5 AVENUE OF THE A RTS th
D OWNTOWN N ASHVILLE
FIRST
Saturday
Regular 5th Avenue gallery hours: 11-5:00 pm, Tuesday-Saturday
the
company
www.theartscompany.com
September 6 - September 26 New work by Jim Hubbman: Watercolor and Graphite Robin Schlacter: Encaustics August 30 - September 6 Limited-engagement for Fahamu Pecou, Artist and Scholar ©Jim Hubbman
www.therymergallery.com
September 6 - September 27 indelible : the work of Matthew Fine, Lisa Bachman and Joshua DeWall ©Matthew Fine, Lisa Bachman and Joshua DeWall
www.tinneycontemporary.com
August 2 - September 20 The New Real 2: Figure-Focused Curated by Sarah Wilson Featuring new work by Eric Zener, Yigal Ozeri, Brian Tull, Ali Cavanaugh, and Kevin Peterson ©Eric Zener
A RT
C R AW L DOWNTOWN
6-9 pm
TM
PUBLISHED BY THE ST. CLAIRE MEDIA GROUP Charles N. Martin, Jr. Chairman Paul Polycarpou, President Ed Cassady, Les Wilkinson, Directors
SOCIAL MEDIA
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CONTRIBUTORS
PAUL POLYCARPOU Editor and CEO
JENNIFER ANDERSON The Great Unknowns
SARA LEE BURD Executive Editor and Online Editor sara@nashvillearts.com
MARSHALL CHAPMAN Beyond Words
REBECCA PIERCE Education Editor and Staff Writer rebecca@nashvillearts.com MADGE FRANKLIN Copy Editor DESIGN TRACEY STARCK Design Director ADVERTISING CINDY ACUFF cindy@nashvillearts.com BETH KNOTT beth@nashvillearts.com KEITH WRIGHT keith@nashvillearts.com
JENNIFER COLE State of the Arts LINDA DYER Antique and Fine Art Specialist SUSAN EDWARDS As I See It ANNE POPE Tennessee Roundup JIM REYLAND Theatre Correspondent JUSTIN STOKES Film Review TONY YOUNGBLOOD Unplugged
Nashville Arts Magazine is a monthly publication by St. Claire Media Group, LLC. This publication is free, one per reader. Removal of more than one magazine from any distribution point constitutes theft, and violators are subject to prosecution. Back issues are available at our office for free, or by mail for $5.00 a copy. Email: All email addresses consist of the employee’s first name followed by @nashvillearts. com; to reach contributing writers, email info@nashvillearts.com. Editorial Policy: Nashville Arts Magazine covers art, news, events, entertainment, and culture in Nashville and surrounding areas. The views and opinions expressed in the magazine do not necessarily represent those of the publisher. Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available at $45 per year for 12 issues. Please note: Due to the nature of third-class mail and postal regulations, issues could be delayed by as much as two or three weeks. There will be no refunds issued. Please allow four to six weeks for processing new subscriptions and address changes. Call 615.383.0278 to order by phone with your Visa or Mastercard number.
S2O14
eptember
on the cover:
Wassily Kandinsky, Black Grid, 1922, Oil on canvas Bequest of Mrs. Nina Kandinsky in 1981, Photograph © Centre Pompidou Article on page 60
FEATURES
COLUMNS
10 Spotlights
36 Public Art
34 Crawl Guide
by Anne-Leslie Owens
37 The Bookmark
44 Lee Ann Womack Making Up For Lost Time
38 Unplugged
46 Paul Harmon Inner Voices
Hot Books and Cool Reads
44
by Tony Youngblood
40 The Great Unknowns by Jennifer Anderson
48 The Doyle and Debbie Show Bruce’s Big Adventure
40
41 Film Review by Justin Stokes 42 As I See It by Susan Edwards
55 Courage Unmasked Distilling Beauty from Suffering
50 NPT
55
60 Kandinksy Everything Starts from a Dot
64 Jared Small Stately Abandonment
93 Backstage with Studio Tenn Fiddler on the Roof 94 Theatre by Jim Reyland
73 Greg Sand Life in an Anonymous World
96 Art Around by Sara Lee Burd
78 Jonathan Trundle Slit Shutter
85 Nashville 6 A.M. Hunter Armistead
90 Any Questions Matt Logan
93
69 There’s Nothing Still About Life
80 Elizabeth Sanford Visual Fairy Tales
88 Poet’s Corner Stellasue Lee
99 ArtSee
64
102 ArtSmart 109 Appraise It by Linda Dyer 110 Critical i by Joe Nolan
96
113 Beyond Words by Marshall Chapman
85
114 My Favorite Painting NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 7
PUBLISHER ' S NOTE
New Artist
CAROLYN EVANS
Art Creates a City
T
here are so many lists these days. Lists such as the top ten vacation destinations, the top ten best places to live, the top ten places to raise a family, even the top ten most creative cities. Nashville is making all those lists. Unbelievably, the one list we’re not on is the top ten most charitable cities in America. I say someone’s figures must be way off, because this city is all about giving. This month the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center hosts its Courage Unmasked event to benefit head and neck cancer patients. Over fifty artists donated their time and skill to create works of art from the radiation masks used in the treatment of head and neck cancer. These masks will be auctioned off at the fundraiser to be held at OZ Nashville on September 27. You can see some of these incredible creations on page 55. Also this month, the Pujols Family Foundation united 21 local artists, including Lain York, Kit Reuther, and Paul Harmon, and people with Down syndrome to create works of art to be shown at Bennett Galleries, opening September 5 with an auction later in the month. Funds raised will be used to secure housing and job training for people with Down syndrome. Read about it on page 19. I may be wrong, but I have a hunch that none of these artists who gave so generously of their time will be on the Forbes list anytime soon, which makes their gifts even more precious than they already are. So whoever is responsible for these lists, please take note: Nashville is number one with a bullet when it comes to generosity of spirit.
Oil on Canvas 52” x 42”
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
My thanks to John Scarpati for taking my photograph this month. The grapes were delicious.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN SCARPATI
Orions Crib
Nashville Arts Magazine is proud to be associated with both these events.
Paul Polycarpou Publisher
State of the Fair Tennessee Craft • Centennial Park • September 26 to 28
by Stephanie Stewart-Howard
E
veryone who’s ever attended one of the sprawling, gorgeous art and craft fairs in Centennial Park looks forward to its annual September iteration, with scores of artisans, food and beverage vendors, and a host of entertainment and hands-on activities. We’ve all walked the rows, talked with the artisans from all over the country, and walked back to our cars clutching bags filled with everything from ironwork to pottery to hand-woven shawls. If you haven’t, it’s time you did. Tennessee Craft takes place September 26 to 28 in Centennial Park. Anna-Claire Gibson, member services and marketing manager for Tennessee Craft, says the name change came about in winter 2014. “There were a couple of reasons for it,” she says. “In some cases, people didn’t understand the ‘TACA’ acronym, and, more important, the ‘Tennessee Craft’ label can connect all six groups across the state that work together. Tennessee Craft conveys what we are and speaks for itself.” The fall show is entirely juried, and it’s a tradition at this point, after more than 36 years. People return annually to see favorite Marilyn Greenwood artists with whom they’ve developed a bond and purchase from both familiar and new. Potter Tom Turnbull has shown at the first booth to the right off West End Avenue for 15 years. “It’s a great opportunity for me to actually meet my clients, customers, and the public. As an artist I’m always doing new work, and it’s good to see the reaction to it. So much of what I do is given as gifts, and I love knowing I’m participating in birthdays, graduations, weddings, Christmas. I love Christmas, knowing people are opening boxes filled with my work.” Plenty of that will be purchased here in September. Gibson says visitors should look for the Emerging Makers tent,
Tom Turnbull
Stephen Nelson
where artisans at differing stages of their careers, often new and fresh in the craft circuit, have a chance to showcase works. The kids’ tent is also full of craft and performance magic for families. “When you come, plan to make a day of it,” she says. “Get there early; take time to talk to the artists and learn their stories. Wear sensible shoes. Carpool—parking is limited close by. Take time to enjoy the live demonstrations.” Tennessee Craft may have been around for decades, but there’s always some new aspect even the most experienced veterans can take delight in finding. For more information, visit www.tennesseecraft.org.
Dennis Paullus
10 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Bruce Johnson
september 20 & 21 See what we’ve got cooking in Nashville this Fall. Tickets and info available at
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The Grand Taste is a tour of flavors featuring Nashville’s finest. Catbird Seat, 2013
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Kateri Pomeroy, Eclectic Color Zap (detail), 2014, Oil pastel, 9” x 11”
Poverty & the Arts Gala Abrasive Media • September 20 by Catherine B. Randall
N
icole Brandt doesn’t give pocket change to the people we sometimes see bundled and huddled on the stairways of office buildings downtown. She is taking a fresh approach to helping the homeless by offering them the chance to create. Brandt serves as founder and executive director of the non-profit Poverty & the Arts. This 501(c3) has grown since its inception in the fall of 2011 and is hosting the second Poverty & the Arts Gala. This exhibit and auction will feature a variety of artwork ranging from abstract to oil, pastel, and watercolor. All pieces are created by the participants in the Adopt a Homeless Artist program. Brandt admits that one of the obstacles of working with this population is their inconsistent attendance. Because their lives are unpredictable, meeting basic needs for food and shelter for the night takes precedence over art. In her opinion, that is all the more reason to provide these folks with this uncommon respite. “When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you lose the freedom to dream. When they create something, they own it, and they’re able to dream again.” In those moments, “They’re not just surviving,” Brandt says.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SWEET MAGNOLIA PHOTOGRAPHY
The Poverty & the Arts Gala will be held at Abrasive Media on September 20 from 6 to 8 p.m. Visitors can meet the artists while enjoying hors d’oeuvres and wine. A portion of the proceeds will be given as compensation to the artists. Visit www.povertyandthearts.org for ticket information.
Kateri Pomeroy, artist in the Adopt a Homeless Artist program
Americana Music Festival
“
This is music that goes way beyond fads or fashion September 17 to 21
by Wendy Wilson
”
S
ome of the performers at the Americana Music Festival are household names; others have names that few would recognize. In the end, that’s not what matters most to organizers of the annual event. “It’s a festival that first and foremost honors musicianship, regardless of commercial success,” says Jed Hilly, executive director of the Americana Music Association, which promotes American roots music worldwide.
Hilly says festivalgoers will experience great shows, whether they know the artists or not, and might stumble across something that takes them by surprise. “The beauty of music as an art form is we love discovery,” he says.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMOSA ARTS
Headliners at this year’s festival, September 17–21, include Jackson Browne, Loretta Lynn, The Avett Brothers, Josh Ritter, and Lake Street Dive. But they account for just a handful of the more than 160 live performances at 11 venues around Nashville.
Farewell Drifters
all going,” says Gauthier, who has served on the board of the Americana Music Association for four years. Gauthier says she became a board member to help keep roots music alive and well. “This music is important because it is real; it’s driven by honest to goodness human emotion and experience. The authenticity is what makes it important. This is music that goes way beyond fads or fashion.” In addition to music performances, the festival, now in its 15th year, will feature conference panels, parties, workshops, and an awards show. Tickets can be purchased for full access to everything at the festival or separately for different events. For more information about this year’s festival, please visit www.americanamusic.org. The Avett Brothers
PHOTOGRAPH BY SUNDEL PERRY
The Avett Brothers will perform Saturday, September 20, at a Riverfront Stage event downtown, a first for the festival. The group, led by North Carolina siblings Seth and Scott Avett, has achieved notable success since performing at the festival in 2007 in front of a modest crowd at Station Inn. In June, the band played at Bonnaroo in front of 70,000. Hilly attributes the group’s growth in popularity to grassroots marketing at its best, the kind of thing his association loves to celebrate. Acclaimed singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier, who has performed at the festival in past years, says it’s a great networking opportunity for artists. “It’s unique in its ability to connect with the working musicians at the ground level, as well as the businesses that help keep us
Pokey LaFarge
14 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
JARED SMALL “stately abandonment” DLG SEP 2014 DAVID LUSK GALLERY
516 Hagan St . Nashville . davidluskgallery.com
Specialized furniture
Lee Hamblen, Walking on the Beach, 2013, Mixed media/canvas, 48” x 48”
from the forest floor
Belmont Community Art Show Christ the King School • October 3 to 4 by Bassam Nessim
T
he Belmont Community Art Show and Sale will open with a reception on Friday, October 3, at 5 p.m. at Christ the King School, with Lisa McReynolds as this year’s featured artist.
to your home.
“I look forward to presenting my new works reflecting the Southern lifestyle,” says McReynolds, whose work is a celebration of Nashville skylines, rustic barns, and her Southern roots found through palette knives, paint, and multiple layerings of colors and textures. This year’s show features 32 artists, 3 jewelers, and 3 potters, including Ron York, Bradley Tyler Wilson, Lee Hamblen, Ginger Oglesby, Lauren Dunn, and Jade Reynolds. The artists will Lisa McReynolds, Homestead, 2013 donate to Christ the King School thirty percent of their sales, which will go towards arts and music scholarships as well as overall operating expense.
901 2nd Ave. S. | Nashville, TN 37210
615-878-6216 www.littlebranchfarm.com
The show will continue until 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 4. Admission is free, and the event is open to everyone. The show coincides with the Historic Belmont-Hillsboro Home Tour, which takes place on Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Find a complete list of participating artists and more information at www.facebook.com/Belmontartshow.
ABSOLUTE ONLINE AUCTION American Indian & Southwest Arts, Crafts & Jewelry from a Middle Tennessee Collector Closes September 10 n Beginning at 2:00 PM CT 96 lots of American Indian and Southwest art, from a single collector will sell to the highest bidders regardless of price via absolute online auction.
470 Woodycrest Avenue, Nashville, TN n 615-517-7675 n
Rangda, 2014, wool, cotton and silk thread on tulle fabric 41 in x 30 in
10% Buyer’s Premium
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18 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
www.nashvillehifi.com
Pujols Family Foundation Event T he 21 Coll a bor at i v e A rt Projec t
T
Bennett Galleries • September 5 to October 9
he Pujols Family Foundation, Bennett Galleries, and Nashville Arts Magazine unveil an exhibit featuring the collaborative art of 21 of Nashville’s best artists who each partnered with an individual with Down syndrome. Each pair created a work of art based on the theme 21, because Down syndrome occurs when a person is born with an extra chromosome—a twenty-first chromosome. Todd Perry, Executive Director of the Pujols Family Foundation, came up with the idea and says, “People with Down syndrome have amazing creativity. I wanted to combine the skills of local fine artists with the energy and passion of this community. The outcome has exceeded my expectations.”
The illustrious roster of artists includes Mary Addison Hackett, John Guider, Anna Jaap, Michael Shane Neal, James Threalkill, Dawn Whitelaw, Jorge Yances, and more. In addition to the amazing art these 21 pairs created, the collaborative experience proved to be inspiring and moving for those involved. Paul Harmon admitted to being a bit apprehensive at first, but later wrote, “At first meeting, I learned that my collaboration partner was just as nervous about the project as I was. Relaxed to see that in each other, we both quickly settled into the business of making some
Adam Holland and Jorge Yances, Beatles Love, Mixed media, collage, 30” x 40”
Brittany Meyer and Jim Sherraden, 21, Mixed media, letterpress, 26” x 40”
art together. What a wonderful reminder of what the essence of art is. Two people making marks together. Ideas and forms and color. Two people talking as if at a table enjoying a fine meal together . . . and each adding to and altering the other one’s graphic conversation. Two human beings coming from vastly different places, being two artists together, and finding that place where we are both the same.”
Coordinated by Carolyn Naifeh, Regional Director of the Pujols Family Foundation, The 21 Collaborative Art Project is meant to raise awareness of Down syndrome,
give individuals with Down syndrome an opportunity to demonstrate their talents and be mentored by a professional artist, and to raise funds to benefit people with Down syndrome in Middle Tennessee. One hundred percent of the proceeds will go to projects such as job training, securing long-term residential options, and providing enrichment opportunities. The 21 Collaborative Art Project opens with a reception on Friday, September 5, at Bennett Galleries. There will be a live auction conducted by Nashville Arts Magazine later in the month. For more information, please visit www.pujolsfamilyfoundation.org and www.bennettgalleriesnashville.com.
Clayton Huffman and Anna Jaap, Tiger in the Woods, Portrait of Clayton Huffman, Age 21, Acrylic, charcoal, graphite, and marker on canvas, 30” x 40”
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 19
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T r iptych E xplor es “R aw” E motions T hose A ffected by S u icide
of
by Karen Oertley
A
group of suicide survivors ranging in age from 10 to 78 years old recently gathered at Your Heart on Art’s studio to participate in an art project designed to promote healing. Using oil pastels on blank canvas, the group was led through the process of expressing their emotions on canvas. While working, they were invited to beat drums and join in chanting to elicit their raw feelings and transcribe them into art. The project was co-facilitated by Eileen Wallach, LMSW and Certified Grief Counselor (CGC), CEO and founder of Your Heart on Art, and Rebekah Near, CAGS and Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT). “Expressive arts directly engage auditory, visual, and kinesthetic senses as well as emotions. Participants used intermodal expressive arts interventions to engage the full range of emotions associated with suicide and grief,” said Near. “The implementation of expressive arts in grief work is emerging.” Three panels, measuring six feet long by three feet wide, are attached to wood dowels hung with raw twine. Personal messages from those who worked on the panels line the two sides of the project. The panels will
In the Raw, 2014, Triptych, Pastel on canvas, 6’ x 3’ each panel
travel throughout the state in September in honor of Suicide Awareness Month. The Team Mica Fund, a component fund of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and sponsor for the project, worked with artist Beth Inglish to bring
the suicide awareness art tour from idea to fruition. Created in memory of Mica Breeden Martin, Team Mica Fund creates awareness of suicide prevention. For additional information, please visit www.yourheartonart.org.
Andee Rudloff ’s Hubcaps and Helmets University School of Nashville • September 8 to October 10
C
hicNhair: Hubcaps and Helmets, featuring over 40 new works by Andee Rudloff, celebrates alternative transportation and artistic collaboration. Among the works on display are Andee’s repurposed hubcaps and ingenious bicycle helmets. Throughout the first week of the exhibit, Andee, who is known for her ability to spark creativity in others, will collaborate with USN teachers and students to create a 32 x 8-foot mural that will be unveiled at a reception on September 12. During the reception, Green Fleet’s Bicycle Bus, a project Andee facilitated with Green Fleet and the Arts and Business Council of Nashville, will be open for tours, and Vanderbilt University Professor Mark Hosford’s music box bicycles will perform.
ChicNhair: Hubcaps and Helmets runs September 8 through October 10 in the Christine Tibbott Center Gallery at the University School of Nashville. The reception is September 12 from 5 to 7 p.m. For more, visit www.chicnhair.com Tomato hubcap, 2014, Acrylic on plastic and metal
and www.usn.org.
22 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
HISTORY EMBR ACING A RT
Melvin Toledo Reception September 5, 6-9 p.m.
Visit Us During “Franklin Art Scene” September 5, 6-9 pm
202 2nd Ave. South, Franklin, TN 37064 • www.gallery202art.com • 615-472-1134
Sunday Errand
Eudora Welty Photography Exhibit
B
Nashville Public Library • September 5 to November 9
efore she became famous as a writer, Eudora Welty was an accomplished photographer. Working as a junior public relations officer for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Welty interviewed people of all social and economic classes throughout her home state of Mississippi. In her spare time she photographed these people, capturing daily life and the effects of the Great Depression. Later, she would use what she saw and experienced in her short stories.
A collection of Eudora Welty’s photographs from the 1930s and 40s will be on display at the main branch of Nashville Public Library beginning September 5. Some of the photographs included were printed by Welty herself. The exhibit is free and remains on view through November 2. For more infor ma tion, please visit www.library.nashville.org.
Music City’s
d n a B t s Bigge
Your Nashville Symphony | Live at the schermerhorn WORLD PREMIERE
WEST SIDE STORY in HD with the Nashville Symphony
September 5 & 6 Nashville Symphony performs Bernstein’s score live while the film classic plays on the big screen.
THE FOUR TOPS
JOHNNY MATHIS
September 11 to 13
September 14
with the Nashville Symphony
The Motown legends will have you dancing to “Baby I Need Your Loving” and “I Can’t Help Myself.”
with the Nashville Symphony
“Chances Are” you’ll get “Misty” when this crooner performs his hits with the orchestra.
AMERICAN MASTERWORKS
with the Nashville Symphony
September 18 to 20
Conni Ellisor and Victor Wooten perform a groundbreaking Concerto for Electric Bass & Orchestra.
JUST ADDED
FOREIGNER September 21
Smash hits like “Juke Box Hero,” “Feels Like the First Time,” “Urgent,” “Cold as Ice” and “I Want to Know What Love Is.”
YO-YO MA
with the Nashville Symphony
October 1
The world’s greatest cellist returns to perform Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the Nashville Symphony.
JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA
THE MUSIC OF MICHAEL JACKSON
October 5
October 10
with Wynton Marsalis
This remarkable group is made up of 15 of the finest soloists, ensemble players, and arrangers in jazz music today.
with the Nashville Symphony
Get ready for a “Thriller” of an evening when the Nashville Symphony, a full band and vocalists pay tribute to the King of Pop.
with support from
615.687.6400 | NashvilleSymphony.org
Handmade & Bound Watkins College of Art, Design & Film October 3 & 4
by Wendy Wilson | Photographs by Samantha Angel
F
rom the beginning, Handmade & Bound was intended to be an annual event. But the organizers were surprised by just how quickly it took off. “There’s a big artist’s book community here, and that’s what we learned,” says Lisa Williams, library director at Watkins College of Art, Design & Film, the host of the event. This year’s fourth annual festival will be held October 3 through 4 at Watkins and will be bigger than in past years, with more than 30 vendors and more opportunities for participants to express themselves creatively. While the festival is centered around artists’ books, book art, and printmaking, it more broadly celebrates anything paper-related, including zines and paper-cutting art. An artist’s book is a contemporary art form that can defy easy explanation. Mary Beth Harding, director of community education at Watkins, puts it this way: “An artist’s book is a piece of art that just happens to be in the form of a book, whereas handmade book art is journals and photo albums that are blank for the buyer.” This year’s festival exhibition is called Poetry and Prints and will feature workshops led by professional artists, poets, and printmakers. Participants will be able to write poetry and produce handmade books inspired by the art of Wassily Kandinsky, an early-twentieth-century abstract painter from Russia, whose work will be on display at the Frist September 26 through January 4. (see page 60) For zine fans, the festival is hosting a visit by John Porcellino, acclaimed zine author and publisher. The Chicago native will show Root Hog or Die, a documentary about his life and work, and answer questions afterward. He has been writing, drawing, and publishing minicomics, comics, and graphic novels for more than 25 years.
In a world of fast-paced technology, the festival stands apart in its recognition of all things paper. That’s what appeals to returning vendor Kelli Hix, who will give a paper-cutting demo. “It dives so deeply into one very simple, very ancient medium.” An opening reception for Poetry and Prints will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, October 3, followed by a screening of Root Hog or Die from 7 to 9 p.m. A marketplace with demos and activities for all ages will be held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 4. Free admission and parking. For more information, visit www.watkins.edu or www.handmadeboundnashville.com.
26 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
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Sutton Costanza
A Tradition Of Excellence For Over 45 Years
3721 A West End Avenue $ 749,000
3807 Harding Pike $ 1,495,000
PENDING
PENDING
700 12th Avenue South $ 1,675,000
1148 Radnor Glen Drive $ 1,195,000
Starling Davis
615-485-6047 • Green Hills • Office 615-327-4800 • StarlingDavis@gmail.com • StarlingDavis.com
Fairvue Plantation
The Complete Package
1147 CHLOE DRIVE
1712 GREEN HILLS DRIVE
Remarkable home! Marble entry, gourmet kitchen with granite and walk-in pantry. Dramatic 2 story living room with fireplace and travertine hearth. Relaxing master bedroom and amazing master bath. Loft rec room and movie theater. Elevator to all 3 floors. Great views. Remarkable golf course with lake view.
Quiet and private with Green Hills convenience. Open & humming with personality. Formal & casual dining. Heart of the home kitchen with snack bar. Great room. Wonderful covered patio and private backyard. Thoughtful floorplan and design. Expansive and light filled 3rd floor perfect for anything you need. 2 Car attached garage opens to mudroom plus a 2 car outbuilding.
3 BR/3.5 BA, 4776 SF $750,000
Eric Grasman
4 BR/3.5 BA, 3750 SF $799,000
Mary Barbee Weiss
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NASHVILLE 615-327-4800
Visit Our Website for Weekly Open Houses
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WILLIAMSON CO. 615-263-4800
A Tradition Of Excellence For Over 45 Years Belle Meade
Vanderbilt/West End
605 LYNNWOOD BLVD
2114 WESTWOOD AVENUE
Updated soft contemporary. Progressive, chic design. One level California living. Open flexible floorplan for seamless entertaining. Fabulous outdoor living with stone fireplace and expansive lawn.
4 BR/4.5 BA, 3969 SF $975,000
Fantastic 1930s classic tudor. Renovated without sacrifice to original charm & character. Great floor plan. 4 bedrooms, 2 on main level. Lots of windows and natural light. Great deck and fully fenced private backyard.
4 BR/2 BA, 2562 $599,900
Matt Warren
Sam Coleman
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Belle Meade
The Kitchen . . .
1202 CHICKERING ROAD
Heart of the Home | Gathering Place | Chef’s Sanctuary
One lot off Belle Meade Blvd on gorgeous Chickering Road. Wonderful home to entertain, light and airy with 9100 square feet. The home, the pool and tennis court have been meticulously maintained. Each of the five bedrooms has it’s own bath. Large family room has it’s own kitchen! Library/ office off master bedroom. Lower level walk out to tennis court. Media room and storage rooms in lower level. Call for an appointment to view today!
Call it what you will, this one is... “Practically PERFECT in every way” You Don’t Know What You Are Missing!
4627 BELMONT PARK TERRACE In the heart of it all. 4 BR/5 full, 2 half BA, 6043 SF
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Nancy Tice
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NASHVILLE 615-327-4800
Christopher Simonsen
615-473-6998 Chris@ChristopherSimonsen.com
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WILLIAMSON CO. 615-263-4800
Rock, Paper, Scissors and Wood Group Show at Cumberland Gallery • Through October 4
I
f the title of the show isn’t intriguing enough, the work of artists Tom Pfannerstill, Johan Hagaman, Billy Renkl, and Kell Black certainly invites a closer look. The exhibit, Rock, Paper, Scissors and Wood, brings together incredibly realistic painting on sculpted wood, figurative concrete work, and intricately cut paper. Cumberland Gallery owner Carol Stein had the title of this exhibit in her book of concepts for a while and explains, “The focus of this show is mediums. These four artists are masters of their medium. Every once in a while you let a concept drive the show, and in this case these artists were a perfect match for this concept.”
Johan Hagaman, When He Wasn’t Watching, 2014, Concrete, copper, p a p e r, fo u n d o bj e ct, m i l k p a i n t, 20” x 8” x 8”
The works present a perfect pairing of artistic vision with attention to detail and process. Tom Pfannerstill recreates the details of discarded, often smashed and dirty bits of consumer ephemera, in carved wood and paint with incredible accuracy. Johan Hagaman makes molded concrete look beautifully soft and alive in her dreamy figures that appear to float in air. Billy Renkl uses old postcards, maps, diagrams,
Tom Pfannerstill, Top Tobacco, 2014, Acrylic and enamel on wood, 6” x 5”
Kell Black, Blackout, 2014, Paper and glue, 7” x 9”
and snippets of text to create evocative and memorable collages. Kell Black takes lovely little fragments of nature such as dandelions, twigs, spiders, moths, and maple whirligigs and delicately renders them with scissors and paper. Rock, Paper, Scissors and Wood will be on view at Cumberland Gallery through October 4. For more information, please visit www.cumberlandgallery.com.
Billy Renkl, New and Modern; Distinctly Original; Styled with Dignity:..., 2014, Collage of vintage prefab housing illustrations, 40” x 32”
30 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
First Pop-Up Show!
Michael Peven, Crazy Horse
Engaging Possibilities Photography Conference at MTSU • October 2 to 5
E
ngaging Possibilities is this year’s theme for the Society for Photographic Education’s Regional Conference, which features keynote lecturer Huger Foote, a Memphis-born photographer and son of Civil War Historian Shelby Foote, and Honored Educator Michael Peven from the University of Arkansas. In addition to two photography exhibits, the weekend is packed with workshops, portfolio reviews, and lectures presented by society members and Nashville artists. Conference Co-Chair and MTSU Instructor Shannon Randol says, “The purpose of the Society for Photographic Education is to foster an understanding of photography as a means of artistic expression, cultural insight, and experimental practice.” Sessions include: The iPhone Enlarger . . . the luxury app by Conference Co-Chair and MTSU Assistant Professor Jonathan Trundle (see page 78); a workshop on organic, non-toxic drying and toning; a think-tank session on fine arts photographic curriculum; a career workshop; Huger Foote, Peaches several sessions on digital photography, and much more.
Joseph Jeswald, Hoofer, oil on canvas, 38” x 20”
OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, October 2 6 – 9 pm
On Thursday, October 2, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., there will be a member exhibition and reception at the Murfreesboro Center for the Arts. On Friday, October 3, Huger Foote and Michael Peven will show their work and lecture at the Baldwin Photographic Gallery. The exhibit reception begins at 4 p.m., and the lectures begin at 6 p.m.
Friday, October 3 10 am – 4 pm
The Society for Photographic Education’s South Central Regional Conference takes place on October 2 through 5 at the MTSU campus. For a complete schedule of events and ticket information, please visit www.southcentral.spenational.org.
NashvilleArts.com
Saturday, October 4 10 am – 4 pm
Main Street Gallery 625 Main Street | naShville, 37206 www.SolidAirGallery.com September 2014 | 31
The Artists of Wizard World Comic Con Nashville Nashville’s Music City Center • September 26 to 28 by Cass Teague
A
major draw for massive Comic Con conventions is the opportunity for fans to meet artists who produce comic books and graphic novels that fuel the multi-billion-dollar entertainment genre based on superheroes and fantasy beings, creatures, and worlds. This month’s Wizard World Comic Con Nashville features dozens of the amazing artists who bring to life superheroes and other fantasy characters on the pages of graphic novels. At Wizard World Comic Cons, many top-notch writers, illustrators, inkers, and animators in the genre and the comic book industry in general are on hand to talk with fans, sell and sign their works, and do personalized sketches. Touring the country with 16 shows this year (25 set for 2015) are Wizard World’s ever-expanding stable of exceptional artists whose work is widely known and loved by comic-book fans.
The Wizard World Comic Con Nashville presents a not-to-be-missed lineup. Among them, Greg Horn, known for his dynamic drawing of Wolverine exploding off the page, is frequently called upon for cover art on many titles. Known for his prolific work on Green Lantern, Action Comics, Superman, Batman, and The Flash, fan-f riendly, outspoken star artist Ethan Van Sciver was recently named the new penciler for Batman: The Dark Knight. Zombies are all the rage, and Arthur Suydam’s amazing talent is why he’s called “The Zombie King.” Tommy Castillo captures you with the dynamics of his creations, his dark humor, brilliant attention to detail, and the intensity of his palette, equally at home creating a slimy corpse or a dragon.
Tommy Castillo
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916 8th ave., sO. nashville (615) 598-2074 tue-sat • 12 tO 5:30 pm • Or by appOintment WWW .t he r ed F eather g allery . cOm 32 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Wizard World Comic Con Nashville returns to the Music City Center Friday through Sunday, September 26 through 28. Visit www.wizardworld.com for more information.
Find Your Freedom℠ BACKS UP TO NATCHEZ TRACE & HORSE TRAILS
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SEPTEMBER CRAWL GUIDE student work. Corvidae Collective is unveiling LIT: Artwork Influenced by Banned & Challenged Classics. Coop Gallery is featuring Cone of Uncertainty, a selection of images by photographer Darin Mickey. HAUS and 40AU are presenting a solo exhibition by Carrie Cox, whose paper works reference the element of water, the stillness of indigo processes, and her background as a printmaker.
Melvin Toledo – Gallery 202
The Franklin Art Scene takes place on Friday, September 5, from 6 until 9 p.m. in historic downtown Franklin. Gallery 202 is showcasing the work of Melvin Toledo. Town’s End General Store is hosting Susan Brock Shadis, a retired elementary school principal, who paints portraits and landscapes inspired by her devotion to children and her love of the Tennessee countryside. Boutique MMM is displaying work by Jay Holobach, an acrylic and oil artist whose love of color shows up in his landscapes, cityscapes, and still lifes. Jack Yacoubian Fine Jewelry & Art Gallery is exhibiting the work of Emily McGrew, who explores themes of personal memory and natural growth and decay. The Heirloom Shop is presenting Debbie Smartt, a published photographer known for her passion for the beauty of Williamson County. Williamson County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau is hosting Coach Jimmy Gentry, a World War II veteran and legendary middle/high school coach whose paintings reflect his life experiences. The First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown takes place on Saturday, September 6, from 6 until 9 p.m. The Arts Company is showcasing new watercolor and graphite work by Jim Hubbman, encaustics by Robin Schlacter, and hosting a closing reception for Fahamu Pecou: Artist and Scholar. Tinney Contemporary is exhibiting The New Real 2: Figure-Focused, a photorealism exhibition curated by Sarah Wilson. The Rymer Gallery is unveiling indelible, work by Matthew Fine, Lisa Bachman, and Joshua Dewall. The Browsing Room Gallery in the Downtown Presbyterian Church is hosting an Matthew Fine – The Rymer Gallery opening reception for the exhibit Dane Carder: Memory of Wounds. In the Arcade, Watkins College of Art, Design & Film is marking the first anniversary of WAG with the exhibit Summer Studio, featuring
Carrie Cox – 40AU
Arts & Music at Wedgewood/Houston takes place on Saturday, September 6, from 5:30 until 8:30 p.m. David Lusk Gallery is unveiling stately abandonment, new oil on panel and Mylar works by Jared Small. (see page 64) Julia Martin Gallery is previewing new work by Martin along with a selection of deeply discounted past works. The Packing Plant is featuring The Door Is Still Open To My Heart, paintings by Doug Cloninger. The 444 Humphreys Pop Up Gallery is pairing two artists who share similar mediums: Vanessa Irzyk, DARKER THE JUICE, cut paper sandwiched between colored Plexiglas, and Manda Hac kney, Butterfly On Black, paper cuts on blac k paper. Ground Floor Gallery is showing Rock, Paper, Plastic, a solo exhibition by Heidi Martin Kuster. Zeitgeist is exhibiting Dark Matter by Heidi Martin Kuster – Ground Floor Gallery Seana Reilly, a painter photographer based in Atlanta, whose photos are monochrome landscapes with geologic features that are the inspiration for abstract canvases and works on paper. On Thursday, September 18, at 7 p.m. UnBound Arts is presenting Third Thursdays at The Building featuring work by visual artist Ryan Wagner and music by Pal & Zelda Sheldon and Lonesome Dove.
Seana Reilly – Zeitgeist
34 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
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Public Art
EXPERIENCING CIRCULATE Interactive Public Art at Lentz by Anne-Leslie Owens, Public Art Project Coordinator
C
COURTESY OF MNAC
irculate, located in the entry lobby of the newly opened Lentz Public Health Center, was installed and dedicated in July. It incorporates 124 LCD glass “pixels,” parabolic mirrors, and custom software with motion-capturing technology to create interactive public art. I asked Erik Carlson about the recent installation.
ALO: What was your design inspiration for Circulate? EC: My wife hit on the word “circulate” as an active verb that relates
to the circulatory system in the human body but also the mission of public health: circulating information. It also references the idea of small-world networks: social networks like the Internet, but also gene networks, the food chain, and the way epidemics spread. The layout of the LCD disks is modeled on the clustering of nodes in small-world network graphs.
ALO: How do you hope people will experience Circulate? EC: I want people to experience it up close from the stairs and
landings, but, just as important, I wanted to create an artwork that provided a long-term, engaging experience for those viewing at a distance. The animations are constantly changing, and, depending on where you are in the lobby, you gain different and surprising effects and perspectives.
ALO: As you were installing, what question did people ask? EC: People asked about the parabolic mirrors. Many people thought
that the images they were seeing were video images, but, in fact, they are just mirrored reflections of the atrium. These reflections are complex, because you have almost a feedback loop of reflectivity, between two layers of glass and the mirrored disk behind. If you lean in very, very close, with your nose almost touching the glass, you see your own gigantic reflection suddenly appear.
To see and experience Circulate for yourself, stop by the new Lentz Public Health Center at 2500 Charlotte Avenue. For more information, please visit publicart.nashville.gov.
Dog Art for Old Friends LIVE BENEFIT AUCTION | FRIDAY, OCT, 10, 6:30PM | THE OMNI NASHVILLE
Thirty-five Nashville artists and celebrities have volunteered to design dog statues that will be auctioned off to benefit Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary. The LIVE AUCTION will be held at the Omni Nashville on October 10. Tickets are $60 ($75 at the door) and may be purchased at www.dogartforoldfriends.org. The online auction will begin September 22. Lexus of Cool Springs is hosting a KICK-OFF PARTY on September 9, 6-8 p.m. and will exhibit a selection of the statues through October 9. RSVP at events@nashvillelexus.com
www.dogartforoldfriends.org All proceeds will benefit Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary in Mount Juliet, TN. The sanctuary is an all-volunteer run, 501(c)(3), non-profit organization dedicated to rescuing and caring for senior dogs in the Middle Tennessee area. 36 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
The Bookmark A Monthly Look at Hot Books and Cool Reads
MAREK KACKI, MD AESTHETIC MEDICINE
For more information about these books, visit www.parnassusbooks.net. Mr. Tall TONY EARLEY Tony Earley, author of Jim the Boy, Here We Are in Paradise, and Somehow Form a Family, is back with a charming collection of fiction. Everyone should read it—partly because Earley is a local author (he’s the Samuel Milton Fleming Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt), but mostly because it’s just that good. The tales of Mr. Tall take place in Nashville, as well as in Appalachia, on the Carolina coast, and in a mythical world of talking dogs. Among the fanciful characters introduced here are plenty of ordinary people who just wish to live extraordinary lives.
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Station Eleven EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL The author says, “My fourth novel is about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. It’s also about friendship, memory, love, celebrity, our obsession with objects, oppressive dinner parties, comic books, and knife-throwing.” Oppressive dinner parties AND knife throwing? We’re in. A spellbinding novel that weaves people’s lives together into an unusual story, it’s sure to be a big book of the fall.
“The One.”
The Human Age DIANE ACKERMAN Ackerman brings us face to face with the fact that the human race is now the single dominant force of change on the planet. Humans have “subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness.” This book fascinates rather than frightens, introducing readers to people and ideas that may just save our future. Definitely worth a read.
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The Bone Clocks DAVID MITCHELL Take the story of a teenage runaway, infuse it with psychic phenomena, then spin it off into a surreal adventure that starts in the English countryside and ends up all over the place, and you’ve got The Bone Clocks. This novel defies being pigeonholed in a single genre, and the The Washington Post calls Mitchell “the novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction.” This is one you might pick up, read the jacket flap, and wonder about. Go ahead and toss it in your shopping basket. You’ll be glad you did.
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Unplugged
Art in Formation
PHOTOGRAPH BY BECK Y FOX MAT THEWS
Stirrings from the Nashville Underground
R2 builders from across Tennessee showcase their droids at the Maker Faire
by Tony Youngblood
F Huddie William Ledbetter “Lead Belly” - Bronze, Edition of 12
Portrait Sculpture by Alan LeQuire September 6–October 25 Reception for the Artist September 20
PHOTOGRAPH BY BECK Y FOX MAT THEWS
or one day in September of last year, there was a place in Nashville where you could sit in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, screen print your own t-shirt, vacuform a Halloween mask, make a Dr. Who Sonic Screwdriver, watch miniature robots battle, see 3D printers in action, and cheer on a drag race of hot-rodded Power Wheels. All of this and more took place at the inaugural Nashville Mini Maker Faire at the Adventure Science Center. If you missed it, don’t worry. The faire is returning to ASC on Saturday, September 13, 2014, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And it’s free!
The Nashville faire is one of over one hundred Mini Maker Faires held all over the world. The event is licensed by Maker Media, publisher of Make Magazine and producer of the official faires in New York City and the Bay Area, and organized by Nashville groups such as the Adventure Science Center, ArtsCubed, Make Nashville, NashMicro, and the Middle Tennessee Robotic Arts Society. ASC’s Jeff Krinks says this year’s faire “will be even bigger than last year’s and chock full of exciting exhibits and hands-on demos.” In addition to panels, performances, workshops, and the return of popular exhibits like Chris Lee’s ever-growing, full-scale Millennium Falcon, Krink says the faire will feature “robotics, 3D puzzles, creative ‘smart art’, origami, electronic gadgets, props and costumes, sculpting, crafts, and much more.” Events like the Nashville Mini Maker Faire, Porter Flea Market, and the newly rebooted PhreakNIC technology conference prove that Nashville’s maker community is alive and thriving. Making things empowers, inspires, and opens up a world of possibilities. Today a Popsicle stick airplane. Tomorrow a starship.
4304 Charlotte Ave • Nashville, TN 615-298-4611 • www.lequiregallery.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN SCARPATI
Learn more at www.nashvillemakerfaire.com.
38 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Tony Youngblood is the founder of the Circuit Benders’ Ball, a biennial celebration of free culture, art, music, and the creative spirit. He created the open-source, multi-artist, scalable “art tunnel” concept called M.A.P.s (ModularArtPods.com) and runs the experimental improv music blog and podcast www.TheatreIntangible.com.
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The Great Unknowns
Wallpaper
Consignments
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Wallpaper & Designer Home Consignments Nashville
Ryan Wagner
PHOTOGRAPH BY TIFFANI BING
118 Powell Place 615-292-7590
by Jennifer Anderson
R
yan knew from a young age that art would be his life’s path. A natural talent, he was sought out from a young age to draw for friends and was consistently recognized for his ability throughout his school years, winning a Best in Tennessee art competition in fourth grade and voted Most Talented in high school. Fine art took a back seat to the more practical, financially viable graphic design degree, and he began his professional life working in commercial art. Missing the tactile feel of the materials and working with the layers of technique used to create his artwork, he left his corporate job to work freelance and devote himself to art.
Ryan Wagner, The Mother Church, 2014, Acrylic, oil, and spray paint
Wagner works in several different styles depicting his view of the world and the people he encounters. His abstract works are a way to let loose creatively and explore techniques and materials without a calculated vision. Creating portraits began as a way to make money, but along the way he found himself becoming enamored with the human face and the rich history portrayed there.
A show featuring the work of Ryan Wagner opens September 18 at 7 p.m. at UnBound Arts Presents: Third Thursdays at The Building. For more information, contact unboundartsnashville@gmail.com.
40 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Madison
1202 Gallatin Pike South 615-945-7410 www.wallpaperanddecor.com
Finding Fela! by Justin Stokes
W
hen charged with creating a biographical work, “Who are they?” is the cardinal question the creators must ask. And when lost in the emotional complexity that offers more questions than answers, those three words become an ongoing chant.
The overall effect of Finding Fela! is that patrons will feel like they’ve been initiated into a club that celebrates an international icon once strangely obscured by time. It is the ideal condition that many viewers go into the film without prior knowledge, as it’s the visual authority on Fela Kuti. But some may complain as the wealth of content
Film still from Finding Fela!
reaches the two-hour mark. It is this contributing writer’s opinion, however, that Finding Fela! earned its spot as a selection of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and upholds Esquire’s assertion that director Alex Gibney is “becoming the most important documentarian of our time.” It’s an astonishing perspective from the third-story window of time into the terrace of one man’s character.
For show time and other information about Finding Fela! please visit www.belcourt.org. As screenings are limited, be sure to visit the film’s website www.findingfela.com to keep up with the progress of the film. PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTY SIMMONS
Finding Fela!—the latest from maven moviemaker Alex Gibney (We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks; Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God)—mirrors the production of a Broadway musical that wants to celebrate the life of Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s most famous musician. Comparable to Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan, his creativity was a beautiful sunflower which thrived in barren, oppressive conditions. A musical prodigy, Kuti cultivated spiritual music and political activism to sire the 1970s sensation known as “Afrobeat.” The anthems for civic improvement were a fusion of highlife, funk, jazz, and other genres, which blasted traditional music structure and highlighted the Nigerian government’s butchery of its people. But as the interviews show the greatness of Fela, they also expose his weaknesses. His visions become quixotic, and doubt is cast against the bandleader. Will he prove to be the play’s hero, or is the main character really the bad guy?
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MICHELE BUONO/PIERO RICCARDI
Film Review
NashvilleArts.com
Justin Stokes is the founder of the MTSU Film Guild, a student organization which functions as a production company for student filmmakers. He is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and social media manager.
September 2014 | 41
As I See It
T
A Story Well Told . . .
here are few moments more memorable in the life of an art historian t h a n w a l k i n g i n t o the Galleria Borghese and seeing Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25, for the first time. It is a sculpture of astonishing beauty and virtuosity. Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned the Italian Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini to carve three sculptures: Pluto and Persephone, Apollo and Daphne, and David. All three sculptures demonstrate the artist’s mastery, but in Apollo and Daphne the artist pushes the extremity of the material. Bernini’s ability to manipulate a stone as hard as marble as if it were as soft as dough has confounded and delighted scholars and visitors for centuries.
T
ohn Pope-Hennessy tells us that Bernini was immersed in several restoration projects at the time he was working on Apollo and Daphne. He admired the sculptures of Ancient Rome and Greece, especially Hellenistic Greece. His version of Apollo was based on the classical statue the Apollo Belvedere. In Bernini’s interpretation the frontal pose of the prototype was exchanged for a side view. The sculptor’s intention was for Apollo and Daphne to be shown against a wall at eye level where a single view would provide the most intense emotional impact, the peak of Daphne’s horror and Apollo’s resignation of unrequited love. Nevertheless, the sculpture is fully finished
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1625, Apollo and Daphne, Marble, 93” at Galleria Borghese
on all sides allowing light to define form with almost spiritual intensity.
B
ernini’s sculpture is a metaphor for how sculpture transforms one material into its opposite. Marble becomes flesh and bone. Daphne, in turn, is converted into wood, another material often used in sculpture. Deep cutting in the drapery, flowing hair, and emerging tree convey the immediacy of action, while the delicacy and thinness of the marble leaves make them appear almost transparent. Bernini was an architect, sculptor, painter, and writer whose
42 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
impact virtually defines the Baroque in Rome. The three sculptures he created for Cardinal Borghese are still on view in the former Villa Borghese (now the Galleria). The myth of Apollo and Daphne has never been conveyed more emphatically than by Bernini, who takes the medium to the limits of transformation and the narrative to dramatic denouement. PHOTO BY ANTHONY SCARLATI
J
PHOTOGRAPH : ANDREA JEMOLO/SCAL A / ART RESOURCE, NY
he god Apollo is the victim of his own arrogance. He insulted Cupid who retaliated by shooting an arrow through Apollo’s heart to incite love. Cupid also shot Daphne with a different arrow, which would produce repulsion. As Apollo advances, Daphne beseeches her father, Peneus, to help her escape the amorous suitor. At the instant that Apollo reaches out to embrace the elusive Daphne, Peneus transforms his beloved daughter into a laurel tree. Her fingers become branches, her toes roots, and her hair leaves. Although the object of his desire has slipped through his hands, the heartbroken Apollo devotes the remainder of his life to caring for the tree. According to Ovid, Apollo asks for the laurel to be evergreen and for laurel wreaths to be worn henceforth in triumph and ovation.
Susan H. Edwards, PhD Executive Director & CEO Frist Center for the Visual Arts
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Lee Ann Womack MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME
by Holly Gleason | Photograph by John Scarpati
L
ee Ann Womack smiles, and it’s hard to believe this is the woman behind The Way I’m Livin’, the decidedly dark collection of stark songs addressing the human condition. Drawing on songwriter/artists Chris Knight, Julie Miller, Hayes Carll, Mindy Smith, Mando Saenz, and Neil Young, the core sample of addictions, heartbreak, devastation, and the harsh light that often falls on people in the throes of falling apart seems contrary to the tiny woman with the buttery-color hair. “I’ve always been pretty sunny,” admits the vocalist with the twinge in her voice, “but when it comes to songs, the darker the better.”
She pauses, “And if you think about ‘I May Hate Myself In The Morning’ or ‘Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago’, I was telling that kind of truth. Just this time, that’s all I wanted to do, and thankfully Luke Lewis understood where my heart was when he was still running Universal.”
Having sat out of the swirl for seven years—“I wanted people to know this was a conscious choice”—she returns with a crescendo. Decidedly more direct, the CMA Female Vocalist of the Year hits new highs as a singer.
The Wall Street Journal has already agreed, offering, “She digs in as Starting with the title song from hard traditionalist Adam if she were making up for lost time,” and Billboard echoed, Wright, where the heroine admits she can’t get on the “One of her vocal flourishes conjures up the shudder right track because “bein’ bad feels so good,” Womack one would expect when encountering the devil in stumbles through the Texas swing of “Sleepin’ with the the flesh.” Even RollingStone.com recognized the I’ve always been Devil,” the haunted, can’t-move-on “Don’t Listen shift with “feels like something Merle Haggard To The Wind,” and the chilling, commonplace, or Waylon Jennings would have crafted back in pretty sunny, but lost-soul confession “Send It On Down.” the Seventies.”
when it comes to
Recorded live on the floor with drummer Matt Whether a faltering gospel piano or an almost-tribal songs, the darker Chamberlain (Tori Amos, Soundgarden, Frank drumbeat, it was the song’s essence they were Ocean), guitarist Duke Levine (Peter Wolf, Mary distilling. For fans of songs that tear at one’s gut, the better. Chapin Carpenter), bassist Glen Worf (Mark Womack made the decision to let nothing stand Knopfler, Kevin Welch) and Mac McAnally ( Jimmy between her and the emotional center of the music. Buffett), the musicians sculpted their performances to “This time, we didn’t think about what the marketing people Womack’s vocals. Unconventional in a town where the players want or the promotion people need; we just went for the best play and the singers fill in the tracks, it added an immediacy and possible songs, the strongest feelings, and what moved us. Frank is a dynamic to the tracking that’s palpable. song man, and I can’t get enough music. “Lee Ann comes at a song like a player,” says producer Frank Liddell. “When you come to our house, you don’t see pictures of us with “Letting the musicians be driven by that vocal is creating a whole famous people or awards. You see instruments everywhere—and other way to get inside the song. You can hear it.” quite possibly hear someone playing something. For Womack, who sold in excess of six million copies of I Hope You “It’s how we live, and I f inally got to make a record that showed Dance and performed the title track at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert that. We have religion in ‘All His Saints’, connection and healing honoring Nelson Mandela and at Maya Angelou’s recent memorial A in ‘Same Kind Of Different’, and even a man obsessed with a Celebration of Rising Joy, the hard left might seem stunning. But the dancer in this great old Roger Miller cut ‘Tomorrow Night In East Texan who’s been the duet partner of choice for Alan Jackson, Baltimore’. To me, if you can give people that, you’re turning ’em George Strait, and Willie Nelson doesn’t see it that way. “I’ve always on to what makes music so alive and necessary, to what makes recorded songs by these writers . . . had Buddy and Julie Miller on the you feel.” CMA Awards with me,” she says. “Maybe it’s not what high-gloss, modern country is, but you know, I remember when country songs Lee Ann Womack’s new album The Way I’m Livin’ will be were the raw and the real of life. Those songs were tough things told released September 23. For more information please visit in a way that made you see ’em.” www.leeannwomack.com. 44 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 45
Installation in the Crouch Gallery at Customs House Museum
Paul Harmon: Inner Voices Customs House Museum through September 7
by Karen Parr-Moody
P
aul Harmon’s oil paintings in the exhibit Paul Harmon: Inner Voices engage viewers with a virtual kaleidoscope of rabbits, dogs, fish, baby chicks, and languid women. With their salon-style hanging, these works are fittingly on view in a cavernous space—the Crouch Gallery with its 22-foot-tall ceilings—at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville.
“Paul’s work is perfect for this format, with the varied scale of canvases, the bold colors and lines he uses,” says curator Terri Jordan. “Paul is a huge fan of Picasso, as well as literature. The salon styling gives homage to Gertrude Stein’s apartment, which encompassed both.”
Within this montage of paintings, one can see Picasso’s influence, as Harmon’s work displays the stylistic ease of that great painter’s line drawings Dove and Francoise Gilot. Harmon also draws on the style of Henri Matisse, his line work fluidly graceful and possessing a sophisticated color scheme of stark primaries with sweet pastels.
Despite his light hand as a draughtsman, Harmon infuses each line with full impact. This is seen in the finer details, such as the curvaceous lips of women. Such lips retain the modernity of a Picasso line drawing, but also carry with them the weight of antiquity, each curve invoking those carved into a marble Aphrodite. And while Harmon
Once We Were Children, 2013, Oil on canvas, 36” x 48”
surely has whimsy as his subject matter, he also picks subjects that suggest a reflective mood, as with the painting The Yellow Chair, which depicts a metal chair that belonged to his grandmother. Harmon, originally from Brentwood, began his career in the 1960s, then spent twelve years in Paris beginning in 1986. He has long been known for the strong manner by
which he outlines his figures, which certainly reveals a French influence. But for this exhibit, the artist has succeeded in using a softer hand in defining his subjects, creating a sense of calm. Paul Harmon: Inner Voices will be on view through September 7 at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville. For more information, visit www.customshousemuseum.org.
where art meets the emotion of sound by appointment (615) 881 0427
gre en hills
p a t h o s e n d o r p hin cd p l a ye r
www.atelier13-usa.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN SCARPATI
B ruce’s B ig A dventure The Doyle and Debbie Show Gets Ready For Hollywood, Baby!
by Michael Dukes
T
he Doyle and Debbie Show creator, Bruce Arntson, gets ready to take one of Nashville’s weirdest cultural landmarks to the big screen.
The Doyle and Debbie Show has succeeded in creating a subgenre all its own. Sure, you can draw references ranging from This Is Spinal Tap to Hee Haw to Monty Python. But at the end of the day, there’s only one Doyle and one Debbie (actually, within the story, Doyle’s now on his third Debbie, played brilliantly by Jenny Littleton). This raucous live show manages to skewer and honor classic country music and culture simultaneously. A fictitious down-and-out singing duo manages to perfectly nail the sweet spot that balances parody with genuine homage. It’s a twisted mixture, but it works. Even the show’s writer and co-star isn’t quite sure how he pulled off this stunt. “It’s purely accidental,” Arntson insists. “All you
can do is try and be funny, using your own sensibilities. Oh, and don’t be mean. “When we first started doing the show upstairs at Bongo Java, we truly didn’t know whether people would get up and walk out during numbers like ‘God Loves America Best’. I was totally curious.” But they didn’t walk out. They laughed. A lot. And soon returned with friends in tow. Before long, Doyle and Debbie had carved out a regular Tuesday night slot at The Station Inn, Nashville’s real-deal bluegrass shrine down in the heart of The Gulch. The audience on any given night tends to be a mash-up of two distinct crowds. “In general, we get baby boomers,” says Arntson. “Maybe they didn’t necessarily listen to George Jones and Porter Wagoner, but they have the context and can appreciate the music. These are really
48 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
salacious and sexist songs that we’re being ironic about to make a point. They get that.
“But then, we do get a type of hard-core-country fan who doesn’t seem to need the irony to appreciate the show. ‘Fat Women in Trailers’ to them is really about fat women in trailers. There’s no irony involved.
The show also draws a steady stream of celebrities, some from the heart of mainstream country. “Toby Keith has embraced us. He flew us to his country club and had us do the show at his Christmas party,” Arntson recalls. “And there we are, doing songs like ‘God Loves America Best’. After the show, Toby’s manager told me he turned to Toby during that one and asked, you think they’re making fun of you? Toby nodded, but he was laughing. He loved it. He gets what we’re doing.” George Jones, elder statesman of the genre being parodied, also showed up. “I’m thinking to myself, we’re about to make fun of George Jones in front of George Jones, the best country singer of all time,” says Arntson. “It was unnerving, to say the least.” Eight years after sketching out the first handful of Doyle and Debbie tunes, Arntson is ready to broadcast his parallel country universe to an even wider audience. He recently completed the script for a feature-length film adaptation. The project will shoot in Nashville via Ruckus Films. Long-time mentor, friend, and collaborator Coke Sams is directing. Sams and Arntson have
PHOTOGRAPH BY HUNTER ARMISTEAD
“On Trip Advisor, you look at the reviews and there are a handful of people who are outraged. But you’ve got to have that. If I’m not pissing anybody off, I’ve failed.”
Doyle and Debbie – together forever
teamed on numerous projects. Their work together spans everything from Existo (Nashville’s answer to the Rocky Horror Picture Show) to multiple releases in the Ernest series, some done with Disney. Riding the wave of Nashville’s swelling entrepreneurial spirit, they plan to pull off this production without the involvement of a major studio. The decision to bootstrap led to a Kickstarter campaign designed to crowdfund recording of the soundtrack, which features a dozen new songs. “It’s not just The Doyle and Debbie Show brought to the screen. It’s more like the adventures of Doyle and Debbie. It’s a completely different scenario. So it’s all new songs. That means we’ve got to record the music before we can begin shooting,” Arntson explains. “That’s the most important pre-production aspect.
“
A fictitious down-and-out singing duo manages to perfectly nail the sweet spot that balances parody with genuine homage.
”
“My friend Colin Linden is helping with the music. He’s a producer and guitarist who works with T-Bone Burnett, Buddy Miller, all these great people. Super-talented guy.
Doyle and Debbie doing what they do best
PHOTOGRAPH BY HUNTER ARMISTEAD
“And we’ll be bringing in serious country artists like Toby Keith. Not just to sing, but to play pivotal roles in the story. The good thing about Toby is that he gets it; he wants to play along. He has on-camera experience, which is critical. There’s such a difference between performing and on-screen acting.” Another key production decision has been finalized: the protagonist’s hero vehicle. “Doyle drives a Cadillac convertible with steer horns. It may be cliché, but you just gotta do it,” Arntson smiles. The hapless Doyle, Debbie, and musical sidekick, Buddy (Matt Carlton), are gearing up for a new round of adventures and undoubtedly for a new Pandora’s box of troubles. In the meantime, see them in action at www.doyleanddebbie.com, catch the live show most Tuesday nights at The Station Inn, 402 12th Avenue South, or hear a sneak preview of the movie soundtrack at www.kck.st/1pmSE7m.
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 49
Arts Worth Watching
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened on Broadway in 1979 and became an instant hit, winning eight Tony Awards the same year it premiered. Since then Sweeney Todd has traveled across the United States, to West End, to the big screen, and now to Nashville Public Television. On Friday, September 26, at 8 p.m., as part of the PBS Arts Fall Festival, NPT brings you Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Concert with the New York Philharmonic. The show, presented via Live from Lincoln Center, features bass-baritone Bryn Terfel in the title role and Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson as Mrs. Lovett, with Christian Borle and more. Audra McDonald serves as host. Together with The Rep, which is bringing its own staging of Sweeney Todd to TPAC in October, NPT is hosting a viewing party of the premiere on Friday, September 26, at 7 p.m. Come to NPT’s Studio A to meet The Rep cast, and settle in for an extraordinary e vening of enter tainment. For more information, please visit www.tennesseerep.org.
Documentary fans have much to be thankful for this month. The P.O.V. series continues on Monday nights, starting with The Genius of Marian on September 8 at 9 p.m. This visually rich, emotionally complex story about one family’s struggle to come to terms with Alzheimer’s disease was an Off icial Selection of the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. After Pam White is diagnosed at age 61 with early-onset Alzheimer’s, life begins to change, slowly but irrevocably, for Pam and everyone around her. Her husband grapples with his role as it evolves from primary partner to primary caregiver. Pam’s adult children find ways to show their love and support while mourning the gradual loss of their mother. Pam’s eldest son, Banker, records their conversations, allowing her to share memories of childhood and of her mother, the renowned painter Marian Williams Steele, who herself had Alzheimer’s and died in 2001.
On Monday, September 22, it’s Koch. New York City mayors have a world stage on which to strut, and they have made legendary use of it. Yet few have matched the bravado, combativeness, and egocentricity that Ed Koch brought to the office during his three terms from 1978 to 1989. As Neil Barsky’s film recounts, Koch was more than the blunt, funny man New Yorkers either loved or hated. Elected in the 1970s during the city’s fiscal crisis, he was a new Democrat for the dawning Reagan era—fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Koch finds the former mayor politically active to the end (he died in 2013)—still winning the affection of many New Yorkers while driving others to distraction.
Whistler and the Case for Beauty
James McNeill Whistler, best known for his painting Whistler’s Mother, was the original art star. He had a caustic wit and was a man about town. For the first time, a film examines the biography of the man and the course of his career. James McNeill Whistler and the Case for Beauty, coming to NPT on Friday, September 12, at 9 p.m., uses dramatic recreations, art, graphics, and interviews combined to profile the life of Whistler, one of the most recognized artists in Europe and, today, placed in the first rank of modern painters Wa t e r c o l o r b y A m e r i c a n a r t i s t M a r i a n Williams Steele, of her daughter, Pam White, and grandson, Banker. White, diagnosed, like her mother, with Alzheimer’s disease, is the subject of The Genius of Marian.
50 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Austin City Limits, as is often the case, has Nashville connections this month. On September 3, don’t miss Kacey Musgraves. On September 10, it’s Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell.
Weekend Schedule 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 11:00 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 6:00 6:30
Saturday
am Martha Speaks Angelina Ballerina Curious George Curious George Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Sesame Street Shorts Dinosaur Train Sewing with Nancy Sew It All Garden Smart P. Allen Smith Simply Ming Cook’s Country noon America’s Test Kitchen Victory Garden’s Edible Feast Sara’s Weeknight Meals Martha’s Bakes Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting Best of Joy of Painting Woodsmith Shop The Woodwright’s Shop Rough Cut with Tommy Mac This Old House Ask This Old House Hometime PBS NewsHour Weekend pm Tennessee’s Wild Side
Nashville Public Television
Sunday
am Sid the Science Kid Peg + Cat Curious George Curious George Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Word World Sesame Street Shorts Dinosaur Train Tennessee’s Wild Side Volunteer Gardener Tennessee Crossroads A Word on Words Nature noon To the Contrary The McLaughlin Group Moyers & Company Washington Week with Gwen Ifill Globe Trekker California’s Gold Ecosense For Living America’s Heartland Rick Steves’ Europe Antiques Roadshow PBS NewsHour Weekend pm Charlie Rose: The Week
Daytime Schedule 5:00 5:30 6:00 6:30 7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30 5:00 5:30 6:00
THIS MONTH
September 2014
am Classical Stretch Body Electric Wild Kratts Wild Kratts Curious George Curious George Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Sesame Street Dinosaur Train Super Why! Peg + Cat Sid the Science Kid Caillou pm Thomas & Friends Sesame Street Shorts The Cat in the Hat Clifford the Big Red Dog Curious George Arthur Arthur Wild Kratts Wild Kratts Martha Speaks WordGirl pm PBS NewsHour
Nashville Public Television
Ken Burns’s seven-part, 14-hour documentary weaves the stories of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of one of the most prominent and influential families in American politics. Sunday-Saturday, September 14-20 8:00 PM
Finding Your Roots: In Search of Our Fathers
In the second, 10-part season, Professor Henry Louis Gates continues his journey into the past to illuminate the familial histories of 30 of today’s most recognizable names in sports, music, film, television, theatre and literature.
Tuesdays, beginning September 23 8:00 PM
Penguins: A Spy in the Huddle A Nature Special Presentation Witness the intimate, emotional and sometimes amusing behavior of Emperor, Rockhopper and Humboldt penguins – nature’s most devoted parents.
Wednesdays, beginning September 24 8:00PM
wnpt.org
Monday
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Tasty Treasures. 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History In the Arena (19011910). FDR courts and weds Eleanor Roosevelt, the shy orphaned daughter of Theodore’s alcoholic brother, Elliott. Together, they begin a family. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Eagles of Mercy
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7:00 Secrets of Underground London 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History Get Action (1858-1901). A frail, asthmatic young Theodore Roosevelt transforms himself. 10:00 Bluegrass Underground Steep Canyon Rangers. 10:30 Life on the Line: Coming of Age Between Nations 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
7:00 Antiques Roadshow Corpus Christi, Hour Three. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Boston, Hour One. 9:00 POV The Genius of Marian. The emotionally complex story about one family’s struggle to come to terms with Alzheimer’s disease. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Shooting in the Wild
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7:00 Secrets of Westminster Go inside the gothic walls for a look at the hidden world of the Houses of Commons and Lords. 8:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Breathless, Part 3. 1961 London, when doctors were treated like gods. 10:00 Bluegrass Underground Widespread Panic. 10:30 Closer to the Truth What is Ultimate Reality? 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Corpus Christi, Hour One. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Corpus Christi, Hour Two. 9:00 POV After Tiller. A portrait of the four doctors in the United States still openly performing thirdtrimester abortions. The Boomer List 10:30 Last of Summer Wine American Experience 11:00 BBC World News Tuesday, September 23 11:30 Next Door Neighbors 8:00 PM Community.
Sunday
Primetime Evening Schedule
September 2014 2
Wednesday
3
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7:00 Dick Cavett’s Watergate 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History The Fire of Life (19101919). Franklin masters wartime Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, while Eleanor finds personal salvation in war work. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition: Everglades to Okefenokee
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7:00 Enemy of the Reich: Noor Inayat Khan Story A daring spy who died fighting the Nazis. 8:00 Big Burn: American Experience 1910 wildfires in the Northern Rockies. 9:00 Frontline Ebola Outbreak. Health officials track the deadly Ebola outbreak and trying to stop its spread. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Pride & Joy
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7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:00 Nature 7:30 Volunteer Gardener Leave it to Beavers. 8:00 The Roosevelts: 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History An Intimate History The Rising Road (1933The Storm (1920-1933). 1939). Aimed at ending FDR returns to politics in the Depression, FDR’s 1928 as governor of New sweeping New Deal reYork. In early Depression stores the people’s selfyears, Democrats turn to confidence and him as their 1932 presitransforms the relationdential nominee. ship between them and 10:00 BBC World News their government. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:00 BBC World News 11:00 Austin City Limits The Head and the 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Royal Paintbox Heart/Gomez.
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7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Children’s Health Crisis Obesity. Medical professionals and nutritional experts explore the causes and consequences of Tennessee’s level of childhood obesity. 9:00 Doc Martin Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Aging Matters End of Life.
Thursday
5
19 7:00 Aging Matters End of Life. 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History The Common Cause (1939-1944). FDR shatters the third-term tradition, struggles to prepare a reluctant country to enter World War II and, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, helps set the course toward victory. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Moyers & Company
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7:00 NPT Favorites 9:00 Washington Week with Gwen Ifill 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Moyers & Company 11:30 Vintage A Vintage for the Ages. Napa Valley, Chminey Rock, Markham Vineyards and Rutherford Hills hope for a vintage season.
Friday
7:00 Nature 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:00 NPT Favorites Meet the Coywolf. 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 9:00 James McNeil Whistler 8:00 NOVA 8:00 Rick Steves Special and the Case for Beauty Vaccines – Calling the The Holy Land, Israelis Whister, best known for Shots. Children are getand Palestinians Today. his painting “Whistler’s ting sick and dying from Steves weaves together Mother, “ was the original preventable conditions two narratives to better art star, a caustic wit and because parents skip understand a place that man about town. their children’s shots. is a holy land. 10:00 BBC World News 9:00 Operation Maneater 9:00 Doc Martin 10:30 Last of Summer Wine The Tameness of the 11:00 Vintage Crocodile. Wolf. When Grapes Hit the 10:00 BBC World News 10:00 BBC World News Fan. Markham Vine10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:30 Last of Summer Wine yards’ harvest explodes 11:00 Austin City Limits into life. Emmylou Harris and 11:00 Kehinde Wiley: Rodney Crowell. An Economy of Grace
7:00 Cuban Missile Crisis: 7:00 Nature Three Men Go to War Touching the Wild. 8:00 The Fidel Castro Tapes 8:00 NOVA News and documentary Ghosts of Machu Picchu. footage details the life and times of one of the 9:00 Operation Maneater Polar Bear. Inspect a most controversial politiwarning system to deter cal figures of the 20th bears and a controvercentury. sial experiment to keep 9:00 Frontline Secret State of North them away from town. Korea. 10:00 BBC World News 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Austin City Limits 11:00 Aging Matters Kacey Musgraves/Dale Caregiving. Watson.
Tuesday
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20 7:00 Lawrence Welk 8:00 The Roosevelts: An Intimate History A Strong and Active Faith (1944-1962). After her husband’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt proves herself a shrewd politician and a skilled negotiator in her own right. 10:00 Globe Trekker El Salvador & Honduras. 11:00 Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild A Long Hard Struggle.
13 7:00 Great Performances Star-Spangled Spectacular: Bicentennial of Our National Anthem. Live from Fort McHenry National Monument and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, celebrate the penning of the national anthem. 9:00 Doc Martin The Tameness of the Wolf. 10:00 Globe Trekker East Texas. 11:00 F.S. Key and the Song That Built America
7:00 Lawrence Welk Carnival. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Miranda What a Surprise. 9:00 Doc Martin Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? 10:00 Globe Trekker London City Guide 2. 11:00 Healing ADD with Dr. Daniel Amen, MD and Tana Amen, RN
Saturday
Nashville Public Television
wnpt.org
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7:00 Masterpiece Mystery! The Paradise, Season 2– Part 2. 8:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Inspector Lewis, Season 7 – Greater Good. Hathaway has been promoted to inspector, 10:00 Bluegrass Underground Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. 10:30 Craftsman’s Legacy The Guitar Maker. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
5
7:00 Masterpiece Mystery! The Paradise, Season 2. Time has not stood still since last season’s wedding disaster. 8:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Miss Marple Season 7: Endless Night. Marple befriends a chauffeur. 9:30 Mystery of Agatha Christie with David Suchet 10:30 Craftsman’s Legacy The Glassblower. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
2
1
Rick Steves Special The Holy Land, Israelis and Palestinians Today Thursday, September 11 8:00 PM
7:00 Tennessee Crossroads 7:00 Penguins: Spy in the Huddle, A Nature 7:30 Volunteer Gardener 8:00 Eating Alabama Special Presentation First Steps. Watched by A filmmaker and his wife spycams, newborn Empursue local food and peror penguins walk on discover community, sustainability and identheir mothers' feet and tity along the way. take their own first un9:00 Doc Martin steady steps. Hazardous Exposure. 8:00 NOVA 10:00 BBC World News 9:00 Rise of the Black 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Pharaohs 11:00 Consider the 10:00 BBC World News Conversation 2: 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Stories About Cure, 11:00 Austin City Limits Relief and Comfort Coldplay.
OCTOBER
25
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Real Rail Adventures Switzerland Thursday, September 25 8:00 PM
Nashville Public Television
7:00 Lawrence Welk Salute to Nashville. 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Miranda Je Regret Nothing. 9:00 Doc Martin Hazardous Exposure. Martin's mother returns to Portwenn with some interesting news. 10:00 Globe Trekker Central America: Costa Rica & Nicaragua.
3 7:00 ACL Presents: Americana Music Festival 2013 8:00 Austin City Limits Celebrates 40 Years Hosted by Jeff Bridges, Matthew McConaughey and Sheryl Crow. Performances include Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, and more. 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Moyers & Company 11:30 Vintage DIY at Chimney Rock.
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7:00 Lawrence Welk 8:00 Keeping Appearances 8:30 Miranda The Dinner Party. 9:00 Doc Martin The Practice Around the Corner. 10:00 Globe Trekker Midwest U.S.A. 11:00 Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild We Live With the Land.
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7:00 Aging Matters Caregiving. 8:00 Live from Lincoln Center Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Concert. Sondheim’s musical masterpiece comes back to life in this bold new production starring Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Moyers and Company
Visit wnpt.org for complete 24 hour schedules for NPT and NPT2
30
7:00 Finding Your Roots: In Search of Our Fathers 8:00 Makers: Women in Comedy Women in the world of comedy, from the 70s sitcoms to today’s multifaceted landscape. 9:00 Frontline Bigger Than Vegas. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:00 Fleeced: Speaking Out Against Senior Financial Abuse
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7:00 Penguins: Spy 7:00 Finding Your Roots: 7:00 Tennessee Crossroads in the Huddle, A Nature 7:30 Volunteer Gardener In Search of Our Special Presentation Fathers 8:00 Real Rail Adventures: The Journey. Emperor 8:00 The Boomer List: Switzerland penguins cross a treachAmerican Masters Construction marvels erous frozen sea. A look at 19 iconic and visual splendors of boomers — one born 8:00 NOVA the Swiss rail system. Rise of the Hackers. each year of the baby 9:00 Doc Martin The Practice Around the boom including Billy Joel 9:00 Secrets of the Dead Resurrecting Richard III. Corner. and novelist Amy Tan. 10:00 BBC World News 9:30 Pioneers of Television 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Carol Burnett & The 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 Richard Bangs’ 11:00 Austin City Limits Funny Ladies. Adventures with The Steve Miller Band/ 10:00 BBC World News Preservation Hall Jazz 10:30 Last of Summer Wine Purpose Switzerland: Band. 11:00 Last One Quest for the Sublime
Nova Vaccines — Calling the Shots Wednesday, September 10 8:00 PM
7:00 Antiques Roadshow Knoxville, Hour Two. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Raleigh, NC, Hour Three. 9:00 TBD 10:00 BBC World News 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:30 To Market to Market to Buy a Fat Pig A celebration of market houses, market places and farmers' markets across the United States.
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7:00 Antiques Roadshow Knoxville, Hour One. 8:00 Antiques Roadshow Boston, Hour Three. 9:00 POV Koch. Few NYC mayors have matched the bravado, combativeness and egocentricity that Ed Koch brought to the office during his three terms from 1978 to 1989. 10:30 Last of Summer Wine 11:00 BBC World News 11:30 Sixteenth Maine at Gettysburg
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7:00 Masterpiece Mystery! Miss Marple Season 7: A Caribbean Mystery. 8:30 Masterpiece Mystery! Miss Marple Season 7: A Greenshaw’s Mystery. Miss Marple visits a tropical island hotel. 10:00 Bluegrass Underground Dave Eggar with Amy Lee & Hammerstep. 10:30 Craftsman’s Legacy The Woodworker. 11:00 Tavis Smiley 11:30 Scully/The World Show
Courage Unmasked
Distilling Beauty from Suffering, Local Artists Turn Radiation Masks Into Works of Art
P
by Karen Parr-Moody | Photographs by Jerry Atinip
atients with head and neck cancers may be prescribed therapy that requires immobilization of the head so that radiation rays are aimed at designated areas. This is accomplished by a porous mesh mask that fits like a second skin onto the patient’s face and is then affixed to a treatment table. Snap, snap, snap. For some patients, the sound of this mask being bolted into place can be horrifying. By the time multiple treatments are finished—some people go through dozens—patients have experienced the mask’s claustrophobic effects and are glad to be done with it. Some people leave their masks at the hospital. Others take them home. One Nashville patient took his mask home and placed it in his back yard, where he shot it and set it on fire.
Lori Anne Parker-Danley, Interval 1
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Kelly Harwood, Being Brave
“
Melody Erickson, Tribal Energy
The patients are very happy that something is going to be done with the mask, which most of them loathe.
Cindy and Aliyah Young, Magic Bird
”
Michael Damico, Dragon’s Battle Mask
56 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
No two cancer stories are alike. And no two of these masks are alike. At the metaphysical level, each one tells a story as different as each cancer journey. Cookie Kerxton, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, underwent twenty-eight radiation treatments for vocal cord cancer in 2008, wearing a mask so tight that its mesh left a checkerboard imprint on her skin at the end of each session (a side effect for many patients). Her experience gave way to curiosity: What did patients do with their masks after their treatment? And could these devices, which were identified with a painful experience, be channeled into something beautiful? It turned out these masks could be transformed. An artist herself, Kerxton asked other artists to channel the masks into works of art that could, in turn, be exhibited and sold to raise funds for head and neck cancer patients.
Many well-known area artists got involved, even if they were often working with materials with which they are unfamiliar. Heustess, a potter, felt the energy of one mask when he took on the challenge. The mask’s mouth had been cut out, so he pushed leaves through the hole so they flowed outward with vitality. He also covered the mask with dense foliage in a nod to the archetypal figure some call the Green Man, who symbolizes the life found within nature. It seemed an apt approach for transfiguring a device involved in so toxic an experience as radiation. A few artists learned biographical information about the masks’ owners, while many did not. But, like Heustess, all transfigured their masks in a positive direction.
Kerxton’s idea became the Courage Unmasked exhibition, in which more than one hundred artists participated. It was unveiled at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, in 2009, and it paved the way for more such events. Now Nashville will host its own Courage Unmasked event on September 27. During a gala at OZ Nashville, A Night of Courage Unmasked will feature masks worn by patients treated at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and refashioned into art by area artists. Some masks will be auctioned off to fund head and neck cancer treatment. This program is a partnership between Sarratt Art Studios, the Sarratt Art Gallery, and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Following the gala, some masks will be on view at the Sarratt Art Gallery at Vanderbilt University through November. David Heustess, the assistant director for visual arts for the office of Dean of Students at Vanderbilt University, is organizing the Courage Unmasked exhibit and the fundraiser gala. “ The patients are very happy that something is going to be done with the mask, which most of them loathe,” Heustess says. His own father passed away from a brain tumor, and he said this relationship to cancer was a thread that ran through the project. Heustess worked with about sixty artists on this project and discovered that most of them were touched by cancer in some way, whether they were cancer survivors or were creating the art in honor of a deceased loved one. “Every person I passed out a mask to personally shared something of their story with me,” he says.
Nancy Cooley, Reflections on Courage NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 57
Lesley Patterson-Marx, an artist and educator, didn’t know the story behind her mask’s previous user, but she did know something of cancer. Her father died of a brain tumor in 2006. “I am kind of familiar with some of the treatments people go through, and also the way their body deteriorates,” she says. “It’s frightening. And the masks just kind of held that energy for me.” So she took a whimsical and cozy approach, enveloping her mask with rectangles and “puff balls” of yarn. “There’s just a lot of pain and suffering attached to the mask,” she says. “And I wanted my process to be one that didn’t contain any pain for me, one that was calming and healing and fun, a process by which I could maybe negate or heal some of that.”
Emily Allison, Warrior
“brave.” Then he considered how many large feathers he would need to create a headdress. But after holding up a paintbrush beside the mask—Harwood is a painter—he decided his paintbrushes would become the headdress. With the Courage Unmasked project, an array of talented Tennessee artists have been given parameters that are strictly defined: Create beautiful art out of a radiation therapy mask. But the variations they have created within that narrow vocabulary are abundant. One can only hope that the cure for cancer can become—one day—as abundant. A selection of masks will be auctioned at A Night of Courage Unmasked at OZ Nashville on September 27. For more information about the event and the program, visit www.courageunmaskedtn.org.
Laurie Graham, Resurgence
Many artists decorated the exterior of a mask, while others turned the mask around. “It becomes a shelter,” Heustess says. JC Johnson, an instructor at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Art Studios, built something akin to a doll’s house on her mask’s interior, complete with a balsa wood chandelier. The themes of regeneration, healing, and comfort run throughout the artists’ work, but there is also the theme of grit and determination. Kelly Harwood, an artist and owner of Gallery 202 in Franklin, where six artists created masks, took that approach. Both Harwood’s mother and father passed away from cancer, so like many of the artists, he was close to the disease. He wanted his mask to relate to the bravery one assumes when undergoing radiation treatment. “I took the mask into my studio and put it on a table, and I was like, What am I going to do to make this magnificent?” he says. “That’s when I got the idea of being brave enough to undergo radiation.” Harwood envisioned a Native American warrior—a
Sara Bickell, I Will Face This Day With Courage
58 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Jennifer Knowles, Metamorphosis
“
These materials are meant to echo the metamorphosis of regular folks into fierce and vulnerable warriors. NashvilleArts.com
�
September 2014 | 59
Y SK
N I D N
A K
Everything starts from a dot The Frist Center for the Visual Arts September 26 through January 4
by Daniel Tidwell
I
n today’s world where the vast majority view abstraction as something to color coordinate with their living room sofa, it’s difficult to imagine a time when the leading artists of the day were driven by a desire to create abstract paintings that would evoke genuine emotional and spiritual responses in the viewer. The very notion that such a connection could be possible through abstraction in a post-modern world is so foreign to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that it led critic Rosalind Kraus to write in her influential essay Grids that “by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.”
But the belief that art could be an expression of deep spirituality and emotion was one of the driving forces that propelled Wassily Kandinsky to develop an abstract language for visual art and create some of the greatest masterworks of twentieth-century Modernism. Kandinsky: A Retrospective at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts brings together many of Kandinsky’s greatest works and provides a chronological view of his artistic evolution from figuration to abstraction. “Drawn almost entirely from the collection of the Pompidou Centre in Paris,” the exhibition highlights “Kandinsky’s innovative responses to a world that was in dramatic flux . . . and also includes intimate studies and drawings, which give further
insight into the invention of a very private language as a means for liberating the mind from the material world,” according to Frist Center Curator Mark Scala.
Kandinsky laid out many of the ideas that would provide the structure for his work in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The book was heavily influenced by the mysticism of theosophy, but it was also concerned with theories of how color, form, and gesture can have a psychological and emotional influence on the viewer. Despite the work’s dated mysticism and utopianism, Scala says that “it is still possible to appreciate the complexity and thoroughness of Kandinsky’s analysis of where art had been and how it might have a role in advancing the cause of the inner life. This idea, after all, has been at the heart of much abstraction throughout Modernism.” In photographs, Kandinsky most resembles a professor or lawyer, with his spectacles and buttoned-up business attire, rather than an avant-garde artist. Perhaps this was because, at heart, Kandinsky was an intellectual who had studied law and economics in Moscow and was steeped in music, poetry, theatre, and philosophy as well as the occult.
The life-changing confluence of a mystical experience in front of a Monet Haystack painting and a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin led him at the age of thirty to jettison his burgeoning law career and move to Munich to study painting. In Munich he grew rapidly as
(Right) Small Worlds VII, 1922, Color xylograph, Collection Centre Pompidou, Bequest of Mrs. Nina Kandinsky in 1981, Photograph © Centre Pompidou 60 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
NashvilleArts.com
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Painting with Red Spot, 1914, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Nina Kandinsky in 1976, Photograph © Centre Pompidou
an artist, working through styles and banding together with fellow artists to found movements including The Blue Rider group. The Blue Rider’s focus on nature as a primal source of spirituality would prove pivotal to his development as an abstract painter. Kandinsky’s work is reflective of the tumult of the first half of the twentieth century as war and political upheaval drove the artist from Russia to Germany and finally to France. And like a chameleon, at each destination along the way, he would adopt new formal means of expression. From his early figurative paintings to his well-known Compositions to his later biomorphic works, Kandinsky was a restless seeker—constantly evolving his visual language. In 1910 Kandinsky created one of his first truly abstract works, aptly titled First Abstract Watercolor. In this work blue, red, and green shapes
swirl around a white ground as energetic lines intersect and create a framework of movement. The watercolor insists on the flatness of the picture plane, and the abstract elements seem randomly placed—there’s no apparent formal order to the piece. As critic Donald Kuspit wrote, “What makes it extraordinary . . . is its structurelessness. It is important not only because it is totally abstract—as distinct from rendering familiar appearances in an abstract way, distorting them so they become unfamiliar and thus fresh, which was what Matisse and Picasso did with the figure, landscape, and still life—but because it seems formless and unfinished.” Some of Kandinsky’s best-known works are his series of Compositions, which took the language that first appeared in his abstract watercolor and expanded it to an epic scale.
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Painting with Red Spot from 1914 is, for curator Mark Scala, one of Kandinsky’s most expressive works. In it he depicts a field full of whirling color and indistinct shapes colliding through a yellowing atmosphere. “The work is teeming with vitality and turbulence. It was one of Kandinsky’s last paintings made at the dawn of World War I, and it shows a premonition of destruction, the old order tearing itself apart,” according to Scala. Yet within this destructive visual world there is a glimmer of hope, “a jewel-like area of small, colored brushstrokes, hinting at a seed of renewal that reflects Kandinsky’s undying belief in the power of the human spirit to rise above conflict.” Kandinsky: A Retrospective is perhaps one of the most important exhibitions that the Frist Center has mounted, providing an overview of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose achievements were more radical than those of Picasso and Matisse, both of whom flirted with abstraction but never developed a truly non-referential visual language. “Kandinsky is a giant of modern art, who expresses better, perhaps, than anyone . . . the tremendous upheaval and idealism of the twentieth century,” according to Scala. His works are “complex, and the allusions and relationships are not meant to trigger a single emotion but the profusion of feeling that comprises existence.”
Achtyrka–Front Entrance to the Dacha, 1917, Oil on canvas, Bequest of Mrs. Nina Kandinsky in 1981, Photograph © Centre Pompidou
Kandinsky: A Retrospective will be on exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts September 26 through January 4. For more information, visit www.fristcenter.org.
Chanson (Song), 1906, Tempera on cardboard, Bequest of Mrs. Nina Kandinsky in 1981, Photograph © Centre Pompidou
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64 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
S tately A bandonment Jared Small Opens at David Lusk Gallery • Sept. 2 to Oct. 4
by MiChelle Jones | Photographs by Anthony Scarlati
J
ared Small doesn’t just paint American Victorian dwellings tending toward disrepair; he also paints barns, horses, and people (like the dramatically lit blues musicians in True Blues). However, Small acknowledges that his house paintings are his most popular. In paintings like Turquoise, lines of clapboard siding and curly gingerbread details define structures that dissolve into drips. The scenes possess a strong narrative sense derived in part from the dark or threatening skies and the absence of people or complete settings. Small’s choice of simple houses—“not too big, not too small”—rendered in varying states of disrepair stems from growing up in Memphis. “We used to cross the railroad tracks and literally across the railroad tracks the exact same houses were pristine. The houses that were in a dilapidated state, they were more interesting to me, maybe because the people I associated with were living in those houses.”
Interpretations of the past and how we remember also inspire Small’s use of images that are partly unfinished. “Every side or every square inch of the painting is not completely done; it’s dripping off, fading off,” Small said. “Sometimes I feel like people don’t even notice the parts that are faded off . . . like when in memories we fill in.” Small touches on this concept in paintings like White Heat. Painted on Mylar, the picture is of a small, white house with a tiny, simple porch beneath an inky sky and amid greenery that drips and runs like a watercolor gone awry. “When framed it’s literally translucent,” Small said. “It looks like you’re just wiping away a frosty window and peering into something, peering into the past. I really like that.” Small lives in a ninety-year-old house, once the home of a prominent doctor, in a Memphis neighborhood he describes as transitional. His studio is also in the house, and it was from there he discussed his paintings, revealing a sense of humor that contradicts the often-gloomy atmosphere of his paintings.
(Left) Light of Day, Oil on panel, 60” x 48”
NashvilleArts.com
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“I let the painting tell me what I need to take off, what I need to add, how much light, dark,” he said, “Sometimes even if I have a sunny day, I’ll do a dark sky.” He paints the sky once he figures out what he wants the “mood” of the house to be. For him, hints of storms underscore houses as shelters; he feels the impending bad weather makes the houses more inviting. (He roars with laughter at the suggestion that some of the houses may encourage viewers to take their chances outside.) Though he is now able to pull houses out of his imagination, Small incorporates details gleaned from quick photo shoots—sometimes done through his car window. But when he does spend time in front of a specific house, residents often come out to ask what he’s up to. He usually carries an iPad with images of his paintings to convince people he’s not staking out the house(s). “I see something that inspires me, and then I tweak it to how I feel like it was or used to be,” Small says. For his Nashville show, Small painted houses scouted during visits to Germantown—a neighborhood he was familiar with from his days of dropping off paintings at Carlton Wilkinson’s In The Gallery—but he said you won’t necessarily be able to tell which ones unless you take a close look. “People never think it’s where they live, because a lot of times they don’t see the houses; they just pass by them,” he said. “I like to do my take, kind of tell the story through the house.” He changes the states of the houses to suit his aesthetics, removing bars from windows, changing the paint color, or making the structures look more downtrodden than they may be.
Green House, 2014, Oil on panel, 48” x 36”
“
The houses that were in a dilapidated state, they were more interesting to me, maybe because the people I associated with were living in those houses.
Decisions, Oil on board, 25” x 25”
”
Wildflower, Oil on board, 40” x 30”
66 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
White Heat, 2014, Oil on Mylar, 28” x 20”
Yellow Bricks, Oil on panel, 60” x 48”
Why paint a house in a pre-renovation state when in reality it has been lovingly restored? “The distress adds to the flavor,” Small said. It makes you wonder about the inhabitants and also think about the possibilities of the house. “People like potential. You could see, ah, that could be beautiful.”
Green House, as an indication that someone lives there, but he never reveals demographic details and is thus able to present neighborhoods removed from specific time periods as they transition along a continuum from their prime to desired to transitional and revitalized.
Potential is also what draws Small to painting older people or children. “The kids have potential, and old people have all these wrinkles and layers of knowledge,” Small said. But his architectural paintings are devoid of people; their presence would give away too much of the story. He may include flowers in the yard or a sliver of curtain, as he does in
True Blues, Oil on board, 72” x 96”
“A lot of times the houses bring back memories of when you were a kid, when you grew up, where you were when you saw these houses,” Small said. Jared Small’s stately abandonment will be on display at David Lusk Gallery, Nashville from September 2 through October 4. For more infor mation about the ar tist, visit www.davidluskgallery.com and www.jaredsmall.com.
Jared Small NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 67
H AY N E S G A L L E R I E S P R E S E N T S
JOURNEYS IN AMERICAN REALISM TRADITIONAL TO CONTEMPORARY
PHILIP MICHELSON. B.1948. CATCHER’S MASK. ACRYLIC ON PANEL. 24 X 20 INCHES INQUIRIES: GARYHAYNES@HAYNESGALLERIES.COM OR PHONE 615.430.8147 OR 615.312.7000. HAYNESGALLERIES.COM GALLERIES: ON THE MUSIC ROW ROUNDABOUT IN NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE AND SEASONALLY IN THOMASTON, MAINE.
Adriaen Van Utrecht, Banquet Still Life, 1644 (Rijksmuseum)
There’s
nothing
H still about
life
NashvilleArts.com
by Catt Dunlop istorically derived from detailed studies for large-scale compositions, still life is an age-old genre whose legacy runs deep within the Western art tradition. Still lifes commonly
feature an arrangement of natural and synthetic objects that reflect the era and challenge artists to both control the subject and adhere to its representation. For centuries, the relationship between composing and rendering has enabled experimentation across the genre, and the contemporary art scene in Nashville is no exception. Galleries across the city such as Haynes Galleries, Zeitgeist, Cumberland Gallery, The Arts Company, and The Rymer Gallery are experiencing an exciting still-life moment, brimming with artists using a range of painterly techniques to build upon traditions and explore different styles. September 2014 | 69
Michael Theise, A King’s Ransom, Oil on panel, 7” x 10” (Haynes Galleries)
While the genre embodies a variety of stylistic approaches, the still life’s unifying element is the ability to turn an artistic eye to everyday objects, allowing the viewer to pause and appreciate moments that may otherwise be overlooked. In sixteenth-century European practices, this historically translated into a direct representation of the subject rendered with a skillful and precise hand. The era was defined by scientific and geographic exploration, sparking a renewed interest in the wonders of the natural world and thereby positioning still life as the perfect genre for presenting these precious finds. While the compositions were often dark (both literally with thick oil paints and figuratively with memento mori scenes), light is a surprising yet undeniable element of works from this period. Pushing this traditional style further into the contemporary is Caleb Charland, whose study of how light reflects and illuminates familiar objects transforms the banal into the magical. In Garage with Organic Batteries (2011), the viewer finds a science experiment posing as unexpected still life. Though in a completely contemporary setting outfitted with modern-day appliances, the composition represents an enlightened curiosity toward the natural world with a haunting quality of stylistic stillness.
Also drawing from this tradition, Robert Durham’s Of Things and Other Things (2012), depicts quotidian clutter on a countertop touched with a gentle rendering of sunlight. Edges of the empty perfume and wine bottles, light bulbs, and boxes create a gleaming arrangement of objects while soft shadows in the background bounce off the wall to balance the composition. The interlaced dark and light forces harmonize each other in one moment.
Milixa Morón, Chinese Fan, Oil on linen, 15” x 11” (Haynes Galleries)
In the nineteenth century, the idea of light as the subject for composition was pushed to the extreme, becoming the most important element of Impressionism. Unlike more controlled and realistic depictions of the outside world, impressionists worked with quick, expressive brushstrokes
70 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Seth Haverkamp, Crab and Grapes (Haynes Galleries)
Caleb Charland, Garage with Organic Batteries, Digital photograph (The Rymer Gallery)
that valued color and form over direct representation. With this newfound stylistic freedom, artists relocated the studio to the outdoors and began to explore more abstract subject matter—such as the way a shadow falls at different hours of the day or the effects of dappled lighting on water’s surface. Of course, the studio was not wholly abandoned, and the en plein air practices in turn informed the rendering of still life compositions. In order to represent dimension, impressionistic still lifes rely on luscious blocks of color to simulate an object in space. If Impressionism imbued still life with a more loose and rhythmic form of expression, then twentieth-century Modernism challenged preexisting notions of the genre by questioning representation on the canvas itself. Most notable was Cubism’s investigation of how to render three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional picture plane. By eliminating shadows and unfolding all sides of an object onto a flat surface, Cubists subverted traditional forms of representation in an attempt to see the whole object at the same time, continuing this tradition with a unique perspective. This ability to look back in order to move forward is an important notion propelling contemporary artists to explore the possibilities of representation. From Realism to Impressionism to Cubism, the current output of the genre successfully reexamines old tropes in order to breathe new life into still life.
Olaf Schneider, Coffee and Starfish (detail) (Haynes Galleries)
Lea Colie Wight, The Journey, Oil on linen, 34” x 24” (Haynes Galleries) NashvilleArts.com
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T H RO UG H
OCT OB E R
1 3
Thi s ex hi bi t i on w a s o rga n i z e d b y t h e W h i t n e y M u s e u m o f A m e r i c a n A r t , N e w Yo r k . THIS EXHIBITIO N ’S T OU R WAS FUN D ED IN PA RT BY A GRAN T FRO M T HE HEN RY LUCE FO UNDATION
T HE F R I S T C ENT ER FO R T H E V I S UA L A RT S GRAT E F UL LY A C K NOW LED G ES O U R P I C A S S O C I R C LE ME M B ER S A S EX H I B I T I O N PAT R O NS .
DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE 919 BROADWAY
FRISTCENTER.ORG
THE FRI ST CENTER FOR THE V ISUAL ARTS IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY
G eo rge To o ker. The Subway ( detail), 1950. E gg tem pera o n co m po s it ion board. Whit ney M useum o f Am erican Art, New Yo rk; purchase, wit h funds fro m t he Jul iana Forc e Purc hase Award 50. 23. C o urtesy o f t he E state o f G eo rge To o ker and DC M o ore Gal ler y, N.Y. P ho to graphy by Sheldan C . C o l l ins
GREG SAND
Traces: Boy Walking on Grass, 2012, Archival digital print, 3” x 5”
Life in an Anonymous World by Karen Parr-Moody
O
ne gets an uncanny sense upon viewing a photo of an empty battlefield. It is a sense of sad omniscience, of seeing the battlefield’s past, future, and present all at once. One knows, intuitively, that a World War I battlefield in France, for example, is now fringed with nearby villages. There, villagers have planted cheery red flowers in the window boxes of their centuries-old, limestone cottages. Life goes on. But the battlefield photograph is seen through history’s omniscience. One sees, in memory, how soldiers traipsed upon that field, optimism in their hearts. And one knows what happened directly afterward. One also sees how peaceful the battlefield appears after the conflict has subsided. It is hard to say where the truth lies. Photographer Greg Sand feels a similar sense of “death in the future”—in the words of Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida—when viewing a photograph so old that the subject must be dead. “My response has a number of layers,” he says. “I feel an immediate connection to the living person in the photograph, followed by a dread of what inevitably is to come for them, completed by a sense of grief over what has, of course, already transpired.”
NashvilleArts.com
Snapshot: Family Reunion, 2008, Archival digital print, 4” x 4” September 2014 | 73
Camera Lucida was a book about love and grief over the loss of the author’s mother, but it remains a canon on the bookshelves of serious photographers, such as Sand. The small tome deals largely with photography and mortality, which also informs the way Sand creates his art, the majority of which utilizes vintage found photographs. He uses computer technology to manipulate these photos, in essence creating a narrative that explores mortality.
Sand describes his work as being about “memory, the passage of time, mortality, and the photograph’s role in shaping our experience of loss.” In the series Traces Sand manipulated vintage found photos—rendered eerie in black and white—to reveal no flesh-and-blood subjects. Instead, the photos reveal the reflections and shadows of the subjects. Such shadows distill the energy of a moment in time, a moment when children played energetically or a loving couple took a stroll.
The clarity, or lack of clarity, of these shadows and reflections of Traces serve to underscore the memories we have of loved ones who have passed; some are clearer than others. Sand has used this same technique in the series Snapshots. Photography is unique in the arts in that it can capture the “fleeting moment” in the second that it occurs, Sand explains. He believes it is in this way that photography underscores life’s temporality. “The concept of photography as a direct representation of the truth is very important to my work,” he says. “A photo may show a graduating class from the 1920s. The truth presented in the photo is that these young people are alive and full of potential with their whole lives ahead of them. However, in reality everyone in the photo is dead or close to death. It is these conflicting truths that interest me.”
Snapshot: Only Child, 2008, Archival digital print, 5” x 3”
Sand received his bachelor of fine arts in photography from Austin Peay State University in 2008. In 2009, he was selected by critic Catherine Edelman and the Griffin Museum of Photography as one of “the most exciting new artists emerging in the world of photography.” He is represented by Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, and exhibits across the United States. Traces: Children Looking at Water, 2012, Archival digital print, 5” x 3” 74 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
His current style came to fruition after he discovered his love for old snapshots and
Vestige #4, 2013, Archival digital print on antique cabinet card, 6” x 4”
portraits. “They say so much about time and memories, and they often produce a sense of sadness and disorientation in me,” he says. “There is no matching the history already present in a found photograph. Any attempt I made would be an imitation at best.” The nature of reality, including ideas about time and death, was on Sand’s mind long before he made the decision to take up photography. But in photography, he has found a medium by which to explore such ideas.
Sand believes that antique photographs inherently possess a special power because they are objects one can see, smell, and touch. Sand is now exploring that idea in his work. He has recently made tintypes, those nineteenth-century forerunners of modern photography, for their “inherent object quality.” He also seeks to achieve that quality by affixing prints to antique cabinet cards, stereoview cards, and decorative mats, which is a direction in which he plans to continue.
Traces: Men Boating on River, 2012, Archival digital print, 3” x 4”
Absence #1, 2013, Archival digital print from scanned collodion tintype, 5” x 4 “
“Although my work explores death’s inevitability, I hope it also serves as a reminder to enjoy life in the moment,” Sand says. “Creating the work does that for me by giving me a way to channel my anxieties about mortality and focus on the beauty of life.” Greg Sand is represented by Cumberland Gallery and teaches at Austin Peay. For more about him and his work, please visit w w w. c u m b e r l a n d g a l l e r y. c o m a n d www.gregsand.net.
Snapshot: Sitting Portrait, 2008, Archival digital print, 3” x 5” NashvilleArts.com
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Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt Recent work by
Vince
Pitelka
SURFACE AND VOLUME
Jeanne
Brady
September 1 — October 10 Artist tAlk And reception Thursday, September 11, 2014 4:30 – 6:30 p.m. www.vanderbilt.edu/sarrattgallery/
NAM_Sarratt Gallery Pitelka_Brady 1-4page.indd 1
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MARC Train – Baltimore MD to Washington DC, 2006, Slit shutter photograph on Epson luster paper, printed dimensions 24” x 200”
SLIT SHUTTER PH OTO G R A PH E R J O N AT H A N T R U N D L E B E N D S T H E L I G H T WAV E
O
by Jesse Mathison ver the last several years, Jonathan Trundle has been perfecting his unique photographic processes. Termed Slit Shutter and Slit Scan, these methods allow him to distort time and space in unconventional ways, to condense and expand perspective, and to alter the idea of focus. I talked recently with the MTSU professor about his methodology and his ideas about photography.
Could you define what Slit Shutter photography is, and tell me about the process?
The stretching of the images is due to the scan rate. With film you’re able to speed up or slow down, since you’re hand-winding the film. However, objects don’t always line up with the scanning rate, so if things move faster they’re compressed, or if they’re moving slower they become elongated. So the focus doesn’t necessarily depend on where the lens is set to, but how properly you match
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTOPHER HAMRICK
Slit Shutter pertains to filmbased cameras that have all been hand built or modified by me, and the process involves hand-winding the film (or using a motorized back) to distort the image. Slit Scan involves digital software and modifying code, taking one center column of pixels apart and then rebuilding an image. So these are two different methods that achieve similar results.
the rate of movements of the film to the rate of movement of the subject matter. How did you develop these methods?
I got into it because I wanted to show the world as I see it, rather than just the peripheral view or through a standard focal lens, so in ways the human eye cannot see, such as a 360-degrees-plus field of view. The slit scanning process evolved from that, working with grids and montage-style imagery, taking 300 digital photos and stitching them together. Working in this method has changed my approach, and I try to represent the world around us in a new way, playing with the ideas of time and motion. One of the images I recorded as I was riding a carousel, so in the image you start to see a wave pattern develop because I’m actually going up and down, and the characters at
Chair Swings Center – MD State Fair, 2010, Made with modified image capture code, printed dimensions 5” x 22” 78 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
to make sure all of the components are balanced properly and keep the final images as true to film as can be, so you see the pink marks from where the paper and film have been taped together, and things like that. I leave the frame numbers and the words like Kodak or Fugi in there, so it represents film-based photography.
“
On a smaller scale it definitely does not hold up, because there’s so much to see. So the larger the print, the better the experience.
”
How are these images best viewed, in your opinion?
A 24 x 200-inch print allows you to have a pretty good experience. You can get close enough to see detail and distortion, and far enough away to see the scope of the piece. On a smaller scale it definitely does not hold up, because there’s so much to see. So the larger the print, the better the experience. I always lean more towards the prints, as they are stationary, and it’s the actual artifact of the process. Otherwise you would have to scroll and move the picture on a screen, and the monitor then becomes another part of it. You would have to have a number of monitors in line to view it in its original dimensions. A print allows you to have that one continuous presentation that isn’t broken up into multiple sections.
the beginning and the end of the image are repeated due to the continuous revolutions. So I was trying to unravel that path through a flat image, where motion and time are compressed. How much time is involved in this process?
Most images took only fifty or sixty seconds to record, but the overall time involved in the final product might be as much as thirty hours. Restitching takes the most time, especially as I try
For more information about Jonathan Trundle email him at Jonathan.Trundle@mtsu.edu.
MARC Train – Baltimore MD to Washington DC, 2006, Slit shutter photograph on Epson luster paper, printed dimensions 24” x 200”
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 79
Visual Fairy Tales The Watercolor Sculptures of Elizabeth Sanford
by Gracie Wise
T
he Nashville International Airport, a scene brimming with the traffic of both Nashville natives and travelers from all over the world, will feature the watercolor sculptures of artist Elizabeth Sanford in an upcoming exhibition. As a welcome to a city known for its dedication to the arts, Sanford’s work offers a spark of whimsy and an engaging display of color and texture.
Sanford’s works are bright, joyful even, with vivid sweeps of paint and delicate cuts and edges. Her definition of her pieces as “watercolor sculptures” is appropriate, emphasizing the fluid characteristics of her watercolor panels and the three-dimensional element of her designs. In her pieces, Sanford creates illusions of space by layering panels of various colors and intricacy, forming a tunnel through which the layers of the story can be unfolded. Reshaping the Shadows-Unseen Omens II, Watermedia on paper, 14” x 11” x 2” 80 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Sanford sees her pieces as part of a cohesive story, rather than solitary displays. She leaves it up to the viewer to interpret the story, believing that the open-ended narrative of her work is enriched by the variety of interpretations it evokes. In her opinion, this approach empowers her viewers: “You get to decide where to begin and how you are going to work your way through the narrative.” Rather than trying to promote a distinct meaning to her audience, Sanford insists that a viewer’s interpretation “completes” her work.
The narrative depends on perspective, and Sanford knows that changes in perspective have the ability to alter the story entirely. As she describes it, “My stories take place in between worlds, where the suburbs meet the remains of the forest. I’m interested in the conversations and clashes that happen along the shifting boundaries. Who’s the hero, and who’s the villain? Who’s the native, and who’s the invader? It all depends on which side of the border you’re on.” Sanford’s call is a plea to pay attention, to care about those on the other side. And she hopes
Reshaping the Shadows-Understory, detail, 2014
Backyard Food Chain, 2013, Watermedia on paper, 5” x 7” x 9”
this will inspire people to action. As she says, “You can pick things because they are beautiful, and this is what we often do. You can also grow gardens to be homes for them.” Her sculptures act as fairy tales, whimsical narratives laced with notes of wisdom and caution. While each of her pieces has the potential to tell myriad stories, Sanford hopes that her work will prompt an appreciation for nature and a desire to responsibly care for the creatures that inhabit it, whether they be bold, curious caterpillars or intricately detailed butterflies.
Elizabeth Sanford NashvilleArts.com
She leaves the conclusion of the narrative to her audience: “How the story ends is up to the viewer. Look into the shadows to find what’s hidden. Peek through the leaves, and discover the signs. Join the quest for a happy ending.” Elizabeth Sanford’s exhibition entitled Reshaping the Shadows will be on display at the Nashville I n t e r n a t i o n a l A i r p o r t f r o m September 9 until November 30. The Fall Flying Solo Art Reception will be hosted on Tuesday, September 23, from 4 to 6 p.m. For more information, please visit www.elizabethsanford.com.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TAMARA REYNOLDS
For example, Sanford is quick to admit that her piece Backyard Food Chain, in which a bold caterpillar creeps onto the scene under the watchful gaze of the bird above, “could be about the bird or the caterpillar.” Similarly, Hidden by the Trees displays woodland creatures delicately outlined in red, a subtle illustration of the all-too-common tendency to miss the beautiful and the unique. The closer the viewer gets, the more details are visible. Her work rewards those who fully invest in the act of observation.
September 2014 | 81
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YORK & Friends fine art Nashville • Memphis
Nashville’s Newest Leading Source for Tennessee Art
GINGER OGLESBY Something of Time, 36 x 48, Acrylic on canvas
VICKI SHIPLEY Familiar, 36 x 36, Acrylic on canvas
CAROLYN MCDONALD Lilies & Cotton, 12 x 9, Oil on linen board
STREATER SPENCER Music II, 20 x 20, Oil on board
107 Harding Place • Tues-Sat 10-5 615.352.3316 • yorkandfriends@att.net • www.yorkandfriends.com Follow us on at Ron York Art 84 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Nashville 6 a.m. Words and photographs by Hunter Armistead
Locations: YMCA & Climb Nashville
A
n open assignment like this one is liberating but also challenging. It’s like looking at a menu with too many choices. I settled on exercise, which is a newly developed habit and therefore topical and personal. NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 85
I went out shooting on four different occasions. I saw people doing all manner of things—coming to work, coming and leaving at the bus station, waiting for school, driving delivery vehicles, etc.—but mostly I saw people exercising.
The streets at 6 are relatively bare. I was surprised how few people were walking or driving. Of the people who are up at 6, the majority are either at a coffee shop or exercising
somewhere. Photographically this was also easier as there was a large sampling of people to choose from, which means you can be picky about who you shoot.
Early exercisers are a very happy lot. They seem to be enjoying their early start and by and large were fit and sunny. I was inspired by them and imagined they were a proactive bunch. Maybe I’ll even set my alarm for earlier. – Hunter Armistead
86 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 87
Poet’s Corner
STANDING IN FRONT OF MARILYN MONROE’S CRYPT WESTWOOD, CALIFORNIA Rose bushes are in bloom, huge red and pink roses, alive with prospect. And, always, there are fresh flowers in a pewter vase attached on the left side of her marble crypt, the dead flowers replaced twice a week, dew of morning still visible on each wilted petal. Between the bushes, below thorns, leaves, below brightly living buds, my mother’s ashes are scattered. People come in twos or more, kiss and touch with fingertips this final resting place as tears spill onto the ground to be held by my mother’s spirit that forces even the roses to grow.
Stellasue Lee will present a selection of her poetry in a reading entitled Queen of Jacks at the Poet’s Corner on September 25 at 7 p.m. at Scarritt-Bennett. Visit www.scarrittbennett.org for more information. She will also lead a workshop at Art & Soul on September 13 called Saying the Unsayable. Please visit www.artandsoul.com for details. 88 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN JACKSON
– Stellasue Lee
OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS
Submit your art, photography or sculpture to be juried by Nashville Arts Magazine for a 2015 exhibit at Customs House Museum, Clarksville Tennessee arTisTs 18 years and older inTeresTed in exhibiTing aT The museum in 2015 musT send The following To be considered: Five images oF work completed in the past three years to inFo@nashvillearts.com with accompanying list oF titles, medium and size artist bio/resume complete the online inFormation Form at www.nashvillearts.com Applications will be kept on file for one year. Application materials will not be returned to artists.
Selected artists will be notified by October 30 and will be given a show at Customs House Museum in Clarksville, TN NASHVILLE ARTS MAGAZINE WILL ONLY ACCEPT SUBMISSIONS FROM AUGUST 15—OCTOBER 15 For entry details visit www.nashvillearts.com or call (615) 383-0278
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7/22/14 1:49 PM
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 89
PHOTOGRAPHER- ANTHONY MATUL A / PHOTO AS SISTANT- L AURA MATUL A / ST YLIST- MAT T LOGAN / AS SISTANT ST YLIST- RUTHIE LINDS EY / BOOTS - PETER NAPPI / LOCATION - PETER NAPPI
Matt Logan Artistic Director | Studio Tenn, Boot Aficionado We sat down with Studio Tenn’s Artistic Director, Matt Logan, at Peter Nappi to see what makes this charismatic Nashvillian tick . . . and what’s with the boot fetish?
90 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
any questions
Q&A
Nashville Arts Magazine: What characteristics do you most like about yourself? Matt Logan: I like that I am structured, in that I need a sense of
purpose to everything I do, that there is meaning to it; it’s not just a whim. I strive to be creative and authentic. Authenticity is very important to me.
ML: It’s a beautiful confirmation for me, coming back to the city
I grew up in, to see it explode in such a creative way. It’s inspiring.
NA: Are you happy with where you’re heading? ML: Absolutely, but it’s always too slow for me. I’m so grateful for the way things look right now and the opportunities ahead. NA: What’s your mantra? ML: Look beyond the obvious. Art taught me that. NA: What’s it like being you these days?
ML: I try to do everything. I find it hard to delegate. I can get lost
ML: I say yes to a lot of things because I never know what that yes will lead to. So there are all these things going on in all directions. It leads to a richer, fuller life.
NA: Why Nashville?
NA: What talent would you most like to have?
ML: Middle Tennessee and the arts are known for their authenticity.
ML: Oh, that’s easy. I want to play the guitar and the piano. My life would be so different in so many good ways.
NA: What do you like least?
in the weeds instead of leading. I’m trying to find the balance.
It’s in the sounds; it’s in the arts; thankfully it’s coming to the food. That’s why Nashville—authenticity.
NA: Whom would you most like to meet? ML: Mike Nichols, the director. There’s something so clear about
his point of view. I love his clarity; I love his practicality. The way he works with an actor is the way I strive to be.
NA: What about you would most surprise people? ML: I don’t really understand people’s perceptions of me, so it’s hard
to say. But I am rather introverted, which is odd for a performer. I also enjoy simplicity in my life, which is slightly at odds with a life in theatre.
NA: What would your perfect evening look like?
NA: What is your most treasured possession? ML: A Shakespeare bust that my mother gave me for my twenty-
first birthday and a beaver-skin top hat that my grandmother gave me when I was three.
NA: What is your greatest regret? ML: My biggest regret is that I doubted myself coming out of high
school. I didn’t go for scholarships. I didn’t push for the big schools that I really wanted to go to. I doubted my talent. NA: What do you want to be remembered for? ML: That somehow, through the medium of storytelling, I was able
to move people, even for a moment.
ML: It would probably involve food from either East Nashville or
NA: What play has touched you recently?
NA: What music do you listen to?
NA: How does Nashville rank as a theatre town?
Germantown. Dinner at Rolf and Daughters anytime you want.
ML: Depends on the day. I love most genres, but I gravitate
towards bluegrass, folk, and Americana. I grew up listening to Bill Monroe at the Bluegrass Inn. It’s all storytelling through music, and I love it. NA: Who has most inspired you? ML: Elia Kazan fascinates me as a director and as a visionary.
Sam Mendes, Baz Luhrman, Julie Taymor, and Mike Nichols. Directors and designers, but they all lead with different strengths. I have learned and pulled from all of them. Also Hugh Jackman, a truly gifted actor and person. I have done some artwork for him. He elevates everyone around him.
NA: How do you feel about the explosive growth of Nashville?
ML: Red by John Logan. I was stunned. ML: It’s one of our best-kept secrets. NA: What visual artists do you like? ML: I have been most inspired by the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld,
the simplicity, the magic of a line. Also Seurat, the pointillist. And Degas; I’m fascinated by the voyeuristic quality of his work.
NA: What is your most treasured possession? ML: My boot collection. I wear boots almost every day. I own close
to twelve pairs of boots that range in shapes and shades. That’s a lot for a guy. I recently found a photo of my grandfather lacing up a pair of boots in the 1930s. It must run in the family.
NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 91
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Backstage with Studio Tenn
Fiddler on the Roof The Costumes Set the Stage
by Cat Acree | Photographs by Anthony Matula
“Direct Shakespeare like it’s a new play, and treat every new play as if it’s Shakespeare.” Matt Logan, Artistic Director for Studio Tenn, approaches every production with these words from film and theatre director Sam Mendes. Every show should be given its own foundation. With Fiddler on the Roof, the foundation is already there, rich with Tsarist Russian heritage and Jewish rituals. “You can just dig for days,” says Logan. “This one comes straight from the ground.”
Studio Tenn’s fifth season opens September 4 with Fiddler on the Roof, almost fifty years to the day after it first opened on Broadway. The musical follows Tevye, a deeply devout milkman, as he struggles to reconcile his stubbornly held beliefs with his three daughters’ rebellions. A story with this much heritage demands authenticity, but it also seems slyly appropriate to incorporate elements from the present day. Logan calls this “bringing it forward,” and it’s one of the main reasons he designed the costumes using repurposed vintage and Goodwill finds—articles of clothing that already have their own weight. Bohemian muumuus can become painstakingly detailed Eastern European aprons. Ruffled linen napkins can become prayer shawls.
“The temptation is to make it very basic, but I don’t think it is,” Logan says. “Just because they’re poor doesn’t make it basic. They wove the cloth . . . It may be their one outfit, but [it’s] very thoroughly constructed, with strong thought.”
The Fiddler promotional shoot at Peter Nappi drives home this marriage of the authentic and the fantastical, as these gorgeous handmade boots represent a rich history of generations of leather makers working with their hands. It’s a fitting collaboration for a story about the balance between past and present, tradition and change. Studio Tenn presents Fiddler on the Roof September 4 to 21 at Jamison Hall in The Factory at Franklin. For additional information and tickets, visit www.studiotenn.com. PHOTOGRAPHER- ANTHONY MATULA / PHOTO ASSISTANT- LAURA MATULA / STYLIST- MATT LOGAN/ ASSISTANT STYLIST- RUTHIE LINDSEY / BOOTS - PETER NAPPI / LOCATION - PETER NAPPI / FEMALE MODEL- MIA ROS E LYNNE / MALE MODEL - DAN ROUS E
Theatre
The Tennessee Rep CELEBRATING
The Big
“
PHOTOGRAPH BY SHANE BURKEEN
30 It’s another exciting year in the Nashville theatre world, and the casts for the 2014–15 season pay tribute to Tennessee Rep’s 30 years, both by bringing back familiar faces and welcoming new ones.
”
– Producing Artistic Director René D. Copeland
Chip Arnold as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman
by Jim Reyland
T PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY BUTLER
he Tennessee Rep staff, crew, and artists surely won’t be insisting they’re 29 again this year. There’s a great deal of pride in what they’ve accomplished in the first 30 years, and they want everyone in Middle Tennessee to know about it. It starts with an ambitious 2014–2015 season that promises to take you on one amazing ride after another—a celebration rooted in the past and looking to the future.
Martha Wilkinson as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, October 4–25, 2014, featuring Matthew Carlton as Sweeney Todd and Martha Wilkinson as Mrs. Lovett. “This is the 25th anniversary of my first show with the Rep, so Todd’s silver razors are the perfect gift. The cast is full of the most talented actors around, and they happen to be some of my best and dearest friends. What a joy it will be to share the stage with such wonderful people. And kill them.” – Matthew Carlton A Christmas Story adapted by Phillip Grecian, based on the motion picture by Jean Shepherd, November 29–December 21, 2014, featuring Samuel Whited as Ralphie.
94 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT L . POOLE
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRITANIE KNAPP
A Christmas Story
Eddie George in The Whipping Man
“Doing A Christmas Story for the last five years has been like hosting the best holiday party in Nashville. I love seeing people who have been with us year after year and those who are seeing us for the first time. Folks show up and we do what families do at Christmas; we all share the family stories.” – Samuel Whited
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang, who takes characters and themes from Chekhov, pours them into a blender, and the hilarious and touching result is set in present-day Bucks County, Pennsylvania. April 11–25, 2015
The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez, February 7–21, 2015, featuring Eddie George. The Rep has worked with Pulitzer Prize winners, Tony Award winners, and Oscar winners. Now they can add a Heisman Trophy winner to that list.
It’s been 30 years since the Rep’s first production of Macbeth at the Polk in 1985. Since then, many talented theatre artists have kept the fires burning—greats like Barry Scott, David Alford, Mike Miller, Mary Jane Harvill, Henry Haggard, Nan Gurley, Brian Webb Russell, Denice Hicks, Shelean Newman, Gary Hoff, and so many more. Also, let’s not forget wonderful benefactors like Founders Martha Ingram and Mac Pirkle and myriad corporate sponsors, subscribers, board members, and other Rep supporters. All of them have made it possible for Tennessee Rep to thrive, and their dedication has been shown under the lights, up on the Rep stage, in 175 productions over 30 seasons.
TENNES S EE REP ARCHIVES
PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY BUTLER
So let’s get started on 30 more. Subscription information for Tennessee Repertory Theatre’s 2014–2015 Season is available at www.tennesseerep.org or at the TPAC box office.
Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, March 14–28, 2015, featuring Chip Arnold as Willy Loman. “One of the most poignant lines in the play comes from Willy Loman’s only friend: ‘A salesman is got to dream. It comes with the territory.’ I have dreamed of the opportunity to play this role for a long time. It is easy to look at Willy and render a simple verdict of tragic hero. But each human being carries a measure of Willy Loman in his soul.” – Chip Arnold
Tennessee Rep’s first performance: Macbeth, 1985
NashvilleArts.com
The film version of Jim Reyland’s play STAND, performed across Tennessee in 2012 as The STAND Project, is now available to stream at www.writersstage.com. Watch The STAND Film starring Barry Scott and Chip Arnold, directed by David Compton and consider a donation to support Room in the Inn. jreyland@audioproductions.com
September 2014 | 95
Rembrandt Harmensz Van Rijn, The Night Watch, 1642. “Imagine you are with them, part of the Night Watch. You’re going out in dreary weather to deal with the drunks, move on the troublemakers and keep an eye out for thieves and burglars. It’s going to be great. It beats being at home, because you’re doing it with your friends. It’s a picture of how nice it is to be doing something with people you like.”
Art Around R
COURTESY OF RIJKSMUSEUM
A Local Look at Global Art
by Sara Lee Burd
ijksmuseum in Amsterdam reopened in the spring of 2013 after a ten-year renovation. Speak with anyone who’s Dutch and they will mention with relief that finally the beloved masterwork by Rembrandt, The Night Watch, is back where it belongs. This summer I experienced the joy of visiting this year’s star exhibit Art Is Therapy, which was curated by philosophers/writers Alain de Botton and John Armstrong. These men fiercely believe that art is more than an aesthetic urge; it reveals truths about life, love, nature, money, and politics. To illustrate this notion they filled the galleries of the Rijksmuseum with enormous post-it-note-esque text blocks geared to spark new ways for visitors to engage with the works of art in front of them. Their witty and thoughtful reflections bring these works to a contemporary audience and elicit a deeper connection to the human condition—even if the result is just enjoying something nice to look at. I relished the breath of new life these words brought to some of my old (and new) favorites. So you can get a taste of this fantastic experience, I’m sharing a few images and quotations from the exhibit catalogue. For more about the museum and to purchase the catalog for Art Is Therapy visit www.rijksmuseum.nl. An expanded hard cover version is available through www.amazon.com.
96 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Pieter Van Der Heyden (after Pieter Brueghel I), Big Fish Swallow Small Fish, 1557. “The underlying message is that there may be things about the world that—though objectionable—cannot easily be changed. A big fish can’t be talked out of eating a minnow. You just have to accept that that’s how things are and use that knowledge to keep out of trouble as much as you can.”
Johannes Vermeer, View of Houses in Delft, Known as “The Little Street,” 1658. This is an anti-heroic picture, a weapon against false images of glamour. It refuses to accept that true glamour depends on amazing feats of courage or on the attainment of status. It argues that doing the modest things that are expected of all of us is enough.”
Guanyin (Saviour of people in peril), 12th-C. China. “The centrality of such figures in the Buddhist and Christian outlooks suggests that all mature lives will involve moments of deep self-doubt, and feelings that one cannot cope alone. It’s not a sign we have failed as a human to be overwhelmed by a need for reassurance.”
Adriaan de Lelie, The Art Gallery of Jan Gildemeester Jansz, 1795. “The reasons behind art’s prestige have for much of its history been left remarkably undefined—leaving us to suspect in our more cynical moments that it might have a bit too much to do with social standing and conspicuous consumption. But in truth, we should feel free to ask—in this room better than anywhere—what the convincing reasons behind art’s elevated status might rightly be.”
NashvilleArts.com
Ludolf Bakhuysen, Warships in a Heavy Storm, 1695. “We should feel proud of humanity’s competence and skill in the face of these dreadful—but strangely also rather awe-inspiring—challenges. We’re better able to cope than we might think.”
September 2014 | 97
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SEE ART SEE ART SEE
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN JACKSON
Gabrielle Taylor, Drew Barton at The Rymer Gallery
Angela Lee at Zeitgeist
Tanisha Smith, Tiffany Patton at The Arts Company
Ceri and Craige Hoover at Zeitgeist
Laura Kruger at Tinney Contemporary NashvilleArts.com
Robin and Zoe Schlacter at The Rymer Gallery September 2014 | 99
Sophia Gordon, Ted Stevens at Zeitgeist
The First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown draws a crowd
Jim Hawk, Tony Teal at The Arts Company
SEE ART SEE ART SEE
David Lusk Gallery
Luke Hoover and Greyson Malo at Zeitgeist
David Lusk Gallery
Lauren Ruth, Eric Malo, Greyson Malo at Zeitgeist
Shavonne Frierson, Stan Patterson, Chana Lymon at Tinney Contemporary
100 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN JACKSON
Monica Nelson at Tinney Contemporary
Barbara Donner, Jerald Eerebout at The Rymer Gallery
Monica Nelson, Kelly Nelson, Ashley Nelson at Tinney Contemporary
Ray Ingram at Corvidae Collective
SEE ART SEE ART SEE Jonah Eller-Isaacs, Kathryn Wilkening at Zeitgeist
Louisa Altman, Barbara Logan, Fielding Logan, Joe Altman at David Lusk Gallery
Artist Christian Greene
The Arts Company
Watkins Arcade Gallery (WAG) NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 101
ART
SMART a monthly guide to art education
State of the Arts
by Jennifer Cole, Executive Director, Metro Nashville Arts Commission Photography by Zachary Gray
S
PHOTOGRAPH: JERRY ATNIP
chool’s back in session and you, working mom extraordinaire, have hit your stride. Your day has a pace, a certain comfortable madness. Mascara in the minivan, a conference call via Bluetooth on the way to gymnastics, a polite, yet heated text exchange with a colleague while you double park for piano lessons. You are, in fact, the star of your own Disney channel show, a legend in your own mind. Then it strikes, without warning—like a pandemic or a visit from your weird uncle: the teacher in-service day.
at soccer practice, someone to plan a day of educational, exciting, and joyful activities during the bloody teacher in-service day! Finally, someone has had the mad brilliance to waltz into that space (or they saw you crying in a parking lot one day and took pity). It doesn’t matter; you are liberated. The Nashville Children’s Theatre and the Adventure Science Center continue to offer great programs on days like MLK Day and Fall and Holiday breaks, but the new OZ School Days program takes it to a whole other level.
Your carefully curated school/work/life calendar has ignited and pushed you to that final breaking point—box wine. What are you going to do? You’ve been hoarding vacation for the Alaskan cruise, and you know sick days have to stay in the bank until flu season passes. You get it; you really do. You want the best and most effective human being imparting wisdom to your kids. You appreciate learning and the joy of silence. Seriously, who could be in a classroom with dozens of moody, zitty pre-teens for weeks on end without a break? But this break, woven into your organized chaos, is like a powder keg to your sanity. Why oh why can’t someone out there help a girl out and program these days? Please? For years you’ve fantasized about moneymaking schemes that would make the life of crazed parents easier. Starbucks inside of Bounce U, Bloody Marys at the Fall Festival, speed mani-pedi mobile
The braniacs at OZ, Lauren Snelling and Bob Kucher, have carefully curated a year’s worth of music, visual art, and performance day camps to fill in that negative space when MNPS is out of session. Fantastic teaching artists like Duncan May, Jennifer Harwell, Jammie Williams, Brian Somerville, and Hannah Maxwell Rowell will inspire and occupy your little genius. So dry your eyes, sisters; put down the Franzia, pack that Monster High lunch box, and get thee to OZ! Sessions are available for $50 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. A complete list of days and classes, more information, and tickets are available at www.oznashville.com/education.
102 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training
E
arly this year the Arts & Business Council launched Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training, an intensive program that prepares working artists to manage the business aspects of their creative endeavors, so that they are poised for success as their careers blossom. Hosted at the Entrepreneur Center, Periscope offers artists access to
professional development, entrepreneurial resources, and mentors. Through small group work, they are able to share best practices with a community of interdisciplinary peers.
Limited to 25 artists, Periscope includes practitioners of all artistic genres from Nashville and its surrounding counties. Over the next five months, Nashville Arts Magazine will introduce you to this year’s Periscope class. For more information on Periscope, visit www.abcnashville.org.
JAS TAYLOR | PERISCOPE DANCE MUSIC Jas Taylor is a dancer, DJ, and founding director of iJam, an educational dance program that also serves the Mayor’s after-school initiative Nashville Afterschool Zone Alliance (NAZA). Jas focuses on offering positive entertainment that connects with people of all ages in a variety of commercial and private settings. From energizing “get up and dance” sessions at companies that want to provide a fun and energetic outlet for their employees, to working with inner city youth and honing their dance skills, his talent lies in bringing a positive, fun atmosphere to any environment. Jas is currently raising money to pay for dance classes for his iJam students and hopes to open a studio where he can train dancers and DJs. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/iJam615. A certified interior designer, Erin has been making jewelry since she was in the sixth grade. Erin draws inspiration from her design background, her Choctaw heritage, fashion, film, and everyday objects. Though she’s had an online store for some time, it wasn’t until two years ago that she quit her full-time job to focus solely on her jewelry business, Rin Juel. Erin wanted to get into Periscope because she had never taken business courses and didn’t think she had any entrepreneurial skills. Through the program, she feels she has “grown leaps and bounds in a short period of time.” Periscope is giving her a different perspective on how to think strategically and how to market her business. For more information, visit www.rinjuel.com.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH BERRY
ERIN HERB | JEWELRY
AMANDA VALENTINE | FASHION Amanda Valentine is the founder of VALENTINE VALENTINE, a Nashville-based clothing and accessory collection. Though she went to school for fashion design, she ended up as a professional stylist and has had success with projects for CMT, Verizon Wireless, The Cadillac Three, and Motley Crue. In 2012 she filmed Season 11 of Project Runway, and even though she had been designing on the side, the experience made her pursue design more aggressively, and her label really started to take off. Voted by Project Runway fans to return for Season 13, Amanda has her hands full filming and growing her line. Amanda’s clothing designs center on contrasts and bring together seemingly dissonant ideas in concept, color, and texture. For more information, visit www.amandavalentine.com. Sharon is the lead figure—singer, songwriter, bassist, and trumpet player—of rock band Kink Ador. Her group recently released their first radio single “Hold on Tight” from the upcoming album Set Me Free produced by Ken Coomer and recorded in Nashville. A proud rock’n’roller, Koltick was influenced by bands such as The Talking Heads, The Police, Lou Reed, The Clash, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, and Nick Cave.
Periscope has given Sharon an avenue for connecting with other artists who are facing similar issues. As her career has progressed, she has had to build a team to help with management, musicians, and publicity. Through Periscope she is learning how to manage her business. For more information, visit www.kinkador.com.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE QUINN
SHARON KOLTICK | MUSIC
PHOTOGRAPH BY TYLER BLANKENSHIP
RHENDI GREENWELL | FILM/VISUAL ART
A Film graduate of Watkins College of Art, Design & Film, Rhendi Greenwell’s work, recognized by the Appalachian Film Festival, celebrates the accidental and idiosyncratic nature of life. Since graduation, Rhendi’s work has evolved, and she is shifting towards conceptual visual art. Rhendi explained that her Periscope mentor, Caroline Allison, has “been amazing and very present. She’s been a game changer for me.” Recently Caroline went with Rhendi to view the space for her upcoming exhibition and was inspirational in helping Rhendi envision the presentation of her work. The 1954 Eames Collection opens at Alfred Williams & Company on September 4 and features largeformat images printed on white rag paper. Her imagery originates from the Eames 1954 film titled S-73. For more information, visit www.rhendi.com. NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 103
Nashville Children’s Theatre: Providing Relevancy
by DeeGee Lester
T
he words “children’s theatre” conjure images of light-hearted, fanciful entertainment. But performances can also offer a safe environment for young people to explore edgy, difficult issues that impact their lives.
In the capable hands of a talented crew of actors under the guidance of director Jeff Church, the performances run from September 18 through October 5. The play follows last season’s Number the Stars (about the Holocaust) in bringing weighty subject matter onto the stage for young people. The story follows coming of age and the need to survive, to express personal identity, and to “fit in” within a tough environment peopled by rival gangs. In creating a performance that addresses these issues, NCT’s Artistic Director Scot Copeland considers Church “the most innovative theatrical director for teen audiences.”
Santiago Sosa (Two-Bit), Matthew Rosenbaum (Sodapop), Kevin Bohleber (Ponyboy), Bralyn Stokes (Johnny), and Daniel Collins (Dallas) star in The Outsiders
workshop) on the evening of September 18, providing teachers with the tools to support classroom discussion and activities connected to the play. In addition, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts provides funding for seven-week residencies in three classrooms. Through these intensive residencies, students explore the themes of self-identity and actualizing identity within the larger community. Mimicking ideas and using tools from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Theatre for Social Change, the workshops “guide students in learning techniques for creating an inclusive environment and helping young people to assist others to gain feelings of belonging and becoming an insider,” says Hamilton. “None of this is easy. And, depending on
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASHVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE
“Part of the value of theatre in the lives of students is that these are issues that are relevant to young people and to the situations they face today,” says Rachel Hamilton, Assistant Director of Education at NCT. Curriculum-based educational programming supports the performance with an Educator’s Preview (reception and
PHOTOGRAPH BY NASHVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE
This fall, Nashville Children’s Theatre offers just such an opportunity to middle school students, kicking off the 2014–2015 season with a production of The Outsiders. Based on S.E. Hinton’s groundbreaking young-adult novel from the 1960s and adapted for the stage by Christopher Sergel, the play addresses issues of inclusion/exclusion, social change, and how we actualize identity within community.
Jenny Littleton and Patrick Waller in Jack’s Tale: A Mythic Mountain Musical 104 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
the school, the neighborhood, and the community, the idea of not belonging can negatively impact a young life.”
Combined, the play and workshop experience offers students the opportunity to talk about and explore various ways of dealing constructively with these issues. In selecting the three schools that will host the residencies, NCT staff considers schools that are booked for performances and whose teachers have filled out a form indicating interest in having a residency program. Through this process, the NCT staff tries to bring the most workshop diversity with offerings to public, private, and rural schools. Performances such as The Outsiders remind audiences that theatre can serve as a powerful teaching tool. Through words, stories, and the navigation of characters through the complexities of life, we gain insight into ways that we, too, might deal with the issues and personal difficulties of living.
The remainder of NCT’s 2014–2015 season will delight audiences with a quartet of family classics for the stage: James & the Giant Peach (November 6– December 14), Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play! ( January 15–February 8), Jack’s Tale: A Mythic Mountain Musical (February 19–March 8), and rounding out the year, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (April 9–May 17). For more infor mation, please visit www.nashvillechildrenstheatre.org.
Music Makes Us: Hitting the High Notes by Rebecca Pierce | Photography by Donn Jones
I
n just a few years, Music Makes Us, a joint effort of Metro Nashville Public Schools, Mayor Karl Dean, and music industry and community leaders, has hit countless high notes and dramatically enriched music education in Metro Nashville Public Schools. A few of the inaugural achievements of Music Makes Us include implementing 40 new contemporary classes in 18 middle and high schools, launching a world-class recording studio and student-run record label in a local high school, restoring band at all 35 zoned and magnet middle schools, and creating new choral programs in four middle schools. In its second year, those efforts continued to grow, new programs were added, and a baseline research report proved that student participation in school music programs has measurable effects on school engagement and academic achievement. For example, music students with more than one year of music are 52% more likely to graduate from high school on time than their non-music peers, 7% more likely to come to school each day, earn a 15% higher grade point average, score 16% higher on the ACT-English, and 9% higher on ACT-Math. Laurie Schell, Director of Music Makes Us, says, “I think part of my job is to say to the community that our investment is worth it. Look what’s happening to the kids. That’s part of the reason we did the benchmark research study, to show that the investment we are making is having an impact on students. It’s not just fluff. It’s not just a ‘nice to have’. This is making a difference in students’ lives every day.”
So far this year, a district-wide indoor drum line has been added, and expansion is underway for the choral program, world percussion and mariachi, which is drawing students of all nationalities. More targeted professional development is being offered to teachers, and a new mentoring program is in place for teachers joining Metro Nashville Public Schools. In October, the Hub, an online listing of vetted music professionals and organizations who want to share their programs or expertise with students in
Metro schools, will be fully operational and ready for teachers to access. In coming months Nashville Arts Magazine will feature some of the high notes Music Makes Us is reaching: student success stories, stellar faculty contributions, NashvilleArts.com
and the music programs that are making such a positive impact on our community’s youth. For more information about Music Makes Us and the benchmark research study, visit www.musicmakesus.org. September 2014 | 105
1932–2012 ®
Gregory Wolynec, Music Director
SEASON
V
O Y A G E in VERSATILITY 2014-15 NASHVILLE CONCERTS
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SATURDAY, OCT 25 JAZZMANIA
MONDAY, SEPT 15 CLASS SESSION STARTS Saturday, Sept 20, 7pm Beegie Adair Trio Friday, Sept 26, 8pm Snap on 2&4 w/ Pat Coil
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The best-selling young adult novel ever comes to the stage at NCT.
Adapted by Christopher Sergel from the novel by S.E. Hinton
Sept 18 - Oct 5
Saturdays at 2pm & 7pm, Sundays at 2pm Tickets: nashvillect.org or 615-252-2675
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Appraise It
All prices given represent retail replacement costs. Bakelite Bracelets, carved, incised, flat, and tube forms: $40 to $150 each.
Inside the Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories have had the occasion to inspect the contents of many inherited jewelry boxes and am of the opinion that the average person does not collect jewelry—the jewelry simply collects.
The boxes themselves have been as different as the collections they held, from multi-drawer floor models to the modest shoebox. The adornments are often found in the company of odds and ends, such as pocketknives, currency, military medals, class rings, and so forth. These adornments and disparate objects were once significant to someone, but without documentation or oral history, that emotional value is lost, and all that remains is the intrinsic value, collectible value, and conjecture. Adornments through Chemistry Plastics, formulations introduced at the turn of the twentieth century, opened the door for the creation of costume jewelry. Affordable adornments for a mass market, made from non-precious materials, could now be produced in large quantities to follow the vogue of the latest fashion trends.
Celluloid Patented in 1869 by American inventor John Wesley Hyatt, celluloid, regarded as the first “practical artificial plastic,” was formulated secondarily to an attempt to invent a satisfactory substitute for ivory billiard
balls. While the formula fell short of that mission, Hyatt’s invention served many other purposes, from false teeth to piano keys. Jewelry made of celluloid dates roughly from 1900 to the early 1940s. Favored for its flexibility, it could be bent, twisted, and molded. Items made from celluloid, also known as “French Ivory,” tend to be thin, light, and fairly brittle. They can be sensitive to heat, and those of the earliest formulation, which included the use of camphor, can be extremely flammable and capable of producing fumes that can damage adjacent metals. Celluloid jewelry should be stored and worn carefully. It is best kept away from open flames, extreme heat, and stored in a place where it can “breathe.” Bakelite The Belgium-born scientist Dr. Leo H. Baekeland is acknowledged as the pioneer of synthetic resin. In 1909 he formulated and patented the non-flammable plastic known PHOTOGRAPH BY JERRY ATNIP
I
Part II
Bakelite “Butterscotch” Dress Clip: $40. Painted and Carved Wooden Horse Head Brooch with Lucite Mane: $70. Celluloid Butterfly Brooch: $50.
as “Bakelite.” It was the first thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin.
A very wide range of items was produced from Bakelite, including telephones, radios, poker chips, and of course, starting in the 1920s, jewelry. Lucite Lucite, the acrylic resin also known as Plexiglas, was first marketed by DuPont in 1937. Lucite began to appear in costume jewelry around 1940. Like Bakelite, it is a thermoset plastic, but it was more affordable to produce. Lucite could also be molded, cast, laminated, inlaid, and carved. In its original state Lucite is clear and colorless, but it can be tinted any color of the rainbow, from transparent to opaque. Lucite reached the height of its popularity in the 1940s and 50s, but it continues to be used in the manufacturing of jewelry. Common post-war pieces that would be of interest to collectors include clear Lucite imbedded with glitter, seashells, rhinestones, or flowers.
Linda Dyer serves as an appraiser, broker, and consultant in the field of antiques and fine art. She has appeared on the PBS production Antiques Roadshow since season one, which aired in 1997, as an appraiser of Tribal Arts. If you would like Linda to appraise one of your antiques, please send a clear, detailed image to info@nashvillearts.com. Or send photo to Antiques, Nashville Arts Magazine, 644 West Iris Dr., Nashville, TN 37204. NashvilleArts.com
September 2014 | 109
Critical i
EDMONDSON PARK PUBLIC ART
Moth-Canyon–Shootout, 2014, Acrylic and spray paint on panel board, 11” x 23”
by Joe Nolan
C
hristopher Bost’s Beyond: New California Landscapes reduces wide-open West Coast spaces into colorful, elemental successions of stripes, angles, formations—and sections that create the sense of paintings within paintings. Bost represents the contemporary edge of a California painting tradition that found artists cycling through their own versions of Realism, Impressionism, and Tonalism between the end of the nineteenth century and WWI. Like the Tonalists, Bost is more concerned with capturing the mood of a space than representing it accurately. He captures red canyons, arroyos, blue water, and green farm fields in abstracted representations that serve to express our postmodern separation from the natural world.
-ROAD TO THE MOUNTAINTOPBY THORNTON DIAL
CHARLOTTE AVE BETWEEN 16TH & 17TH AVE N publicart.nashville.gov
Bost’s Moth-Canyon-Shootout is a diptych displayed on a gallery-wall corner. On each panel, successions of red, blue, pink, and black lines shoot up from either side to form a jagged ridgeline where they meet. The panels are very similar but not exactly the same, and the uneasy lack of symmetry adds to the sense of vertigo they induce. Odd cylinder shapes also play Op-art tricks on the eye, protruding out from the background one minute and drilling down into it the next. Bost’s interest in Op-art trickery recalls the movement’s first formal stirrings in the mid 1960s, speaking to the psychedelic drug culture that emerged at the time and to the desert’s natural abilities to distort perceptions with heat and light and solitude. Perfect-Waterfalls also plays with the eye as its spectra of perfect vertical lines seems to fall into spaces at the centers of the panels where they recede into rosy fields of still light. The imagery is simultaneously graceful and threatening, precisely evoking the gorgeous danger of the West, its wild spaces, and its Neverland sovereignty at the edge of the national imagination. Christopher Bost is represented locally at The Red Arrow Galler y. For more infor mation about him, please visit www.theredarrowgallery.com and www.cxbost.com.
110 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
BLAIR CONCERT SERIES 2014-2015
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SATURDAY, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER 13 13 ·· 7:30 7:30 P.M. P.M. ·· INGRAM INGRAM HALL HALL We salute pianist Roland Schneller, celebrating 50+ years teaching at the Blair School. Performers are his former and current students, including: Dr. Jerome Reed, Lipscomb University Roger Wiesmeyer, Nashville Symphony Orchestra and Blair School Dr. Grace Huang, Cleveland Institute of Music
100 Powell Pl, Ste 200, 615-297-2224 & 128 Powell Pl, 37204, 615-292-2250 Open M-Sat 10-6 & Sun 12-6 : GasLampAntiques.com Celebrate the season with SALES at Fall Fiesta, September 13th, 10am-6pm, BOTH Stores!!!
Dr. Jim Helton, Ball State University Rebecca Rousseau, high school senior Joanne Kang, fifth grade
A reception in Ingram Lobby will follow the performance Presented with gratitude to the Valere Blair Potter Trust for its generous support of the Blair School
Details about the Fall 2014 concert series may be found at blair.vanderbilt.edu All concerts at the Blair School of Music are free and open to the public unless specifically stated otherwise. For complete details about all the upcoming events at Blair, visit our website at blair.vanderbilt.edu
2400 Blakemore Ave. Nashville, TN 37212
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September 2014 | 111
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Stochastic (stō kas' tik)
The pseudo-random or variable arrangement of printing dots to recreate full color images of nearly photographic quality, clarity and detail.
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The Highway Has Always Been Your Lover, Oil and acrylic on panel, 60" x 60" Artist, Brian Tull represented by Tinney Contemporary 112 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
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PHOTOGRAPH BY DEBBIE SMARTT
PHOTO: ANTHONY SCARLATI
Friday, September 5, 6-9 p.m.
Nearly 30 galleries and working studios in a 15-block area, featuring artists at work, live music, wine and more! There’s no cost to attend
The other day, while gardening in my front yard, I noticed an SUV pulling up alongside the curb. The driver was wearing a ball cap and smiling like he knew me. At first, I wasn’t sure who it was. Then it hit me. “John Simmons! What brings you to town?”
John is the youngest brother of Barbara Simmons Eustis, a good friend from our days at Vanderbilt. She and I have stayed in touch over the years, and I’ve kept up with John though our mutual love of music. John was twelve years old when I first met him at the Simmons’s house on Lookout Mountain. Barbara and I had driven down for a weekend. As always, I had my guitar in tow, and when I pulled it out and began playing, John’s eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. It was obvious he had the bug. Now here it is, forty-something years later, and John still has the bug, playing a fine flattop guitar in the Doc Watson tradition. More recently, he has begun writing songs. So when John pulled up, I was feverishly working in the yard trying to get my mind off some personal matters. “You still got that Martin D-28?” he asked, grinning. “Sure do,” I replied. “Mind if I strum it for a while?” “Be my guest. It’s in there in the living room. Make yourself at home,” I said, as I continued my yard work. As John sat down on the porch and began to play, the sweet sound of his slightly out-of-tune flatpicking wafted out across the lawn.
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Before I knew it, I was feeling content. Then a strange thing happened. A man materialized from out of the bushes that separate my house from the one next door. In an instant I recognized my neighbor, Matt Reasor, who happens to be a fine artist and musician. Without saying a word, Matt strode purposefully onto the porch and handed something to John. Now John didn’t know Matt from Adam’s housecat, so imagine his surprise when he looked down and saw a guitar tuner. “Is this Marshall’s?” John asked. Matt looked at John like, This one’s for you, Bud, then vanished back through the bushes. www.tallgirl.com
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September 2014 | 113
My Favorite Painting
K ip K rones
Bruce Matthews, Wrestlers One, 1994, Oil on canvas, 24” x 36”
A
Founder, SolidAirGallery.com
fter collecting for many years, you tend to run out of available wall space. You don’t, however, run out of the urge to find that special piece, the one you see that you must have, sometimes even when it doesn’t quite fit.
When I met Bruce recently he shared something more and, in doing so, answered a lingering question: What does the title Wrestlers One actually mean?
He said it came from a song lyric from the Moody Blues album Days of Future Passed. I was then able to tell Bruce how I had worked with the band for several years while living in London in the 80s. Who knew!
After a long career in the music business, Kip Krones has recently launched Solid Air Gallery as an online gallery. His first pop-up show will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. October 2 at Main Street Gallery in East Nashville. www.solidairgallery.com
ARTIST BIO
Bruce Matthews
Painter and muralist Bruce Matthews typically creates art that explores three-dimensional illusions. He is interested in surfaces and uses light, shadows, and shapes to produce tromp l’oeil effects. His paintings reveal a deep connection to color rendered with a strong palette of deep tones and hues of varied intensities. His style defies strict categorization as the artist paints with the intention of being true to the work he is creating. Self-taught, he studies the masters to uncover the
114 | September 2014 NashvilleArts.com
PHOTOGRAPH BY SHERI ONEAL
Wrestlers One, a wonderful abstract by Bruce Matthews, has met that challenge. The painting has hung happily in our home in equal measure both horizontally and vertically. Eye of the beholder and all that.
various methods artists have used to express themselves. He lives and works in a rural area of Middle Tennessee where he leads an uncomplicated life. The time he spends alone in the woods frees his mind to explore new ideas. He paints what he wants when he wants, and finds he makes his best art when following his subconscious. As part of Matthews’s commitment to simplicity he prefers to sell his work through word of mouth. You may reach him at brucematthewsart@gmail.com.
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