I’m fixin’ to crawl all fall, y’all.
Nashville’s best art season means cozy gallery shows, sweater-weather exhibition hopping and — never forget — holiday shopping. The days grow shorter, the wine turns from summer white to autumn red, and art galleries and institutions around the city deliver some of their best programming of the year. This fall Nashville’s galleries, institutions and artist-led spaces are dishing up everything from African masks and new-media displays to a two-woman show that combines painting and sculpture in East Nashville.
Red Arrow pairs Danielle Winger’s colorful abstract botanical works with Lindsy Davis’ earthy immersive sculpture installations in Call & Response (through Oct. 25), and the complementary combination is a curatorial chef’s kiss. Winger’s richly colored paintings of flowing fronds and moonlit woods are dreamy and brooding. Her unpopulated wild spaces resonate with quietude and stillness, while also hinting at the presence of the divine somewhere between the meadows, mountains, moons and stars. Davis’ sculpture practice gets only stronger, and every exhibition feels like a big step forward for one of Nashville’s best artists. Her new large-scale woven forms are designed for gallerygoers to stand inside of, and her work is informed by a conceptual framework that’s as elegant and compelling as her constructions. Winger’s subjects and Davis’ use of natural materials align with recent trends toward abstraction and formalism, as well as the revival of Romanticism in the 21st century.
Tso Scream Mask, Visages de masques (IX) series, Hervé Youmbi. Collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, museum purchase, Robert P. Gordy Fund, 2023.38.1-.7. Image courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art. photo: Hervé Youmbi.
As always, the Frist Art Museum will have something for everyone to wonder and wander about this fall. New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations (Oct. 10-Jan. 4) spotlights four contemporary artists who are updating and reimagining ancient West African mask and costume-making traditions that stretch all the way back to the beginnings of agriculture on the Mother Continent. The exhibition includes works by Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa (Nigeria), David Sanou (Burkina Faso), Sheku “Goldenfinger” Fofanah (Sierra Leone) and Hervé Youmbi (Cameroon), and it offers fresh research models for contemporary masquerade, illuminating various issues relating to ownership and research ethics when it comes to tracing and documenting these long-lived creative traditions. This will be the buzziest local show of the season, and it’s complemented by Fahamu Pecou: This Face Behind This Mask Behind This Skin (Oct. 10-Jan. 4), a display from the Atlanta-based multimedia artist whose paintings, sculpture and videos confront the comforts and limits of contemporary Black identity in the South. Also at the Frist, Nashville music-heads will be keen to see Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm (Nov. 6-Jan. 26). Macca’s snaps take viewers along with The Beatles during the three months when the group went from being a hit British band to becoming an unprecedented global pop phenomenon.
Ellie Caudill is a Nashville native who made her place in the local art scene when she helped open the Elephant Gallery space in 2017. As co-curator at Elephant, she helped define the venue’s unique immersive exhibition installations. Caudill studied at Watkins, but her art revels in trashy midway charm. The artist is known for commercial production, commissioned murals and zany portraits, but Peas in the River at Julia Martin Gallery (Oct. 4-25) is a more personal show exploring themes from grief to joy in the artist’s signature style.
TR Ericsson is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist whose works range from zines and books to sculpture and painting. Ericsson — whose Is This You? (Oct. 4-26) comes to Neue Welt this fall — combines a conceptual mind, a ruthless attention to detail and an imaginative use of materials to create works like his signature nicotine paintings on panel. Since his mother’s passing in 2003, Ericsson’s work has been inspired by his explorations of an inherited family archive.
Modfellows opens a new show this fall that feels like a conversation between traditional painting and new-media art. Into the Field (Oct. 18-Nov. 15) is a two-woman exhibition examining dream imagery and unseen supernatural forces that finds each artist taking distinct paths into these unknowns. Ruth Chase pictures abstract figures in mysterious narratives using acrylic on canvas. Chalet Comellas paints abstract color fields and employs lighting tech to display illuminated text messages in her work. The exhibition speaks to this contemporary art moment where age-old materials and techniques are mixing with revolutionary new technologies as artists continue to struggle with eternal questions about the immaterial world.
From Herb Williams’ crayon sculptures to Bryce McCloud’s throwback prints, the legacy of Nashville-born pop-art trickster Red Grooms is alive and well in the city’s contemporary art scene. Grooms himself is still working and innovating, and during the pandemic he escaped New York to shelter in the Volunteer State, creating a body of botanical still-life watercolor paintings at his retreat near Beersheba Springs. His show at David Lusk Gallery (Oct. 28-Nov. 26), which is untitled as of press time, examines the artist’s beloved Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel. The gallery will have his initial drawings and watercolors for the carousel figures, and four of the original cast models. Grooms is also slated to do a live wall drawing on site.
“A Brief Pause Between Two Mysteries,” Wendy Walker Silverman
Wendy Walker Silverman opens a new painting exhibition in November. The local favorite will close the gallery’s 2025 calendar with A Brief Pause Between Two Mysteries at Tinney Contemporary (Nov. 22-Jan. 3), and we call that going out with a bang. Silverman’s new works are the most cohesive collection I’ve seen from the artist, and one gets a new sense of confidence from this eponymous display of big canvases covered in bold colors arranged in graphic-inspired compositions. Silverman’s earthy palettes of oranges, ochres and olives feel particularly suited for a fall art display, and her work embraces a timeless formalism that will please anyone with an eye for abstract painting.
Our preview of the season’s most exciting art, music, book, theater and film events
