more heat. So I took the print of the image I had, and I set it on fire. I captured this big, powerful burn.” The landscape of the image twists with fire, large flames lapping at the edges in a way that engulfs the flattened world. White grins. “I almost set my camera on fire, but this? This was her.” White’s adaptability in moving between production roles, and his willingness to revisit until the image is exactly right, create a consistent voice. “I cycle through and back again, constantly adjusting and asking.” This process and consistency carry over into his other creative expressions, which revisit themes and the cinematic expression of
Phoenix of Detroit
set-building. Looping GIFs of work reveal new sides to their stories; his music, at times, dips its toes into that well of inspiration and tracks that influence throughout his sound. Within the exhibit, Lonely Island Caldera hangs with a pair of headphones, playing the only record of songs written as a performance piece in the studio. “[These songs] are best listened to in the audience of the image,” a paper-doll portrait of the artist, in a starry landscape, alone, “not shared with friends or danced to,” but simply listening to “night music for lost people.” The works, too, cycle again and again into each other. Many of White’s characters seem to inhabit the same universe, their paths crossing each other’s trails somewhere along an unspecified timeline. “The Durian Man, and the Phoenix, for example,” White connects the two with a gesture, “I think are headed towards each other, are meant for each other.” Even when inhabiting similar spaces—are the philosophers, on exile from the floating sanctuary of The Celestial Farmer Princess, a footnote in her story of growth? Or is she, a Circe for Odysseus, only one of many encounters along a longer journey? They seem at once part of a deeper narrative, and yet, simultaneously, headliners in their own episodes, standalone issues in a tale of crossover universe, their paper corners projecting a world much larger than we know. na
Paper Dolls is on view through December 8 at Gallery 121 in the Leu Center for Visual Art, located at 1919 Belmont Boulevard on the Belmont University campus. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sundays from 1 to 7 p.m. For more information, please visit www.belmont.edu. See more of Rory White’s work at www.rorshak.com.
Winter’s Evening Pickup
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Hoosier Daddy: My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel spills the beans and gets ready for his show at the Basement East November 14 WORDS John Pitcher PHOTOGRAPHY Jack Spencer
“I
was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out,” the novelist and Indiana legend Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a 2004 essay. What gushed out? “It was disgust with civilization.” Carl Broemel, an Indiana native who just happens to be the guitarist for My Morning Jacket, had his Kurt Vonnegut moment during the hot summer of his sophomore year in college. At the time, the Bloomington music student often felt directionless and lost, and he’d tear up when contemplating his less-than-certain future. His sense of disgust was palpable. But like so many famous Indianans before him—Vonnegut, Florence Henderson, Theodore Dreiser, Steve McQueen, and Michael Jackson were all Hoosiers—Broemel found his answer in the arts. Eventually, he would confront his demons through his music. In the title song from his most recent solo album 4th of July, Broemel writes of his college days in a style that calls to mind his hero e.e. cummings: “burning in the indiana sun, driving aimlessly with coke and rum, i’m back at
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disappeared. The fact that it was easier to do other projects in Nashville turned out to be an incidental benefit.
home saving up . . . i been alone so long it starts to hurt.” Many of the songs on Broemel’s terrific album boast this deeply felt, introspective quality. This is due in large part to the words themselves, which often rise to the level of pure poetry. The words are then set to beautifully nuanced musical accompaniment, complete with guitar playing that has all but defined the signature sound of My Morning Jacket since 2005’s breakthrough album Z. Nashville Arts Magazine caught up with Broemel early one recent Tuesday morning. One usually expects rock stars to be nocturnal creatures, but Broemel had already been up for hours, having gotten his young son off to elementary school in Nashville. Alert and upbeat, he was eager to discuss his life and career. NAM: You’re best known for your work with My Morning Jacket. How did you hook up with [lead vocalist] Jim James and those guys? CB: I met those guys in 2004, when I was living in Los Angeles and doing what I could to earn some money. I have to confess I’m an atheist, but I truly believe that the universe intervened between me and the band. I was driving in my car and heard the tail end of a song on KCRW, the big radio station there. I had never heard it before, and I thought to myself that I’d do anything to play music like that. A short while later I got a call to audition for My Morning Jacket, and I went out and got all their albums and started listening. I was floored when I realized the song I had heard was “I Will Sing You Songs” from It Still Moves. I decided right then and there I was going to get that job. NAM: So many rock musicians have moved to Nashville over the years. What brought you to Music City? CB: It coincided with me joining My Morning Jacket in 2004. After touring I got back to L.A., and my wife and I started asking, why are we here? We were both from the Midwest and thought it would be great if we could afford to buy a house and start a family. Hey, maybe we could even get a dog and truck. So we made the move, living at first in East Nashville and then Green Hills. NAM: Are there things you can do in Nashville as a musician that you couldn’t do in L.A.? CB: L.A. was an inconvenient town to travel around, and it was harder to launch side projects there, because everything was so expensive. But I can’t say I moved to Nashville because I wanted to do more side work. Once I joined Jacket, the fire to be in L.A. just
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NAM: The songs on 4th of July are extremely sophisticated, both musically and lyrically. What drives you to create these songs? CB:
I’ve always written songs, even when I was in middle school and high school. It’s just always been part of what I do as a musician. Sometimes the songs come to me in the middle of the night, or they come to me as fragments or phrases. Sometimes they flow out of an improvisation, out of a chord progression that really appeals to me. I just like to experiment and see what happens.
NAM: A lot of songwriters are driven to create. You make it sound casual, even playful. CB: It’s playful until it becomes serious. I will say, though, that I never go into a studio with the idea that I’m going to write songs that are so phenomenal they’ll change the world. If I put that much pressure on myself I’d never write anything. I don’t want to see a picture of the Beatles in the studio, because I’m not trying to top anyone. I’m not competing with the past. I’m writing songs for today. na For more information, visit www.carlbroemel.com.
ART MADE TO MOVE YOU. Chicago-based artist Nick Cave creates work in a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, and performance. His creations, bursting with color and texture, are optical delights that can be enjoyed by audiences of all ages and backgrounds. A deeper look reveals that they speak to issues surrounding identity and social justice.
NOVEMBER 10 – JUNE 24
Downtown Nashville 919 Broadway Nashville, TN 37203 FristCenter.org/NickCave #NickCaveFeat
Kids 18 and under are always free.
Nick Cave: Feat. is supported in part by: Silver Sponsor
The Frist Center is supported in part by:
Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2016. Mixed media, including vintage toys, wire, metal, and mannequin, 84 x 45 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Š Nick Cave. Photo: James Prinz Photography
by Demetria Kalodimos
Photography by John Partipilo
Greek Icons Come to Nashville
The Greek proverb says, “One minute of patience, ten years of peace.” Imagine what 100 years of patience brings. Nashville’s Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church is, at last, being adorned with the exquisite iconography its founding families saved, sacrificed, and prayed for. Working high inside a tangle of scaffolding, artist Themis Petrou and his small crew from Athens are transforming an already stunning sanctuary into something other-worldly. And that is precisely the intention of Orthodox iconography. Church leaders explain, “The icon is not merely decorative; it signifies the presence of the individual depicted . . . icons are like a window linking heaven and earth.” To coincide with a long-planned Centennial celebration, the families of Holy Trinity solicited sample work from several leading iconographers. Then they narrowed the field. The unanimous choice was Themis. Father Gregory Honholt says his work “spoke” to the church in its detail, authenticity, and spirit. Over the course of several weeks, the icons, on large sheets of canvas, were applied, smoothed, blended, and integrated on the walls, then finished with hand painting and lettering. Much of the work was done after dark, high in the air. (Think Michelangelo and The Agony and the Ecstasy.) It is 21st-century art, yet it exudes the color and craft of timeless antiquity. Holy Trinity is not the first American church project for Themis Petrou, and his work is widely acclaimed throughout Greece. For the congregation, it has been divinely directed. For several decades the building itself wasn’t ready. Longtime parishioner and former TV news anchor Chris [Clark] Botsaris says
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troublesome leaks from the complicated Byzantine tiled roofline caused water “intrusion.” Had they been installed too soon, priceless images might have been badly damaged. As we go to press, the work is not yet complete. But the dream certainly is. Holy Trinity, the Byzantine treasure nicknamed the “miracle on Franklin Road,” reflects the glory of God like never before. See these Greek icons at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, 4905 Franklin Pike in Nashville. For more visit www.holytrinitynashville.org.
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Fridrich & Clark Realty, LLC 615-263-4800 | 615-944-3909 twrobeson@gmail.com
shaking the Twilight
New Work by Corrine Colarusso
Shaking the Twilight, Reeds, Rain and Vapors, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 84” x 66”
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Night Casting, 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 24”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. —William Blake in “Auguries of Innocence” (1803)
Galerie Tangerine through January 4, 2018
WORDS Elaine Slayton Akin
A
tlanta-based landscape painter Corrine Colarusso describes her art as the opposite of “walking and talking” art, meaning art that is created for a hyper-publicized social event, where you “walk and talk” with your friends. This otherwise fleeting comment would be negligible were it not for the truth that Colarusso’s most concentrated preoccupation as an artist may very well be the romantic notion of personal experience of each singular viewer. Every technical, thematic, and aesthetic selection involved in Colarusso’s practice appears to build toward this noble concept, visually commanding the bygone gallery ritual of a slower pace. Shaking the Twilight, Colarusso’s exhibition of new work at Galerie Tangerine running through January 4, 2018, is a mixture of her standard 66 x 84-inch acrylics on canvas with smaller paintings and drawings. Colarusso chose the title from a painting of the same name included in the show
because the work embodies the quintessential spirit of the artist’s larger message of nature as metaphor. It is the most recent large-scale painting, reflecting the general size and vertical shape of the human body with its arms outstretched. This measurement is just one tool Colarusso uses to hold a viewer in place in front of her work. Shaking the Twilight (2017), like much of the artist’s work, has a drippy quality, the weight of the humidity in the air acquiring physical presence in our mind’s eye much like the waxy yet lifelike fruit and dishware of the Northern European still-life tradition. A spiderweb-like canopy of green shelters a vibrant ecosystem of exotic swamp things from the surrounding gray-blue sky. Intermittent leaves and petals emit specks of red, orange, pink, and purple—evidence of a sinking sun. It is difficult to discern where plant life ends and its reflection begins in the murky water below.
This work alone confirms much about Colarusso’s background and process. Painting since the age of 16, Colarusso grew up in Boston surrounded by all the cultural and art history you imagine. In the 1980s, Colarusso first visited the Okefenokee Swamp, a protected wetland on the Florida-Georgia state line. “Botanic acid in water is very brown but creates an incredible reflecting pool; as such, what’s above is also below,” recalls the artist. The weepy plant forms of the swamp initially drew Colarusso to the Southern landscape and ultimately sparked the beginning of her richly hued palette and botanic subject matter as we see them today. Over time, the touchstones informing the imagery of Colarusso’s paintings have expanded. Yes, the Spanish moss and oak trees of Georgia play a part, but so do current events, found objects, color samples, and so on. A combination of in-studio and en plein air, Colarusso’s workplace is a veritable
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Batman Flower, with Fog, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 44” x 36”
Blue Diamond, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 18”
“When it’s out in the world, meaning in art changes for each and every person. We’re all preoccupied by personal events, so we subconsciously associate things,” she continues. “Not to say artists are incapable of including guideposts to help you gain access to our thoughts. Unlike the more direct spoken word, art offers an avenue by which you get from point A to your own point B, whatever that may be.” This relevance to the capricious nature of human life is a “metaphoric gateway,” per Colarusso, to viewer enlightenment. “Behind every common reed or plant or rock there’s a hinterland. In that way, nature reflects who we are as humans. You lift up one tiny corner of a person, and there’s so much going on within each of us.” Colarusso shifted her focus to the “daily spectacular” of twilight in the fall of 2015, the twilight of the
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Corrine Colarusso in her studio
Photograph by Victor Barchers
collage of stimulants within the artist’s purview. The stylized flowers in Rain and Twilight (2017), for example, are Art Deco-esque in their precision, as if ink stamped. The crest of brownish-yellow silhouettes across the top of the canvas is streaked with white “rain,” appearing as gold foil from a distance. The forms are not so abstracted that they mask time and space, but give us a peek through the looking glass, so to speak, where inches-tall weeds become towering trees.
Rain and Twilight, 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 33” x 44”
calendar year. At the end of each workday, when she had run out of energy to paint, she would draw. As the drawings accumulated, she casually referred to them as “the twilights,” a few of which are included in the exhibition along with some new, larger ones. While the drawings are complete works in and of themselves, they also function as facilitators of paintings. Colarusso completed Stack of Twilight in 2016 leading up to the “devastating event of the presidential election,” in her words. “Twilight took on a whole new context for me, a darker presence somehow. ‘Stack of twilight’ equals a stack of things that do not set right.” Although darkness will soon fall in Stack of Twilight, there is a sense that the activity is not quite ready to give up the day. At first glance, nothing is happening, but at the same
time, everything is happening. This atmosphere of excitement is the result of Colarusso’s thin-layer strategy, using acrylic paints as if watercolors. “I need to keep the surface fresh and alive until I’m sure. Every layer changes the composition because it is translucent,” she says. “I add more body and weight in certain areas towards the end. Balance rewards the eye.” Despite the sociopolitical undertones of this and potentially other works, the good news is that darkness may blind us for a short time, but it is a conduit to light in the morning. Colarusso still returns home to Boston every summer, where she looks forward to seeing a favorite work of art—Day and Night (2008) by Antonio López García. Two giant bronze baby-head sculptures, flanked by overhanging weeping beech trees, embody the entire arc of life with
the subtle shift of one’s eyes open (Day) and the other’s closed (Night). “Life and death, beginning and end, night and day is a core theme throughout the history of visual culture,” says Colarusso. The familiar way we engage with this theme, because it is part of our everyday lives, reminds her of her own work and how the ordinary organisms she paints represent our increasingly desensitized engagement with nature. Colarusso’s macro depictions of the micro world pose a valuable lesson for us. “All comers, come,” says the artist. “Art and nature are available to you. If you give it time and let them unfold, there is information to be gained.” na Shaking the Twilight, Colarusso’s exhibition of new work, is on view at Galerie Tangerine through January 4, 2018. For more information, please visit www.galerietangerine.com. See more of Colarusso’s art at www.corrinecolarusso.org.
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Wayne Brezinka Captures the Joy of Walter Knestrick
Wayne Brezinka with Walter Knestrick
Walter Knestrick is one of Nashville’s longest-tenured patrons of the arts. He has contributed time and/or donations to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; Watkins College of Art; the Nashville Symphony, and more. As a childhood friend of Red Grooms, he acquired an incredibly large collection of his work and recently gifted it to the Tennessee State Museum. Knestrick’s lifetime commitment to the arts is being celebrated in a new portrait by local painter Wayne Brezinka, commissioned by Knestrick’s children for his 80th birthday. “Walter loves art and has been an avid supporter of the local Nashville art scene and abroad over the last few decades,” explains Brezinka. “I’ve known three of his children personally for many years, and they thought one of my mixed-media portraits would make a unique gift.” Brezinka’s portraiture displays figures rendered with newspaper, cloth, and other found material, layered in a way to bring it off the canvas. “I consider my projects large puzzles,” Brezinka says. “Where will each piece be placed and secretly hidden yet seen upon further examination? Lots of cutting, sculpting, shaping, sanding, painting, and glue are used for each project.” It’s a process that was particularly well suited to render Knestrick, who attended Hillsboro High School, went on to found the incredibly successful Knestrick Contractors and Knestrick Properties, and has continued to be an advocate for local arts throughout his life. “Walter’s story inspired me,” says Brezinka. “Every one of us has a story, and my interest lies in drawing that out through the art of mixed-media portraiture. Asking questions, learning the history of the particular subject I am illustrating, and taking into consideration those interesting objects that might be provided for possible inclusion . . . Walter is full of cheer, delight, and animation. My goal was to capture that in his smile, his eyes, and overall features.” Brezinka’s portrait of Walter Knestrick will be included in a onenight show on Saturday, November 11, at the home of country music legend Hank Snow. For more information and to RSVP, visit www.waynebrezinka.com/exhibitions.
CORRINE COLARUSSO Stack of Twilight | 84 x 66 inches | 2016
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Diva’s Delight Superstar soprano Renée Fleming performs at OZ Arts Nashville on December 1 WORDS John Pitcher
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few months ago, the opera world experienced a seismic event. Renée Fleming, the star soprano, sang her signature role of the Marschallin in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera for the last time. For more than a quarter century, Fleming reigned supreme at the Met. Naturally, her swan song marked the end of an era for that august stage.
One of those recitals takes place on December 1 at OZ Arts Nashville. Fleming will appear in a special event titled the Chairman’s Choice, which honors OZ Arts Chairman and Founder Cano Ozgener. Fleming will present an evening-length concert featuring German, French, and Italian classics as well as some contemporary American music. Recently, Fleming took some time out of her busy international schedule to answer a few questions for Nashville Arts Magazine.
© Decca/Andrew Eccles
Yet it also opened a new chapter in the already storied career of the star often referred to as “The People’s Soprano.” With many of her big prima donna roles behind her, Fleming has now become a power behind the scenes, working as a creative consultant at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Moreover, she’s appearing in musicals—she’ll sing the part of Nettie Fowler in a Broadway production of Carousel next season—and she’s singing more in recital.
You just retired one of your signature roles at the Metropolitan Opera, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. Do you still plan to perform in staged operas? Definitely. I have two likely projects on the table now—one, a lesser-known work by a major composer, and the other is a new composition. What was your favorite Metropolitan Opera role? I really don’t think in terms of favorites, but two characters I have related to most strongly are Tatiana in Eugene Onegin and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. Aside from the fact that neither of them dies at the end, they are both well-drawn, complex women who take charge of their own paths. I relate to Tatiana’s shyness at the beginning of Onegin and admire her growth into a woman of real strength. And the Marschallin is a deeply intelligent, complicated woman, who chooses how she wants to live. You are a creative consultant for Lyric Opera of Chicago. What do you have planned for the Windy City? Chicago Voices, an initiative that I helped launch with Lyric Opera to celebrate Chicago’s entire vocal scene, across all genres, is continuing as an ongoing program. It has a fantastic engagement project called Community Created Performances that helps local groups from all walks of life create and present music theatre pieces telling their own stories. They just completed their second annual presentation. We may be celebrating the anniversary of my debut at Lyric, and my work with the Ryan Opera Center, Lyric’s fantastic Young Artist program, is ongoing. I’m actually in Chicago at the moment, to speak at Chicago Ideas Week about a major project I’ve been working on recently, Music and the Mind. This has grown out of an initiative I spearheaded at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, with the National Institutes of Health. My goal is to look at and amplify the amazing work being done at the intersection of music, health, and neuroscience. Researchers are using music to understand and map pathways in the brain, and music
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I enjoy the intimacy and tradition of the song recital, and I’ll be singing some well-loved German, French, and Italian songs. In line with the adventurous spirit behind OZ Arts, I’ll be performing new songs by Caroline Shaw...
Next season, you’ll be appearing in a Broadway production of Carousel. Are you thinking about transitioning from opera to musicals? I could think of many, many musicals I’d love to hear you in. I don’t see this as a transition, really, because the core of my career, which is really concerts and recitals, continues unabated. And I’m also focused on quite a lot of new music, which has always been a passion. But with regard to musical theatre, I think the boundaries between genres are becoming more flexible, and I have always followed wherever my musical instincts and tastes have led me. Performing in a Broadway musical, especially an iconic classic like Carousel, has always been a dream. And there certainly could be others. On your latest album, you perform Barber’s deeply moving Knoxville: Summer of 1915 along with music by Swedish and Icelandic composers and songwriters. Is there an overarching theme connecting these works? In putting these works together for the album, the through line that spoke to me was summed up in a phrase from one of the songs by Björk:
emotional landscapes. All of these pieces conjure emotional states—nostalgia, unease, desire, joy—with amazing clarity. They also have in common that a singer was a generative force in their creation. The great American soprano Eleanor Steber commissioned Knoxville, and I worked with Anders Hillborg in the selection of texts for The Strand Settings. And of course, Björk, as a singer-songwriter, creates her own music. You perform a couple of songs by the wonderful Icelandic pop star Björk. What attracted you to her music? Björk’s originality is amazing. I admire the way she just blazes her own path, and I also love the creative coloring of her voice and her emotional honesty. Because she is one of the few singers in popular music who sing in a true soprano register, I could imagine her music in my voice, with the acoustic textures of a symphony orchestra. What are you planning to perform for us at OZ Arts Nashville? I devote a lot of time and thought to programming, and I usually perform a wide range of music, not only to reflect my own tastes, but also to be sure that everyone hears something they particularly like. I enjoy the intimacy and tradition of the song recital, and I’ll be singing some well-loved German, French, and Italian songs. In line with the adventurous spirit behind OZ Arts, I’ll be performing new songs by Caroline Shaw that I’m premiering at Carnegie Hall a few days from now. Caroline is the youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, and she’s an incredible, exciting talent, really on the cutting edge, collaborating with artists from Roomful of Teeth to Kanye West. Rounding out the program, there will be some musical theatre as well, and of course there may be some opera, too. na
Photograph by Timothy White
therapy is helping people all over the world with health issues from autism and childhood development to pain management, PTSD, stroke, brain injuries, and Alzheimer’s. I will be doing a presentation on this at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, because the city is such a leader in healthcare technology and research.
Renée Fleming will perform at OZ Arts Nashville on December 1 at 8:00 p.m. For information and tickets, visit www.ozartsnashville.org.
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WORDS Audrey Molloy
Angie Renfro: Emotive Equivalencies
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ngie Renfro debuts in Nashville with (de) construction (2017), an expressive series of floral paintings which employ surface condition as an equivalency for personal narrative. The newly Nashville-based artist is best known for her painterly depictions of desolate landscapes from her previous body of work industry (2009–2016)—a practice thematically centered on what the artist terms a “longing for connection.” (de) construction is a continuation of Renfro’s investigations of self through the canvas originally manifest in those early works. In industry, Renfro activates her layering of paint by emphasizing the painting’s various regressive and intermediary states of process. Previous marks, hues, and figurative shapes float softly behind the most recently applied veneers of oil. In the lines we draw (2013), acrid magenta and heavy umber brushstrokes form the hulking shape of a lone industrial mass. The figure is emergent from the bottom of the canvas and ensconced in an irreverently applied swath of dusty blue, an all-over application whose near-opaque surface blushes prior hues. To put things into perspective (2014) features a receding line of power lines made visually splintered by dripping lines of paint. Fragility (2017) from (de)construction proceeds similarly; muted orange, verdant blue, and deep yellow brushstrokes coalesce at the
the differences remain, 2014, Oil on panel, 32” x 48”
center of the canvas to form the loosest expression of flora. Horizonless and floating untethered to any environment, the figure recalls the disparate nature and uncertain scale of those prior industrial forms. “When I’m painting it feels like sculpting to me. I think what I really love in painting—what I’ve figured out over the years—is painting the negative space. That’s where I get really lost,” said Renfro. “That’s one thing I love about the organic nature of these, because the negative space is so fun and so easy to get lost in. It totally feels like sculpting to me when I’m kind of taking away from the positive space and adding negative space. I like that push and pull.” The manner in which Renfro approaches her figurative subjects, this reductive and additive process of painting, formally asserts depth up from the surface of the canvas. Renfro thoroughly works the illusion of verifiable depth in (de)construction and industry by negotiating the romantic integrity of the picture plane. As in everything is as it was, industry (2011), painterly drips and sweeping brushstrokes are intermittently revealed beyond the surface’s topmost pale layers—a conscious markmaking that signals the artist’s hand at work.
everything is as it was, 2011, Oil on panel, 18” x 48”
to put things into perspective, 2014, Oil on panel, 23” x 32”
“I kind of destroy and rebuild as I’m painting, which is super cathartic. Layers upon layers of paintings that I add to, take away from, and destroy what was there, so they are sort of a meditation on accepting uncertainty,” said Renfro. “As I’m painting I work through life lessons—knowing that I don’t have control, things happen outside of my control, but I can control how I respond to it. In this case, I’m responding by trying to create something beautiful.” This frank assertion of the literal action of painting recalls midcentury gestural abstraction, a process wherein expressive brushwork and instinctive creative actions were employed by artists to convey unfettered emotional states. Art critic and somewhere in midland, 2010, Oil on panel, 36” x 24”
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take everything, 2017, Oil on panel, 18” x 18”
fragility, 2017, Oil on panel, 18” x 18”
theorist Rosalind Krauss in “The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths” (1985) writes that these abstract expressionist concepts “call for an interpretative model based on the analogy between the work and its maker: the work’s surface thought of as existing in relation to its “depth” much the way that the exterior of the human subject is understood to relate to his internal, or true, self.”
work is grounded in the biographical matrix of its author, its condition of surface and depth most actively related to our consideration of the human mind. na See more of Angie Renfro’s work at www.angierenfro.com.
This manner of seeing and interpreting was fundamental to early abstraction and later conceptual practices as it engaged the psychology of the artist as both quantitative substance and basis for theory. Seen most readily in the expressive, multi-layered works in (de)construction, Renfro likewise posits the canvas as an emotive equivalency for her personal experience, enacting the process of painting to both consider and aestheticize personal narrative.
Understood exclusively through the perceived interior mind of the artist, aesthetic choices, medium specificity, and function are correlated in (de)construction and industry to that of the artist’s psychology, albeit their subjective variation. Renfro personifies the paint and canvas through a layering process whose likeness is most readily akin to that of the artist’s internal self. The formal significance of Renfro’s
Angie Renfro
Photograph by Stacey Irvin
“This work is also a meditation in self-doubt, too, because as I’m painting and adding a layer, I often think I’ve just ruined it—that part I like—and I have to trust that it’s going to work out. There’s no one way something needs to go, and even if I’ve messed up part of it, a new part will emerge that I like,” said Renfro. “With this [new] series, I don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s finished. For me, that’s also an analogy or a life lesson. I’m never going to get to a place where I feel like I’ve figured it out, but the important thing is to keep asking questions.”
“When will it end?� November 10 at 8 p.m. November 12 at 2 p.m. Ingram Hall A Vanderbilt Opera Theatre production In cooperation with the Vanderbilt University Orchestra Gayle Shay, director Jennifer McGuire, conductor For the complete concert calendar, please visit blair.vanderbilt.edu
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Olga Alexeeva, Andante Con Motto, Acrylic, 36” x 48”
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The Unblinking Persistence of Susan DeMay The Clay Lady’s Co-Op
Skirted Vase
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November 2–30
Deco Vase
n a Friday afternoon, Susan DeMay is the last person left in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, and the entire facility seems to belong to her. As she moves, so does the studio, exposing work hidden within kilns and radiating color from the walls. Her affection for this place is braided with years of labor: She began teaching at Vanderbilt while maintaining a private studio in the eighties. On November 2, she’ll celebrate her decades of craft with a show at The Clay Lady’s Co-Op, which will feature entirely new work. “Yeah,” she says, “I don’t want to do a retrospective.” Considering her career, this should come as no surprise. DeMay has rambled across various artistic influences, methods of construction, and subject matter for years. One of the only constants in her practice has been her
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Swirling Leaves
involvement in community, which she describes as being the whole of Middle Tennessee. Readily, she ticks off a list of around eight regional cities and towns that she’s shown work in. Aside from Nashville, she’s particularly active in Smithville, where she maintains her private studio. There, she’s contributing to local heritage: Brides have set up registries to receive her dinnerware, and one family boasts four generations of DeMay collectors. Her work wasn’t always so well-received, though. When she was a student at the Appalachian Center for Craft, “It was really a no-no to do color on your pieces. It was really a no-no to do motifs on your pieces. I was ridiculed at the craft center by the guys, because I didn’t do brown pots with calligraphic imagery. I didn’t do wood firing.” At one point, her fellow
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It’s not a leap to say that DeMay’s work is symbolic of the strength of its maker. While well-rooted in whimsy, it finds its teeth in stalwart foundation and technique.
Steam Punk Vessel
Steam Punk Vase
students built a hideous effigy of her in the studio. When she came upon it, she had to cart the clay away herself. Despite this harassment, DeMay refused to compromise her aesthetic ideology. “It was a lot about survival,” she explains. “There was always a lot of pressure to keep some kind of support coming in.” Her persistence was rewarded; not only did she go on to carve a niche for herself in the territory between Memphis and primativist movements, she also became the main breadwinner for her family. This success was built on a body of work that has included everything from functional production lines to unique sculptural works, and though there are specific forms and motifs that she is recognized for, ultimately DeMay worships at
the church of idiosyncrasy. She describes her approach kaleidoscopically: “My work is an expression of things that I encounter and embrace.” DeMay alchemizes visual elements as disparate as battlements and quilts, teeth and pyramids, boats and trees, and recasts them into small, obscurely familiar abstractions. She embeds bright pops of primary color into wider swaths of earth tones and layers these on forms that seem at once pillowy and stony, feminine and masculine. “I don’t have a primary source,” she reveals about her influence, “Except I can say that my process influences how I work and what kinds of imagery I might look for in the outer world.” In the new series, this synthesis periodically results in the
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Photograph by Gina Binkley
development of closed vessels. Their hollows, unable to be touched or glimpsed, quietly serve as a metaphor for DeMay’s narrative style. She insists that she’s uninterested in making work about herself, preferring formalist expression to sadomasochistic soul searching—but can formal pursuits ever manifest aesthetic purity? Or do their investigators always impart traces that alter the light around them? It’s not a leap to say that DeMay’s work is symbolic of the strength of its maker. While well-rooted in whimsy, it finds its teeth in stalwart foundation and technique. Even her most sculptural works are influenced by functional methods of construction and built with stoneware, because of the medium’s durability. Such utilitarian materiality echoes the persistence and grit with which DeMay has conducted her career and goes on to reflect the rich dichotomy inherent in her practice: “I latch onto anything I want to and then develop it, but I also cannot escape myself.” DeMay’s distance from personal narrative allows her a kind of freedom that can’t be enjoyed by the artists of that tradition, in that she is not self-consciously attempting to frame her own experience, but allowing it to passively come to the surface. She finds purity not in a formalism unattached to narrative, but in a narrative unattached to calculation. Ultimately, DeMay’s show at The Clay Lady’s Co-Op demonstrates more than the tenacity it takes to honor over thirty years of original work—it also reveals the persistence of self within formal exploration. na
Susan DeMay in her studio
Pyramid
Storm Surge
DeMay’s show at The Clay Lady’s Co-Op opens with a reception on November 2 from 5 until 7 p.m. and remains on view until November 30. For more information, visit www.theclaylady.com. See more of Susan DeMay’s work at www.susandemay.com.
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Lush Interiors Channel to Channel
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Photograph by Lindsey Butler
WORDS Amanda Dobra Hope
St. Francis Elevator Ride November 4–December 21
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t this point in our history, we would do well to step back and focus a bit more on the fragility of life. In this case, what was life like before our gadgets and technology, and how have they affected us as a species? For the months of November and December at Channel to Channel Gallery in Nashville, you can reflect on this fragility through the perspective of Memphis artist St. Francis Elevator Ride. The exhibit, Lush Interiors, uses collage prints on birch plywood, mounted into three-dimensional layers featuring
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St. Francis Elevator Ride
common household appliances mixed with human anatomy and vegetation. “If there is any one message in this body of work, it’s a commentary on the fragility of life,” SFER says. “I find the floral and vegetation imagery to be the best way to show this fragility through the delicate plants. As we become consumed by our gadgetry, they become parts of our anatomy. This exhibit explores how the machines become enmeshed in our anatomy and vegetation,” he continues. When asked how this exhibit reflects him as a person, St. Francis Elevator Ride muses, “These pieces feel very natural to my personality—horrific but also beautiful. I strive to find beauty in unexpected places.” Regarding his choice of medium for this exhibit, he explains that he was trying to push himself and do something more innovative than what he was doing at the time. “This is a big departure from my previous work. Everything I did before was flat 2-D printing and screen printing. It’s like a pop-up book in a gallery setting, still 2-D, but the pieces have a lot of life and depth to them,” SFER explains.
Tune Your Vitals, 2016, Plywood print and 3D assemblage, 28” x 33” x 7”
I couldn’t write this article without explaining what the artist’s name means, because of course that was my first question. “There isn’t really a great story behind it,” he says. “I was looking for another name to use for my art, something that could take the shape and form of what I was creating.” St. Francis Elevator Ride a.k.a. Josh Breedan researched St. Francis of Assisi and discovered he was a wild child who eventually became dedicated to something greater than himself. “The name sounded like the art I was making, a psychedelic group of words. It could take the form of a lot of things,” he concludes. For SFER, a 2007 graduate of the University of Tennessee at Martin, his last exhibit was a homecoming of sorts. One of his art professors asked him to install an exhibit and do an artist talk, showcasing his ten years of work since leaving college. Referring to SFER’s success working for clients like MTV and The New York Times, a current student asked him how he did it. From what I can garner from everything he tells me he has done, including an artist showcase blog he and a buddy started, the answer was to get yourself out there, and then one thing leads to another, and another, and another. That’s sound advice in our technological world, even as we remain aware of life’s fragility. na Lush Interiors is showing at Channel to Channel November 4 through December 21. For more information, please visit www.channeltochannel.com. See more of St. Francis Elevator Ride’s work at www.stfranciselevatorride.com.
Evelyn’s Permitted Plains, 2015, Plywood print and 3D assemblage, 22” x 30” x 7”
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ARTSMART
A monthly guide to art education
TENNESSEE ROUNDUP Building Creativity Thanks to Arts Educators During this season of gratitude, I’d like to give thanks to all of those who make arts learning possible across Tennessee. As a grants manager, I am fortunate to have a glimpse into schools and community settings where grants-funded arts education projects occur in all 95 counties of the state. Each arts learning activity looks different depending on the needs of participants, the ingenuity of the educator, and the skills of collaborating artists. I am often struck by the countless ways teachers—licensed arts specialists, general classroom teachers, teaching artists, and community arts education providers—create learning environments that not only build skills and knowledge in the arts but also inspire students to apply creative thinking beyond the classroom. This is possible because the educators themselves are creative thinkers who are comfortable with an unstructured process and open to exploring new possibilities. For those of you interested in exploring new ways to present content and developing creativity in your students, you may consider applying for one or more of the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Arts Education Annual Grants below. Most of these grants pay for professional artist fees, in-state travel or lodging for artists, space rental, marketing, and consumable arts supplies related to the project. Arts360 grants support whole-school arts integration programs to improve instruction and increase student outcomes through arts integration, making arts-based learning a critical component of every child’s educational experience.
Photograph courtesy of State Photography
Teaching artist Noelia Garcia Carmona from New Ballet Ensemble, working with Mrs. Cross’s kindergarten class, Bartlett City Schools
Photograph by Amanda Tutor
Arts Education Community Learning grants provide funds for projects that use the arts in creative and innovative ways in non-traditional PK–12 settings or for adult learners. Arts Education Teacher Training grants fund professional development with hands-on, immersion-style curriculum planning sessions for educators, allowing them to build their own creative thinking skills. Funds for At-Risk Youth grants support arts-based after-school or summer camp programs geared toward children in grades PK–12 who are considered at-risk. Applications are due January 22, 2018, for activities occurring July 2018–June 2019. Thanks to the many educators who offer arts education as described above. Consider applying for a grant, and your students will thank you, too! For more information about Arts Education grants, please visit www.tnartseducation.org.
by Ann Talbott Brown Director of Arts Education Tennessee Arts Commission
At first glance, the sheer vibrancy of color, the playful blend of materials, and resulting aural banquet of Cave’s trademark Sound Suits belie the layers of meaning. A concept originating in his own emotional and artistic response in the wake of the Rodney King beating in L.A. over 25 years ago, these evolving human-shaped sculptures reinforce in the mind of the artist and viewer the often overwhelming “feat” of hard work in building a life and personal success while overcoming prejudice and pursuing social justice. “On one level [the exhibit] can be enjoyed by people of any age, any educational background, just seeing all of the visual optics, the variety of materials and craftsmanship,” says Katie Delmez, curator of the exhibition. But in creating this immersion experience, Delmez points out, there are “multiple entries for the works.” These can range from reflection of the dreams and aspirations fostered in children, to a deeper dive with playful armor as protection against profiling and labels, or as a safe means for crawling into another skin, exploring other perspectives, and experiencing other realities. As an extension of this rare, multi-sensory art experience, the Frist offers Extrasensory (through March 25, 2018), a community exhibit inspired by Nick Cave and focusing on
the five senses, combining through interactive displays and workshops the efforts of organizations, teaching artists, and over 900 participants. A public performance to close out the Frist Center’s Free Family Festival Day (November 12) features the creative contribution of artists from Borderless Arts Tennessee (formerly VSA TN), the state organization on arts and disabilities. Music for the performance will be provided by award winners from the Young Soloist Program, including Tyler Samuel, Drew Basham, Allie Hemmings, and Gregory Price Stallings under the artistic direction of Kristen Freeman of the Nashville Symphony. The program features the Movement Connection Dancers (directed by Danielle Clement and Nashville Ballet choreographer Shabaz Ujima) performing in Nick Cave-inspired costumes created by Austin King, Hope McKee, and Tori Summers of Teapot Diplomats (Nashville Arts Magazine, July 2017). Special thanks to the Tennessee Arts Commission for grants funding this performance. “The aspects I have loved about this project are how many hands have already touched these costumes in the creation process and also the limitless creating that Nick Cave’s work can inspire,” says Dee Kimbrell, education play specialist for Borderless Arts Tennessee. “The collaborative efforts of so many and watching the artists enjoy working with the unique decorations have made this project a blast to facilitate.” For more information visit www.fristcenter.org.
by DeeGee Lester Director of Education The Parthenon
Photograph by Drew Cox
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts offers art-goers a total sensory experience (November 10, 2017 – June 24, 2018) through the unique perspective and creative talents of Chicagobased artist Nick Cave.
Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2015, Mixed media, including synthetic hair, ceramic birds, strung beads, wire, metal, and mannequin, 108” x 43” x 40”
Nick Cave: Feat
Nick Cave, Rescue, 2014, Mixed media, including ceramic birds, metal flowers, ceramic basset hound, and vintage settee, 70” x 50” x 40”
Photograph by Danielle Clement
Movement Connection Dancers Anna Kirby and Caty Garrett
ARTSMART
ARTSMART
ON THE HORIZON
Father Ryan: When the Arts Take Hold
Father Ryan senior Hannah Vogt has a ready answer for the
Hannah recalls being interested in art “pretty much my whole life.” Over time and through the rigorous program at Father Ryan, she has gravitated toward painting and pastels and has moved toward development of her own style. “I used to see art as a competition measuring myself against others, but everyone has a different style and the real competition is the personal challenge—how to work within mediums, how well I’ve done, and how to keep improving.” Her personal favorite piece is Folds, an assignment for the development of a more controlled work of art by picking a photo and zooming in for a specific area of focus in the development of a piece of art. She enjoyed the challenge of expressing the interesting interplay of light and shadow in the simple folds of a cloth draped over a statue. Because she is a senior with classes in AP and Portfolio, each effort becomes a significant contribution as she prepares her portfolio for application to college boards. But she is keeping her options open as she explores opportunities at UTC, Sewanee, and Belmont.
Hannah Vogt
Photograph by John Partipilo
Fine Arts instructor John Durand explains, “When a student leaves my class, even if they never take another art class, I want them to understand and appreciate the skills and thought process involved in creating a piece of art.”
Photograph by John Partipilo
skeptics. “I say, art is incorporated into everything. In every area,” she is quick to point out, “people have to come up with the design.” She already recognizes that it’s the creative expression of ideas, the “story” that sets the brand, the product innovation that sets a company apart, and all of these are grounded in the arts. Everett Delaney
Senior Everett Delaney echoes the lifelong love of art—“for as long as I can remember. It started as more of a hobby, drawing comics. By 6th grade, I really got into it and just kept going, picking art electives in high school. This year, I have more arts classes than actual classes.” He recommends experimenting with various art forms to find one you like. His own interests range from comics to graphic novels. “I used to do digital and marker, but now I’m more into colored pencil.” Opportunities such as Governor’s School likewise emboldened his artistic curiosity. “It was really fun to have a college experience, being around like-minded people and talking about art,” he says. “The best thing was probably being surrounded by other good artists, people who challenged you.” Everett wants to pursue a career in either illustration or animation and is considering colleges such as Savannah College of Art and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia University. Everett Delaney, Untitled, 2017, Prismacolor markers, 16” x 12”
Hannah Vogt, Untitled, 2017, Watercolor, 12” x 9”
The true joy of teaching in a school with a dynamic arts program, such as Nashville’s Father Ryan High School, is watching the arts take hold as young people tap into their passion and creativity, discover their unique voice, and express what they have to say to the world. Those on the outside of the artistic world look in with a combination of awe and skepticism, persistently pelting aspiring artists, musicians, actors, and dancers with the question: How can you make a living?
“I can’t see my life without art. Not doing it makes me feel empty.”
by DeeGee Lester
ARTSMART
Tim Jones Photography
Cara Orlich
Photograph by John Partipilo
When describing her artistic passion, junior Maggie Rodgers admits, “I’ve never really had one of those ah-ha moments. Musical theater has always been my path. The stage has always been the place for me to express myself, to find out how to bring characters to life, connect with others, and bring an audience joy!”
Like their artist counterparts, performing arts students such as sophomore dancer Cara Orlich share a lifelong passion for their chosen pathways.
Her growing list of credits at Father Ryan and with Franklin’s Act II Players includes productions such as Pippin, Grease, Rent, and an upcoming spring production of West Side Story.
Photograph by David Johnson
“I can’t picture myself doing anything else,” says Cara, whose dream college would be NYU. “Father Ryan will point every student toward the path of success, and with the excellent education and guidance I am receiving, I know I will have everything I need to go down that path.”
Cara in dance class
Maggie Rodgers in Thoroughly Modern Millie
Cast in a number of productions, including the title role of Millie in Thoroughly Modern Millie, she recalls selection during her freshman year for the role of Jenny Hill in Big Fish as a dream come true and, she admits, a surprise. “Our teacher, Ms. [Kelli] McClendon, is wonderful about casting based solely on talent and the right match of actor and role. As she thinks about college and the auditioning process required for top programs and a pathway to Broadway, Maggie explains, “I’m focusing with intensity, looking at what will make me look best to colleges and give me the tools to look good for auditions. I’ve just started this journey. They’re looking for confidence—not cockiness; professionalism and the ability to do the technical aspect; the ability to show depth of character in yourself as well as the role; and originality—how you can color a piece.” Such self-motivation, intention, and self-fulfillment are the goals for students in Father Ryan’s Department of Visual and Performing Arts as explained by art teacher Mike Mitchell. “We work collaboratively to position students with the skills and resources to challenge them to become creative members on the local, regional, national, and international artistic ecosystem.”
Maggie Rodgers
Photograph by John Partipilo
“I was the girl who would only pay attention to Friday night football games when the dance team performed,” she says. From dancing around the house at age 3, she progressed through tap and ballet to jazz and hip-hop at the Bellevue Dance Center to her dream position with the Father Ryan dance team and an expansion into musical theater.
THEATRE
Scout Pittman, Taylor Browning, Lacy Hartselle, Jonah Jackson in Dancing at Lughnasa
Photograph by Kristi Jones
BY JIM REYLAND
Lipscomb Theatre Collaborations Anyone?
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adies and gentlemen, please stand and join me in a big purple and gold round of applause for the hardworking staff, students, and friends of the Lipscomb University College of Entertainment and the Arts. Dean Mike Fernandez, Director Steve Taylor, and Chair Becky Baker and crew not only shine with plays on the stage, but they also have a knack for strategic collaborations that will no doubt take their programs to the next level. “The Department of Theatre is proud to partner with Nashville theatre companies, both professional and semiprofessional, to give our students and faculty the best opportunities possible for development, growth, and networking. Lipscomb theatre students learn from those directly in the field, working side by side with them either as performers on the stage or in the capacity of backstage crews. The faculty utilize the chance to continue sharpening their directing and/or designing skills with these unique and special collaborations.” Impressive. Mike, Steve, and Becky, thinking like ninjas, are creating alliances with the Nashville Rep, the Shakes Fest, TPAC, and any other worthwhile, outside-the-box partnerships that will benefit their students and the arts community in which they live. In 2012, when Writer’s Stage took STAND on the first of our three tours, Mike Fernandez
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Emily Meinerding and the ensemble of Peter and the Starcatcher
“We held a shadow-interpreted performance of The Miracle Worker for the deaf and hard of hearing that was completely sold out. [September was Deaf Awareness month.] It was one of the coolest things we have ever done.” —Beki Baker, Chair, Lipscomb Department of Theatre
and staff were among the first to invite us to perform on the Lipscomb stage. In 2017, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival partnered with Lipscomb Theatre to present an all-female Richard II featuring a mixed cast of professionals and students. Perhaps you saw it. If not, please don’t miss it when Nashville Repertory Theatre and Lipscomb present an exciting co-production of Inherit the Wind at TPAC. Inherit is the final production of the Rep season and will put both organizations in the spotlight in the winter of 2018. And since nobody is tired yet, again in 2018 Tennessee Performing Arts Center and Lipscomb will collaborate in hosting the Nashville High School Musical Theatre Spotlights Awards. The local winners will travel to New York to compete nationally in the Jimmy Awards. The program invites area high schools to submit their performances and productions for evaluation by members of the local theatre community. Kathleen O’Brien, TPAC president and chief executive officer, is thrilled to collaborate with Lipscomb University on the Spotlight Awards. “Whether they involve young performers taking their first steps on stage in a recital or Broadway stars returning to dazzle us in a touring Broadway production, we delight
Photograph by Kenn Stilger
Handmade: Friendships Famous, Infamous, Real, and Imagined by Jim Reyland is available at Amazon.com. Purchase an autographed copy and support a 2017 high school tour of his award-winning play STAND at writersstage.com. jreyland@audioproductions.com
Photograph by Kenn Stilger Photograph by Kristi Jones
Lauren Yawn and Scott Wilson in She Loves Me!
in those signature moments on TPAC stages when we celebrate the creative abilities honed right here in Music City. We can’t wait to see what new moments these future stars of the stage will bring.” So, what’s happening right now on the Lipscomb stage? It’s She Loves Me!—considered by many to be the most charming musical ever written and featuring music by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof). She Loves Me! is a warm romantic comedy with an endearing innocence and a touch of old-world elegance. Working in a 1930s European perfumery, shop clerks Amalia and Georg, more often than not, don’t see eye to eye. After both respond to a lonely-hearts advertisement in the newspaper, they live for the love letters that they exchange, but the identity of their admirers remains unknown. She Loves Me! is based on the same story as the blockbuster film You’ve Got Mail. Join Amalia and Georg to discover the identity of their true loves—and all the twists and turns along the way! na Performances of She Loves Me! take place November 3, 4, 10, 11 at 7:30 p.m. and November 5 and 12 at 2:30 p.m. at Lipscomb University’s Collins Alumni Auditorium. For tickets please visit www.lipscomb.edu/theater.
Molly Tuttle
1938 Martin 00-42
GUITAR LOVE FIND IT AT
WORDS Peter Chawaga
MARY FERRIS KELLY BRIDGES THE SPIRITUAL AND EVERYDAY AT PRAY TO LOVE Monthaven Arts & Cultural Center
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November 11–January 5
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aith has always been a catalyst for great art. From classical renderings of the gods to Renaissance depictions of Biblical scenes to modern interpretations of spiritual enlightenment, visual art has served as a way to imbue our everyday understanding of the world around us with the otherworldly power of faith. The Monthaven Arts & Cultural Center will be celebrating this intersection in November with its exhibition Pray to Love. The show features two artists, Anne Goetz and Mary Ferris Kelly, whose work has joined history’s efforts to reconcile the spiritual unseen through paintings and sculpture. Kelly, who was born in Athens, Tennessee, and now lives in Chattanooga, has long had a preoccupation with one of religion’s preeminent conceptions.
The Cove, 1996, Acrylic on canvas, 36” x 48”
“A great deal of my work centers around man’s age-old yearning for flight and is an exploration of the instruments of flight—the wings—and how they might be put together,” Kelly explains. “My only sibling, my sister, was terribly injured at birth and was unable to walk, talk, hear, or use her hands, and the paintings and drawings of angels were conceived as a kind of prayer that she might regain in an afterlife all that she had lost on earth.” The exhibition will include several of Kelly’s paintings and drawings of angels and two bronze angel statues. It will also host her paintings and sculptures of everyday scenes. Kelly graduated from H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans where she studied with Mark Rothko, who was the artist-in-residence at the time. She counts Rothko among her many influences, from Michelangelo and Vermeer to Rodin and the Impressionists, who are all clearly apparent in her work. By combining the spiritual and commonplace, Kelly’s work imbues both with an elevated sense that the heavenly and tangible worlds are not so distant. It’s a sensation that sits firmly in line with art’s long-standing history of bridging the two. “I hope that after seeing this show the viewer might feel a sense of peace and an awareness of everyday life,” Kelly says. na
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Room with a Tapestry, 2010, Oil on canvas, 36” x 48”
An opening for Pray to Love will be held at the Monthaven Arts & Cultural Center, 1017 Antebellum Circle in Hendersonville, on November 11 from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibit remains on view until January 5, 2018. For more information, please visit www.monthavenartsandculturalcenter.com.
SOUNDINGOFF BY JOSEPH E. MORGAN
Tosca at TPAC
In Tosca, these strengths play out in the long, dramatic crescendos that characterize the expanse of each act, and Nashville’s music director Dean Williamson marked these ascents with patience and great skill. The first act, with its simple, even comic beginning, leads slowly to a climax with the majestic Te Deum, sung well on Saturday by Amy Tate Williams’s impeccably prepared chorus. In the second act, the crescendo begins with the torture motive in the low flutes, played with sinister relish by Deanna Little, leading to Floria Tosca’s famous “Vissi d’arte” impossibly performed by the majestic Jennifer Rowley while lying on her stomach. Rowley’s genius is connecting her exquisite voice to her character’s development. As Tosca abandons her childhood idealism under the pressure of the villainous Scarpia (played well by a menacing Weston Hurt), you can hear the worldly, pragmatic woman emerge. In the third act, the climax begins in the moments before “E lucevan le stele,” the intimate cello divisi section led beautifully by Michael Samis and the aria’s clarinet solo played with a sense of fated nostalgia by Todd Waldecker. This crucial aria was sung with abandon and a warm brassy tone by tenor John Pickle. Apart from an overly dark set in Act One, and a ridiculous bloody gesture added at the end (why is Tosca’s felo de se never graphic enough anymore?) the production was a remarkable success, especially for Rowley. Luck would have her in such fine form for her reprise of the role at the Met in January.
NASHVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE
MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS Book by Robert Kauzlaric Music & Lyrics by George Howe Based on the novel by Richard & Florence Atwater
October 26 - December 3
TICKETS: NashvilleCT.org or 615-252-4675
Photograph by Anthony Popolo
Long-ago musicologist Joseph Kerman famously, and perhaps unfairly, described Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca as a “shabby little shocker.” I prefer Donald Grout’s more measured judgement that Puccini’s talent was his ability to perfectly match his “ends to his means,” that is, tailoring his libretto to his compositional strengths—beautiful melody and dramatic instincts. It was to these strengths that the Nashville Opera played when it opened its season with Tosca on October 5 and 6.
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Karen Sternberg as The White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Photograph by MA2LA
The White Witch is a fierce adversary. She rules this world, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to maintain control.
STUDIOTENN
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Jamison Theater December 1–23
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hough Studio Tenn’s upcoming production of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may feature all manner of fantastic creatures, its storyline is anchored by the performances of four young actors. In this adaptation of the beloved fantasy novel, the Pevensie siblings—Lucy (Bella Higgenbotham Franklin), Edmund (Gus O’Brien), Susan (Morgan Davis), and Peter (Joe Leitess)—are transported to the wintry landscape of Narnia after discovering an enchanted wardrobe, only to find themselves at odds with the fearsome White Witch. “This is a play for both children and adults,” said director Matt Logan. “The Pevensie children are the lens through which Narnia is revealed to the entire audience. I think when you combine the classic nature of the novel with the design and interpretation that we do here at Studio Tenn, we have a perfect match for the holiday season.” Designing this show, however, has been an entirely new experience for Studio Tenn. While most productions deliver a more literal presentation of Narnia and its creatures, Studio Tenn presents a contemporary look through the use of largescale puppetry and elaborate costuming.
The audience will be in for quite a surprise when Aslan is revealed onstage, but he’s just one fantastic element in the world of Narnia. The play will also feature the half-man/halfgoat faun Mr. Tumnus (Brent Maddox), myriad talking animals, including the bickering Beaver family (Matthew Carlton and Nan Gurley), and of course, the White Witch, played by Karen Sternberg. “The White Witch is a fierce adversary. She rules this world, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to maintain control,” Sternberg said. “C.S. Lewis’s books are beloved by generations of readers. What a thrill to join forces with a visionary theatre company like Studio Tenn and this talented group of artists to bring this story to life.” na
Photograph by MA2LA
One of the most challenging aspects Studio Tenn faced was bringing Aslan—the rightful King of Narnia who happens to be a talking lion—to life for the show. Logan and the design team took inspiration from the Tony and Olivier award-winning play War Horse, which featured full-size horse puppets. Aslan’s puppet will be operated by multiple performers and voiced by Nathaniel McIntyre.
Gus O’Brien, Morgan Davis, Bella Higginbotham-Franklin and Joe Leitess as the Pevensie siblings, who are transported to Narnia
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe runs December 1–23 in the Jamison Theater in the Factory at Franklin. Performances begin at 7 p.m. with matinee performances on Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are available now at www.studiotenn.com.
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ASISEEIT BY LIZ CLAYTON SCOFIELD
Liz Clayton Scofield is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, thinker, all-around adventurer, and nomad. They hold an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. See their art at www.lizclaytonscofield.com.
Art happens in the in-between, in the late-night conversations, the days of skip-work-and-hang-out-at-(insert local coffee shop here)-withbeautiful-people, the space between you and me and the air we share. In the learning who you are and who I am and how we teach that to each other to learn more. Art is in the bike ride from your house to my house. Art is life and life is collaborative, and I am becoming and you are becoming, and in that space, that’s where my practice is, and that’s where I want to meet you for a conversation about what we learned to love today. Because conversation is a radical creative act, and art is resistance, and love is resistance, and the resistance is collaborative, and we need that now if we ever did.
Artists as Worms; Art as Dirt
How agonizing. Art practice is hard, aggravating action and inaction: dirty work.
Artists are well acquainted with the anxiety of uncertainty, the looming question of mattering. How to matter and/ or not matter, and the anxiety on both sides of that binary, mostly faced simultaneously. In my work, I have been experimenting with ways to overcome these consuming anxieties. One aspect of this process is learning not to overcome but coexist, not to resist but accept it, welcoming it as a reliable old friend, the annoying, nagging kind that you tolerate because it knows you so well. Through this acceptance, practice becomes possible.
Photography by Mark Sniadecki
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he artist, facing constant uncertainty, makes decision after decision, each one to choose one trajectory of infinite possibilities: this mark, that mark, this color, that tone, this word among all of the words they know. It goes on like that, mark after mark, word after word to form a sentence, then another, slowly to form a paragraph and then a page. Eventually a story unfolds, or a feeling.
process, a conversation can be something that constantly unfolds: words participating and flowing with other words. If we practice conversation as a collaborative act, we exist in a work-in-progress that reveals itself over time and changes. We could allow things to flow and grow and change: the fluid nature of conversations and/or art and/or being/becoming.
To me, comfort and relief in the anxiety comes in reimagining what an artist is or can be. Today I propose artists as worms; art as dirt. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett, in challenging the human/ nonhuman divide and proposing an agency and vitalism of objects, discusses Charles Darwin’s observations of worms. Worms, as small, seemingly insignificant creatures, are constantly consuming, digesting, and redistributing dirt. These small acts actually preserve human culture. As worms, artists become agents in networks of humans, objects, and otherwise (worms, dirt, etc.), each pushing against each other with their actions, affecting one another for some unexpected outcome: art, as dirt. I’m invested in modes of art-making and -being that reimagine what an artist’s role is. The quest for external validation is toxic to the artist. Professional demands squash artistic potential, so we must strive to free ourselves, as artists, from external demands (social, capital, professional, etc.) and embrace some internal value. What could it mean to develop an art practice as small gestures repeated? How do these iterative gestures build to have some significance? An artist not striving for a sole masterpiece, but a constant practice of small gestures? The accumulation of such gestures/dirt, collectively with other artists/worms, having unintended and unexpectedly significant impact on human society. Collaboration is necessary for artist worms. A single artist worm moving art dirt is inconsequential. When artist worms move art dirt en masse, the piles accumulate. Artist worms thrive in conversation with one another. Conversation is a critical component of artist worm collaboration. In this
Approaching our conversations as a radical form of art, we allow space to open ourselves up beyond our own understandings of what it is to be. We again are rethinking art not as something produced by a sole individual, but rather something done—as a way of being, becoming, living. As artist worms, we are taking these small actions, digesting and redistributing. Collectively our small gestures become something much larger together than any individual action taken or object produced. The art dirt as we shift it around may then uncover or recover or reveal some truth about our world. It may preserve something. It may change something. We may realize new opportunities for us to become, to live in unexpected ways, to engage in new conversations. How does one become an artist? Freeing oneself from external expectations or ideas of what it is to be an artist. Then simply become. I offer these words as an experiment in the practice of this process. I’m just shifting around some dirt: a flowing gesture to offer forth in an ongoing, complex, winding, unfinished conversation; an invitation. na
TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHY BY HUNTER ARMISTEAD
Photograph by Jerry Atnip
FYEYE Instagram: @hunterarmistead
A Frame of Film, A Line of Words, Capture the Creative Culture of Our City
Dori Pechianu Artist, Hair Designer
Put on a “Happy Face” I knew I had to feature Dori Pechianu when I saw her nude drawings on Instagram. They remind me of Japanese erotic art— except for the heads. On each of her immodest bodies, whether male or female, is a macabre happy (or unhappy) face or a mask. Or they are simply headless. The lines are very strong and the work both beautiful and sad—the same sadness and artistry of Diane Arbus, the famed photographer of the fringe, the freakish, and the strange. There is indeed a well-founded melancholy in Pechianu. She is a survivor of a very repressed ultraconservative upbringing in Woodlands, Texas, under an autocratic Romanian father and a compliant mother. Her “coming out” at 16 was more like being outed by her parents, who found out she had a girlfriend. She was then promptly sent to a conversion therapist, but the traumatic experience only broadened her exploration of gender, sexuality, and identity. She’s had a mix of boyfriends and girlfriends since. The tidal wave of denial and repression of her sexuality by her parents is a major component in her art. Pechianu is a woman for whom her relationship with her body has been a really long journey—she feels there is “still a lot of societal shame just for being female. “Every day is a struggle to keep it together, not to get overwhelmed,” says Pechianu. But she continues to push her causes and journey in her art and lifestyle. “What I am doing is stuff that makes people uncomfortable, and me too, which is why I feel I need to make it.” The most interesting thing about Pechianu’s work is that she doesn’t know why she draws the happy faces. “I am discovering through art what to contribute or what I can say,” she explains. As a 22-year-old with her sexuality on the table, Pechianu finds it rough being a self-avowed freak in Nashville. “I don’t remember the last time I saw a nude at the Art Crawl. Sexuality is so human and so a part of life. It needs to be in the conversation.” My bet is her monologue turns into a dialogue. For more on Dori, follow her on Instagram: @doripechianu
Ella Ballentine as the title character in Anne of Green Gables: The Good Stars
YOUR MUSIC
Well, Gen Xers, Millennials may grab all the headlines, but now you have your own My Music special! The ’80s premieres Monday, November 27, at 8 p.m. Hosted by Martha Quinn, one of the original MTV vee-jays, the special includes videos that were in heavy rotation in the music channel’s early days.
ON LOCATION Music and place combine in several of this month’s specials. On Friday, November 10, at 9 p.m., Foo Fighters – Landmarks Live in Concert from Great Performances is a concert recorded at the Acropolis in Athens. Sunday, November 26, at 9 p.m., John Legend performs at Manhattan’s historic Riverside Church on Live from the Artists Den. Also, Human Nature: Jukebox in Concert from the Venetian premieres Wednesday, November 29, at 8:30 p.m., while Celtic Woman – Homecoming: Ireland, a new special recorded in Dublin, airs Friday, December 1, at 8 p.m.
BROADWAY PACKAGE Great Performances continues its Broadway series Fridays at 8 p.m.
Courtesy of Joan Marcus
The British are invading on Saturday, November 25! At 7 p.m., The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years is Ron Howard’s film about the band’s brief but impactful history on the road. Later at 9:30 p.m., Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution marks the 50th anniversary of the group’s iconic concept album. Harmony was one aspect of Beatle music; American siblings Don and Phil Everly were also known for excellent harmonizing. The Everly Brothers – Harmonies from Heaven, airing Thursday, November 30, at 7 p.m., tells the early rock duo’s story
through interviews and performance clips.
The cast of Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn – The Broadway Musical, on Great Performances
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throughout November. Kevin Kline stars as a self-obsessed actor in the critically acclaimed revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter on November 3. Indecent, a play inspired by another play— Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance—airs November 17. The Tony Award-winning drama by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel explores the courageous actors who fought to present Asch’s play in the 1920s. Finally, enjoy a nostalgic seasonal treat on Friday, November 24 with Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, the musical based on the 1942 film featuring “White Christmas” and a score of other festive songs. The musical closes out the Broadway series and is also part of a Thanksgiving weekend menu that includes a double helping of Anne of Green Gables. New movie The Good Stars airs Thanksgiving Day (November 23) at 7 p.m. followed at 8:30 p.m. by the 2016 adaptation of the Lucy Maud Montgomery novels starring Martin Sheen. We are thankful for our viewers and members! Show your support for NPT by making a donation at wnpt.org. Enjoy our programming on NPT and NPT2, as well as 24/7 children’s programming on NPT3 PBS Kids.
John Legend performs at Manhattan’s historic Riverside Church on Live from the Artists Den
Courtesy of Joe Papeo
NPT brings you a feast of entertaining programming this month, including Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary. This jazzy portrait of the groundbreaking saxophonist opens the new season of Independent Lens on Monday, November 6, at 9 p.m. (The film also opened our Indie Lens Pop-Up series last month; see wnpt.org/events for more on the series.) Also this month, David Letterman: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize features an all-star lineup saluting the entertainer as he receives the nation’s top humor prize. Watch Monday, November 20, at 7 p.m.
Courtesy of Breakthrough Entertainment © 2017 Gables 23 Productions Inc.
Arts Worth Watching
November 2017 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
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Saturday
am Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood Thomas & Friends Bob the Builder Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Splash and Bubbles Curious George Nature Cat Sewing with Nancy Sew It All Garden Smart Martha Bakes Ellie’s Real Good Food Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television noon America’s Test Kitchen pm Cook’s Country Kitchen Sara’s Weeknight Meals Lidia’s Kitchen A Chef’s Life Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting Best of Joy of Painting Woodwright’s Shop American Woodshop This Old House Ask This Old House A Craftsman’s Legacy PBS NewsHour Weekend Ray Stevens CabaRay Nashville
This Month on Nashville Public Television Saturday, Nov. 25, 7 pm
Sunday
am Sid the Science Kid Cyberchase Sesame Street Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Cat in the Hat Curious George Nature Cat Tennessee’s Wild Side Volunteer Gardener Tennessee Crossroads Nature Washington Week noon To the Contrary pm Destination Craft with Jim West Music Voyager Curious Traveler Globe Trekker Roadtrip Nation Bare Feet with Mickela Mallozzi Travels with Darley Rick Steves’ Europe Antiques Roadshow PBS NewsHour Weekend Charlie Rose: The Week
Weekday Schedule 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 6:00
am Classical Stretch Body Electric Ready Jet Go! Wild Kratts Thomas & Friends Curious George Curious George Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Splash and Bubbles Splash and Bubbles Sesame Street Sesame Street Super Why! noon Peg + Cat pm Dinosaur Train Ready Jet Go! Bob the Builder Nature Cat Wild Kratts Wild Kratts Odd Squad Odd Squad Arthur NPT Favorites PBS NewsHour
Aging Matters: Nutrition & Aging Understanding malnutrition among older Americans.
Nashville Public Television
Thursday, Nov. 16, 8 pm
Everly Brothers – Harmonies from Heaven Performance clips and interviews. Friday, Nov. 30, 7 pm
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7:00 The Durrells in Corfu Season 2, Episode 5. A “friendly” Greeks vs. English cricket match. 8:00 Poldark on Masterpiece Season 3, Episode 7. Elizabeth turns the tables on George. 9:00 The Collection Episode 6. The inspector spots a crucial clue. 10:00 Start Up Finn-Ish Your Beer. 10:30 A Craftsman’s Legacy The Spur Maker. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
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7:00 The Durrells in Corfu Season 2, Episode 4. Aunt Hermione arrives. 8:00 Poldark on Masterpiece Season 3, Episode 6. Aunt Agatha vs. George. 9:00 The Collection Episode 5. Charlotte makes her move. 10:00 Start Up A Bearded Delight. 10:30 A Craftsman’s Legacy The Cowboy Hat Maker. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
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16 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Aging Matters: Nutrition & Aging Mal- or undernutrition is now considered a hidden epidemic among older adults. 8:30 Aging Matters: Practical Nutrition Practical nutrition tips and food safety for older adults. 9:00 Cirque Dreams Holidaze 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Tending the Wild
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7:00 A Place to Call Home Truth Will Out. 8:00 Great Performances Indecent. Paula Vogel’s Tony Awardwinning play inspired by the controversial 1923 Broadway debut of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Alicia Keys – Landmarks Live in Concert A Great Performances special.
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7:00 Lawrence Welk Show Thanksgiving. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Rebecca Part 2. The conclusion of Daphne du Maurier’s haunting tale, with Diana Rigg as Mrs. Danvers. 10:03 Bluegrass Underground The McCrary Sisters. 10:30 The Songwriters Even Stevens. 11:00 Globe Trekker North East England.
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7:00 Lawrence Welk Show You’re Never Too Young. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Rebecca Part 1. Charles Dance and Diana Rigg star in this adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel. 10:05 Bluegrass Underground Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors. 10:32 The Songwriters Wayland Holyfield. 11:03 Globe Trekker Food Hour: Sicily.
7:00 A Place to Call Home 7:00 Lawrence Welk Show The Prodigal Daughter. We Can Make Music. In the so-called Aussie 8:00 Keeping Downton Abbey, a Appearances nurse returns home 8:30 Wuthering Heights in 1953. Part 2. 8:00 Great Performances 10:00 Bluegrass Noël Coward’s Present Underground Laughter. Kevin Kline Don Bryant & stars as a The Bo Keys. self-obsessed actor in 10:30 The Songwriters this Broadway play. Pat Alger. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Globe Trekker 11:00 BBC World News Wild West: USA. 11:30 Front and Center Dawes.
Friday
7:00 Nature 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:00 A Place to Call Home The Cheetah Children. 7:30 Volunteer Gardener The Welcome Mat. Two years in the life of 8:00 Pilgrims: American 8:00 Great Performances a wild cheetah family Experience In the Heights: in Zimbabwe. Ric Burns’ exploration Chasing Broadway 8:00 NOVA of the Pilgrims and Dream. The story of Killer Floods. Geologic American origin stories. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s traces of colossal 10:00 BBC World News first Tony Awardancient floods. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine winning show. 9:00 Frontline 11:00 First Language: 9:00 Foo Fighters – LandBusiness of Disaster. The Race to Save marks Live inConcert An NPR co-production Cherokee A Great Performances about who profits after The Eastern Band of special. natural disasters. Cherokee fights to 10:00 BBC World News 10:00 BBC World News revitalize their language. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Front and Center 11:00 Austin City Limits CMA Songwriter Miranda Lambert. Series with . Jennifer Nettles.
7:00 Nature 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads H Is for Hawk: A New 7:30 Volunteer Gardener Chapter. Goshawks, 8:00 Tim Rushlow & Nature’s fighter jet. His Big Band – Live 8:00 NOVA 9:00 Johnny Cash’s Killer Hurricanes. Bitter Tears The Great Hurricane 10:00 BBC World News of 1780. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 9:00 Frontline 11:00 Shelter Me Putin’s Revenge, Hope & Redemption. Part 2. Katherine Heigl hosts 10:00 BBC World News an episode about how 10:30 Last of Summer Wine shelter dogs become 11:30 Austin City Limits service animals for Norah Jones; veterans with PTSD. Angel Olsen.
Wednesday
7:00 Finding Your Roots 7:00 A Year in Space Children of the Scott Kelly’s 12-month Revolution. Lupita stay on the International Nyong’o, Carmelo Space Station. Anthony, Ana Navarro. 8:00 Beyond a Year 8:00 The Vietnam War in Space The History of the World Kelly’s return to Earth; (April 1966 – May 1967). the next generation of 10:00 BBC World News astronauts. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 9:00 The Farthest – 11:00 Red Power Energy Voyager in Space A Native-American 11:00 BBC World News perspective on mineral 11:30 Austin City Limits resources and the The Head and the energy debate. Heart; Benjamin Booker.
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Junk in the Trunk 7. Appraisals from Season 21. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Junk in the Trunk 3. Appraisals from Season 17. 9:00 POV Almost Sunrise. Two combat veterans embark on a 2,700mile trek. 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Aging Matters: Aging & the Workplace
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. 7:00 Finding Your Roots Black Like Me. Bryant Gumbel, Tonya Lewis-Lee, Suzanne Malveaux. 8:00 The Vietnam War The Veneer of Civilization (June 1968 – May 1969). 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Art in the Twenty-First Century Chicago. “Soundsuit” artist Nick Cave and others.
7:00 Antiques Roadshow Our 50 States 2. 8:00 The VA and the Human Cost of War The Dept. of Veterans Affairs, from the 1920s to today. 9:00 Independent Lens Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Everyone Has a Place A film about Wynton Marsalis’ Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration. .
Wednesday, Nov. 15, 8 pm
Friday, Nov. 10, 9 pm
Tuesday
Beyond a Year in Space
Monday
Great Performances: Foo Fighters – Landmarks Live in Concert
Sunday
Nashville Public Television’s Primetime Evening Schedule
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Anaheim, Hour 1. 8:00 Celtic Woman – Homecoming: Ireland 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Ray Stevens Cabaray Nashville Special
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7:00 Cat’s Attic – Yusuf Cat Stevens 8:00 David Gilmour: Live In Pompeii The guitarist returns to the Roman amphitheater, site of a legendary Pink Floyd concert. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine
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7:00 Rick Steves’ Heart of Italy A survey of the Italian heartland with stops in Umbria, Assisi, Siena and the Cinque Terra. 8:00 The Vietnam War The Weight of Memory (March 1973 – Onward). 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution
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The ’80s (My Music) Monday, Nov. 27, 8 pm
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Wednesday, Nov. 22, 7 pm
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Nature: Nature’s Miniature Miracles
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7:00 Anne of Green Gables: 7:00 A Place to Call Home The Good Stars The Mona Lisa Smile. Anne Shirley turns 13 in 8:00 Great Performances this new special. Irving Berlin’s Holiday 8:30 Anne of Green Gables Inn – The Broadway The 2016 adaptation Musical. Based on starring Martin Sheen. the 1942 movie with 10:00 BBC World News “White Christmas” and 10:30 Last of Summer Wine other songs. 11:00 This Is the House that 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Jack Built 11:00 Brad Paisley – A look at JFK 100 years Landmarks Live in after his birth. Concert A Great Performances special.
7:00 Mannheim 7:00 Everly Brothers – 7:00 A Place to Call Home Steamroller 40/30 Harmonies from Day of Atonement. Live Heaven 8:00 Celtic Woman – 8:30 Human Nature: The story of Phil and Homecoming: Ireland Jukebox in Concert Don Everly told through Recorded in Dublin, from the Venetian interviews and this new special The quartet performs performance clips. features elaborate songs by artists from 8:30 Journey in Concert: stage productions in The Temptations Houston 1981 a celebration of to Justin Timberlake, A classic performance Ireland’s centuries-old The Beatles to Bruno featuring Journey’s heritage. Mars in this new greatest hits. 10:00 BBC World News special. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 National Park 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 The ’80s Symphony – The 11:00 Great Performances Mighty Five Hit Man: David Foster Images of Utah’s five and Friends. national parks.
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7:00 Finding Your Roots 7:00 Nature Relatives We Never Nature’s Miniature Knew We Had. Miracles. Nature’s Téa Leoni, biggest little secrets. Gaby Hoffmann. 8:00 NOVA 8:00 The Vietnam War Extreme Animal A Disrespectful Loyalty Weapons. Claws, (May 1970 – March 1973). fangs and other animal 10:00 BBC World News armaments. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 9:00 Frontline 11:00 America’s Secret War Poor Kids. Three The role of CIA-trained Midwestern families in fighters in the Laotian financial distress. Civil War. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:01 Austin City Limits Americana Music Festival.
for NPT, NPT2, and NPT3 PBS Kids.
Visit wnpt.org for complete 24-hour schedules
7:00 Great Performances The Moody Blues: Days of Future Passed Live. 9:00 Mannheim Steamroller 40/30 Live 10:30 Human Nature: Jukebox in Concert from the Venetian
7:00 Antiques Roadshow Kansas City, Hour 3. 8:00 The ’80s Original MTV VJ Martha Quinn hosts this My Music special featuring videos by Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen and other stars of the decade. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years
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7:00 Great Performances Hit Man: David Foster and Friends. With Andrea Bocelli, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Black Shelton, Celine Dion and others. 9:00 Live from the Artists Den John Legend. A celebration of Legend’s Darkness and Light album recorded at Manhattan’s historic Riverside Church. 10:30 How Not to Die with Michael Greger, M.D.
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7:00 David Letterman: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize Entertainers celebrate the comedian as he receives the nation’s top humor honor. 8:30 Independent Lens Shadow World. A look at the global arms trade based on Andrew Feinstein’s acclaimed book. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:01 School Discipline: NPT Reports Town Hall
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7:00 The Durrells in Corfu Season 2, Episode 6. The season conclusion. 8:00 Poldark on Masterpiece Season 3, Episode 8. The season conclusion. 9:00 The Collection Episode 7. The season conclusion. 10:00 Start Up The Athletic Board. 10:30 A Craftsman’s Legacy The Spoon Makers. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
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6:30 Ray Stevens Cabaray Nashville Special A behind-the-scenes peek with stories and music. 8:00 Young Hyacinth A prequel to the beloved Keeping Up Appearances series. 9:00 Cat’s Attic – Yusuf Cat Stevens An evening of songs and storytelling by the legendary singer-songwriter, recorded in Sept. 2016. 10:30 Journey in Concert: Houston 1981
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7:00 The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years Ron Howard’s film covers the Beatles from Liverpool to their final concert in 1966. 9:30 Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution This 50th-anniversary look at the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band includes rare footage and recordings. 11:00 Age Reversed with Miranda EsmondeWhite
Tommy Gossett and Talley Wood
ARTSEE
Blake Moran and Madison Casey
Laura, Olive Caroline and Brian Tull
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Quintin Watkins
Lauren Weber and Jason Renaud
Kay Lyons, Celeste Hankins, Kenneth Burke, and Patricia Avila
ARTSEE
Steve Sirls, Jackie Hicks, John Grimes and Chris Grimes at the Antiques and Garden Show Committee Kickoff Party
Marie and Davin Beltran
ARTSEE
Photograph by Peyton Hoge
Deborah Brannan, Kristin Dietrich, and Drew Galloway
Lexi Roland and Marcus Maddox
Elizabeth Donaldson, Evan Boutte, and AD Maddox
Christine Hautlar and Ashley Swafford
Jon Buko, Herb Williams, and Lindsey Bathke
ARTSEE
Morganne Myles, Maiya Hardnett and Dricka Myle
ARTSEE
Carrie Hull and Hannah Taylor Robin Puryear, Jane MacLeod and Kim Holbrook at the Antiques and Garden Show Committee Kickoff Party
Ellen Andrews, Meredith Mattlin, Jared Eckman, Owen Hanna, Allison Young, and Hudson McNeese
Tennessee State Parks park ranger doughboys from the WWI living history detachment at the Frist Center’s opening of World War I and American Art
Woods Drinkwater and Kat Drinkwater
Photograph by Emily Beard
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIFFANI BING
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Abraham Pardee
Photograph by Peyton Hoge
Lucy Gaines and Beach
Megan Coleman and Haneen Baker
Steven Mather, Clif Dickens, and Marin Sieck
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ARRATT GALLERY AT VANDERBILT
“With All That We Have Been Taught...” November 6–29, 2017
Paintings by Morgan Craig
LOCATED ON THE MAIN FLOOR OF SARRATT STUDENT CENTER AT 2301 VANDERBILT PLACE, NASHVILLE, TN 37235 Visit us 7 days a week from 9 a.m–9 p.m. during the academic year. Summer and holiday schedule hours are Monday–Friday 9 a.m.–4 p.m. www.vanderbilt.edu/sarrattgallery
The Clay Lady’s Studio
Annual Student Sale!
Saturday, November 18, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm Free admission 1416 Lebanon Pike, Nashville, TN, 37210 • 615.242.0346 Hours: M-F 8am-4:30pm, Sat 10am-2pm
Photograph by Anthony Scarlati
Blessed are the persistent ... One of my pet peeves is light pollution. When my former husband and I moved into our house twenty years ago, the street lights drove me crazy. Especially the one on the pole in front of our house. The light from that fixture shined directly into our upstairs bedroom window. I remember lamenting to a friend, “Our bedroom has more light at night than in the daytime!” Something had to be done. So I called my friends at NES. I soon learned that, as far as streetlights are concerned, NES is under contract to Metro Public Works. And that’s when things got complicated. For the next two months, I bounced back and forth between Metro and NES like a pinball, as innumerable phone calls and emails were exchanged.
Williamson County Culture
At first I tried having the offending streetlight removed or relocated. This was followed by talks of having a shield installed. I even made a drawing, illustrating how a shield might work. At one point, I got Betty Nixon involved. (Betty was on the NES board at the time.) But nothing could stop that dance between Metro and NES. And when things got to be too much, I let go. Nine months later, I was sitting in my office minding my own business, when I received an email from a man in Customer Engineering at NES. Dear Ms. Chapman, After several discussions with our new engineer in charge of streetlighting materials, he’s come up with a possible solution I think you’ll be pleased with. One of our streetlight vendors has a new and improved cutoff fixture they’re providing us for evaluation. This new fixture is supposed to do a better job of focusing light down on a limited area. We plan to install this fixture on the pole in front of your house for evaluation, at no charge to you, of course. It was all I could do to refrain from turning cartwheels in my office. And I’m happy to report that fixture worked like a charm. Sometimes good things happen to those who persist ... then let go. Marshall Chapman is a Nashville-based singer/songwriter, author, and actress. For more information, visit www.tallgirl.com.
BEYONDWORDS
ry Eve st fir ! ay Frid
BY MARSHALL CHAPMAN
MYFAVORITEPAINTING ANNETTE GRIFFIN, GALLERY COORDINATOR, GALERIE TANGERINE
ARTIST BIO: John Paul Kesling John Paul Kesling lives and works in Madison, Tennessee. A native of Kentucky, he attended Morehead State University and received his MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design. He painted Americana in 2014, when he was living in New York. The man loves dogs, wields a wicked sense of humor, and listens to lots of podcasts. You can see more of his work on his website, www.johnpaulkesling.com.
John Paul Kesling, Americana, 2014, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 80” x 70”
M
Behind just such an occurrence, our foreground protagonist lays out one set of eyes for seeing so that she might keep her second dim and milky set for understanding. A jagged tooth obscures her expression; is she serious or smiling? Concerned, or a contented culprit in the crimes of our present? If, like the rest of us, she straddles that gradient, perhaps it’s because her upper horizon is constellated by nostalgia: cars and bars, symbols that we thought might make us great. na
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Photograph by Jerry Atnip
ost recently, my favorite painting is John Paul Kesling’s Americana, in which figures rise from the ground like oil to inflict deep riddles on their passersby. These sunbathers, bordered not by rule of law but by a landscape of their own creation, slide over a petroleum sea and scratch chalk splinters off of the only tree in sight—a young, dead one—to profess the consequences of every movement with fetal calm. Their placid resolution is at once as comforting and unsettling as the resurrection of land by a novel ecosystem.
Annette Griffin
One of a Kind Pieces by Spark
new location. new look. 4009 Hillsboro Pike Suite 212 (Grace’s Plaza, 2nd floor) Nashville, TN 37215 (615) 385-1212 • www.ejsain.com