I'm going to be totally honest and tell you that I was practically in tears during yesterday's media preview at The Frist. Thornton Dial was fairly silent during the tour of his work and the quilts of Gee's Bend (read Joe's pick on the exhibit here) — but underneath his Nascar hat, slumped low in a wheelchair pushed by his son, his presence was powerful. I felt honored to be seeing it, as if it were so precious I could only assume it would be kept secret.

The exhibit opens today, along with an exhibit of drawings by Bill Traylor. Look for more in-depth coverage on both of these exhibits — including an installation view of the Traylor exhibit, a few posts about connections I've made between this work and other contemporary art, and a full review — in the next couple of weeks.

Speaking of Bryce McCloud, in case you missed it, here's the video Third Man Records put together of him making the "triple decker" posters for Jack White's recent Ryman shows. Three separate prints, when stacked together, form a composite image thanks to the cut-outs. Ace stuff.

• Eric England

There are several reasons to stop by the just-opened fancy-pants coffee shop Barista Parlor (including but not limited to Mast Brothers chocolate, mugs that are the exact perfect size and weight, fantastic light fixtures, and of course, really great coffee), but if you're anything like me, you'll probably make a bee-line to the mural on the shop's back wall, inspect it from close up, gawk at the craftmanship, then back up and gawk at the artfulness of its presentation. It's the latest creation of Nashville printmaker Bryce McCloud, who runs Isle of Printing (for more on that, read this).

• Mellencamp with "Fear in America," 2005, mixed media on canvas, two panels, 48" x 156". Photo courtesy of TSM, Denny Adcock, Photographer

Last Thursday night I found a spot at my favorite downtown lot and marched across Legislative Plaza on my way to a John Mellencamp press conference and private reception at the Tennessee State Museum. Arriving early for a change, I made my way inside where I was pointed to a media waiting area. Penned-in by lobby furniture, this motley crew huddled like a herd, murmuring among themselves, weighed down with cameras, lights, microphones and the burden of their own expectations of a pop icon who was in town to celebrate his first museum show as a fine artist. I was one among the throng, but not for long.

• Barbara Yontz

The off-kilter mad scientist aesthetic of taxidermy is the only link I’ve been able to come up with to connect the two exhibits opening tonight at Vanderbilt’s Space 204. That difficulty is not a complaint — the space typically entertains diverse exhibits that are much easier to appreciate in person than they are to write about in a 150-word preview, but that’s never stopped me from trying. And so: Taxidermy!

Barbara Yontz worked with animal parts to make her “Star Womb Project,” an 8-foot sculpture based on collaborations with an astrophysicist whose experimental data measured the formation of the first stars. The sculpture incorporates hog gut, wool and silk to create a hollow vessel that works like a womb and turns abstract information into sound.

Joining her in the space is Quintin Owens, who uses the bright colors of hunters’ blaze-orange vests to offset dead animals on pedestals. He is currently a studio assistant at Vanderbilt’s department of art.

• Quintin Owens

A native of Tulsa, Okla., Megill was born July 17, 1942. He spent a stint in the Air Force before the Vietnam War, translating Russian into English and cracking codes. A multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter, Megill was active in the Oklahoma music scene, but he didn't get serious about making metal sculpture until he and CarrieGlenn, his wife and creative partner, attended a Salvador Dali exhibition together in the early ’70s.

Megill's work explores what CarrieGlenn calls “the mythical kingdom,” and the artist's greatest gift may have been his ability to combine whimsy with an intensity of vision, marrying the two together with an eye for detail and a feel for materials. Megill was never one to pass up a good pun, but his pieces also embody deep metaphysical questions and mystical symbolism. There is always a sense of serious play at work in these sculptures of army ants carrying spears, mermaids gazing into illuminated crystals, giant hornets gathering around glowing blossoms and at least one half-porpoise/half-human creature riding on a tiger shark, playing a game of underwater polo.

When the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch, aka MCA, died last week, it was a sad day for music fans all over the world. But it hit particularly close to home for local video artist Benton-C Bainbridge, who did two world tours and many TV performances with the Beastie Boys, providing live visual accompaniment using computers and oscilloscopes. (See the video above for an example; Bainbridge performed, co-created and co-designed all the visuals.)

Bainbridge splits his time between The Bronx and Hillsboro Village, where he now lives part-time to be near his son. Along with business partner V Owen Bush, Bainbridge runs Glowing Pictures, which provides just about every video application you can imagine for education, technology, story-telling, live performance and more. He's shown his video art at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, Lincoln Center, and on five continents.

Best of all, his first Nashville show, Super Long Play!, opens tomorrow night at Seed Space with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. In this week's Scene, Laura Hutson writes:

Benton-C Bainbridge has been working on an interactive installation that might be the perfect Seed Space gallery show — lo-fi, anachronistic and totally engaging. ... This is his first local exhibition, and he’s enlisted the help of local performers to create a stack of 50 VHS tapes with 14 hours’ worth of footage that creates, according to the artist statement, “an ‘electronic sketchbook’ of real-time recordings of rehearsals and studies … painted with live electronics.”

In an interview with Country Life, Bainbridge recently shared his thoughts on Nashville, video art and his work with Yauch and the Beastie Boys. We got a sneak peek at some of Super Long Play!, and Hutson took some still shots that are interspersed throughout the interview:

I finally got around to seeing the giant rose sculpture on the Broadway-side lawn of The Frist today. It's one of 38 sculptures that artist Will Ryman (no relation) created to line New York's Park Avenue last Spring, but its new home is Nashville — it was installed last month and will remain up through December. With details like massive insects and thorny stems, the sculpture is monumental but still pretty, flamboyant but not overly kitschy, and it deserves your attention.

Watch a video of its installation at The Frist after the jump.