Joe Nolan
Intermedia artist Joe Nolan has covered a wide range of art and film for the Nashville Scene. In his new book Nowville, he tells the story of Nashville’s contemporary art renaissance with a lively oral history featuring numerous artists, gallerists and curators.
Nolan, a veteran of the city’s 1990s art scene, displays the depth of his knowledge, sharing origin stories of pivotal organizations like the Untitled Artists group and The Fugitive Art Center. He takes readers into a world of abandoned factories and mills where artists endured dust-filled rooms, collapsing floors and sweltering heat to make art in a creative community. Nowville reveals an infectious do-it-yourself spirit at the heart of the movement.
When you began this project, how did you discern that a compilation of interviews was the best approach?
One reason I didn’t want to write about institutions and commercial galleries is because those stories are readily available. But Nashville’s independent artists, spaces and organizations are harder to track, and an untold story is obviously more appealing to a writer. When I realized I was going to have to rely on interviews, it occurred to me that delivering these voices directly to the reader via oral history was the most potent form.
Is the renegade spirit of the 1990s still alive in Nashville’s current contemporary art scene?
In the book I write about how the key figures of Nashville’s modern art legacy — Aaron Douglas, William Edmondson and Georgia O’Keeffe — brought values of vision, devotion and generosity to the city’s visual art scene. Those values are still in play today. Untitled was as much a concept as it was a group, and their uncensored, uncurated pop-up displays brought do-it-yourself, punk rock values to the table. Those are still here too, but the context is totally different. Nowadays there are lots of legitimate opportunities for emerging and unschooled artists to show in galleries and other art-focused spaces. But the artists have a much harder time finding affordable spaces to work or curate in. We’re seeing the rise of independent, itinerant curators who are guest programming in commercial galleries and popping up in collaboration with other art-centric or art-adjacent spaces. We’re also seeing a return to domestic studios and gallery spaces — they’ve been a Nashville thing since William Edmondson turned his front lawn into an art gallery for his sculptures back in the 1930s.
For young artists or newbies, Nowville offers a way into the Nashville art community by learning its history. And for artists seeking a creative community, the book offers a model for those with a DIY mindset. Did you intend for the book to both preserve history and show a way forward?
The book is definitely an archive of these places and people, collected and made accessible for the first time. It’s not really a handbook of DIY art strategies, but there are lots of ideas and examples that I hope young artists in another small art scene might take inspiration from. We talked about adding some kind of conclusion that would tie the book up in a bow, but I never wanted to do that. I love predicting art trends in my columns and reviews, but here I just wanted to celebrate these people and their unlikely accomplishments by letting them speak for themselves.
You explain in Nowville that the impetus for the 1990s movement grew out of frustration with Nashville’s traditional art institutions. Decades later, has the gap between institutions and do-it-yourself movements become narrower or wider?
The biggest problem was a lack of places to show work. That was exacerbated by the fact that, at that time, local galleries weren’t looking to nurture the careers of local emerging artists.
But it’s very different today. Now there are many more commercial galleries and artist-led spaces that regularly feature local emerging artists. Part of this is just postmodernism flattening the hierarchy of high and low art and erasing boundaries between art and craft and design. But the other reason is that the DIY projects in Nowville served as a proof of concept, demonstrating that there was real talent, creative organizing and productive practices happening right here in the city limits.
The final chapter in Nowville focuses on North Nashville’s rich history of contemporary art. I was unfamiliar with Carlton Wilkinson and his gallery. Who is another artist, curator or gallerist from Norf’s art scene that deserves attention?
I just gave a Best Independent Curator notice to Evan Roosevelt Brown in the Nashville Scene’s 2024 Best of Nashville issue. As I mentioned, independent curators are playing bigger roles in the art scene since gallery spaces are harder to come by, and Evan is at the front of that pack.
To read an uncut version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
