Friday, August 31, 2012
Visual Art New Yorkers in Nashville: A List by Adrienne Outlaw
Posted by Adrienne Outlaw on Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 11:30 AM
As I was writing the post about people to watch, I came up with a nice list. In looking it over I realized that several people on it recently moved to Nashville from New York. So I split the list in half — here’s the section dedicated to the Big Apple for giving us such great transplants:
Veronica Kavass grew up in Nashville. She left to attend curatorial school in London and moved back last year to do some curatorial work at Cheekwood Museum of Art. In addition to writing for various publications around town, she’s hosted a residency program for sound artists in her house. Most recently she took time off from writing reviews to write a big ol' book called Artists in Love (to be released in October). I’ve seen it, and it is beautiful. I can’t wait to get a copy and read it.
While they haven’t yet moved here, we can always hope. Andrea and Scott Zieher, who co-own a fantastic gallery in Chelsea called ZieherSmith, have hosted a pop-up gallery in Nashville’s very own Gulch twice over the past two years. Last year they featured mostly Brooklyn artists. This year they included more Nashville artists. They’re super-nice and have made a great effort to get around town and meet people, as they visit their family here often.
One of my favorite artists moved here last year to do a teaching stint at Vanderbilt University. Although she’s returned to New York, Sharon Louden says she loves Nashville so much that she’d entertain an offer to move here. While she was here she connected Nashville artists to the national and international art scene. One of her students won the prestigious Hamblet Award at Vanderbilt. We can only hope that we can attract her back.
Benton-C Bainbridge, whom we recently showed at Seed Space, moved to Nashville a year ago. He is a great guy and talented video artist. Probably most known for doing the video production for the Beastie Boys, Benton left Nashville for most of the summer for a gig at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and tour with another band. He’s in Brazil right now, but he’ll be back next week and is hoping to be able to stay in town more often to continue collaborating with such people and organizations as Company Rose, Tony Youngblood and me.
Paul Collins didn’t move here directly from New York, but he did live there for several years. I know that makes the New York connection a stretch, but he impresses me enough to make it onto the list. He moved here from Anderson Ranch to take an art professor job at Austin Peay State University. With only a few months under his belt, he made the bold move to turn the gallery inside-out: The gallery has been repurposed to home student studios, and Paul is taking the art — and not your standard office decoration fare, but socially engaged art projects — to interesting spaces all over the APSU campus.
The great thing is there are plenty more where this came from. People seem to be pouring into the city from all over the place and making it thrive like I’ve never seen. Exciting.
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