The late Nancy Saturn loved craftspeople, knew everyone, fought cancer to her last breath — and changed the city's arts scene
by Jim Ridley
The pin Alice Zimmerman wore to the memorial service at West End Synagogue last week was not a high-end production piece, the kind for sale in identical models wherever a top-dollar boutique has a store. It was semi-circular, offset by stones that were no more than black and white nuggets of quartz. But it was bold, striking and one-of-a-kind — qualities that seemed appropriate to the occasion.
"That looks like Nancy," someone told Zimmerman.
When Nancy Saturn died last week at age 67, after one last bout with the cancer she'd already beaten once, her many friends say some of the boldness and color went out of Nashville's arts scene. Gregarious, glamorous, possessed of a quick wit and a singular sense of style, Saturn devoted herself to the individual. She did so as a crafts advocate, as a shop owner, as a wife and mother — and as a one-woman resistance movement against the disease that finally took her life.
"She never wanted to be average," said her close friend Hope Stringer, who met her in the early 1970s as a customer at her early Bandywood shop The Craft Cranny. "All her children are the same way. She gave her children the independence to be everything they could be."
Saturn's headquarters was a tree-lined house on Whitland Avenue, a place where the walls and shelves bespoke a lifetime of travels and the kitchen buzzed with laughter and lively talk. She and her devoted husband, attorney Alan Saturn, loved to cook and entertain: It was not uncommon for Alan to bring home total strangers during the High Holy Days, knowing the feasts his wife had in store.
But to generations of craftspeople, Saturn will always be known for The American Artisan, the artisanal crafts shop she operated for nearly four decades. The West End shop was only one tributary of her efforts to elevate "the work of the hand," as her longtime friend and former business partner Zimmerman remembers.
"She had an impeccable discerning eye," says Zimmerman, who partnered with Saturn in the 1980s for the Zimmerman Saturn Gallery, a Second Avenue gallery and exhibition space 25 years ahead of today's thriving downtown arts scene.
That didn't mean she was always looking for costly ingredients and name brands — on the contrary. In the immediate wake of pop art and its fascination with mass production, Saturn sought an artist's inspiration in the humblest of materials: clay, cotton, wood. At a time when handcrafts were often treated as lesser works — hobbies — she founded The American Artisan Festival to give America's craftspeople their due.
That festival — which celebrates its 40th event this Fathers Day weekend in Centennial Park — did more than provide a selling platform. According to Anne Brown, owner of The Arts Company, it made Nashville look beyond the city limits. It made local craftsmen measure themselves against the finest artisans Saturn could find across the nation — and Saturn knew everybody.
"She pulled us up to a different level," says Brown, who knew Saturn for more than 35 years. "She used the term 'artisan' deliberately, because it means someone who brings beauty into function, and art into craft."
Between the festival and the shop, Saturn gave countless artists in all manner of media — woodworkers, weavers, glass blowers — their first commercial exposure. (Either that, or she just bought their wares herself.) People came by and bought things just to spend time in her company. Zimmerman says Saturn was canny enough to know that if she wore one of the shop's necklaces, someone more than likely would take it home.
In 1995, Saturn received her first diagnosis of breast cancer, the disease that would become her mortal foe. Her public efforts were widely reported: her work to open Gilda's Club and the nearly $1 million she raised for it through the American Artisan Festival; her co-founding of the Tennessee Breast Cancer Coalition. Less well-known were the calls she fielded sometimes daily from the newly diagnosed — people whose certainties about life had been yanked from under them, and who had heard Nancy Saturn could reassure them.
"Her recovery was helping other people," Zimmerman says.
Five years ago, she turned that attention to her husband Alan. He had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and last year she closed The American Artisan to devote herself full time to his care. On June 10, 2009, he died at Saint Thomas. By that time, she herself had been diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer.
At Saturn's memorial service last week at West End Synagogue, Rabbi Laurie Rice capped an eloquent eulogy by reading aloud a list of 41 strong women who Saturn said had inspired her to be the woman she was. She started making the list, Stringer says, not long after she received her final prognosis late last year.
"People were taken aback that she would think of honoring others at her own funeral," Stringer says. "She was what we call a 'one-er' — a one-of-a-kind, something unique. She recognized beauty in objects and people that few of us ever do."
Nancy Saturn is survived by her daughters, Rachel, Jacqueline and Samantha; her sister, Lori Adelson; her brothers Sheldon and Robert Adelson; and five grandchildren. Contributions may be made in her memory to Gilda's Club of Nashville, Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center, or the West End Synagogue.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
Comments (0)