Bryce McCloud at NoellePhoto: Eric England
When 21c Museum Hotels’ Nashville outpost opened downtown last fall, the boutique accommodations and free 24/7 gallery brimming with world-class contemporary art represented a game-changer for Nashville gallerygoers. Now a new art hotel, Noelle, aims to claim its own place in the heart of the city’s creative community by drawing attention to Nashville’s homegrown artists and artisans.
Noelle sits at the intersection of Fourth Avenue North and Church Street, where the building originally opened as a downtown hotel in 1930. Later it spent years as an office building, but this new project is a rebirth for the space and its story. Architect Nick Dryden led all aspects of Noelle’s design, and his solutions for bridging the hotel’s past to the present involved calling in a phalanx of local makers who crafted elements throughout the space — including everything from light fixtures to flooring to wall coverings. But the local-focused decor is only one element in an overall aesthetic putting Nashville’s visual art scene on display.
Noelle’s director of programming and creative projects is Nashville’s own Bryce McCloud. McCloud’s Isle of Printing headquarters has become synonymous with the printmaker’s Nashville-celebrating Our Town portraits project, which has included countless live interactive portrait-making happenings across the city. Picturing Nashville through portraits of its people is also a central theme at the Little Prints shop that McCloud is helming at Noelle.
“That’s what I’m most excited about,” says McCloud. “A lot of the projects we’ve been doing revolve around interaction, and this will give us a great new platform to provide great experiences.” Portraits of Little Prints visitors will be created by McCloud’s talented staffers as well as by the shop’s guest artists-in-residence.
“We’re using portraiture to get to know one another,” says McCloud. “To me the whole project is about building community.”
McCloud has created special prints of lesser-known Nashville notables that decorate Noelle’s guest rooms, but the public corridors of the hotel are decked with works by a handpicked group of artists McCloud assembled to help him tell the story of our city.
“I look at the whole space as an interactive installation that tells a different, deeper story about what Nashville is,” says McCloud. Noelle’s exhibiting artists include Alex Lockwood, Julia Martin, LeXander Bryant, Vadis Turner, Tim Hooper, Paul Collins, Lesley Patterson-Marx, Dan Brawner, Caroline Allison, Rob Matthews and Samuel Dunson. Each artist took the concept of local portraiture in different directions — but both Collins and Martin included their takes on the Nashville Scene’s own late, great film critic and editor, Jim Ridley.
“Jim represents all of the qualities I want to highlight with this project,” says McCloud. “He was an immensely talented person who made the decision to stay in Nashville and help to create communities by lifting other people up. Jim inspired people, and I hope when people tour the art in the hotel and meet all the people in these portraits, they walk away thinking, ‘Man, what can I do?’ ”
One of the most important aspects of the project for McCloud is the fact that Little Prints’ door opens directly onto Printers Alley. In the early 20th century, the thruway was home to both of Nashville’s major newspapers — The Tennessean and the Nashville Banner — along with roughly two dozen print shops and publishers. Little Prints’ opening is the fulfillment of a generations-old family dream for McCloud.
“I love printmaking, and I’ve done it for a long time, but it started for me as a kid,” he says. “My uncle was a historian at the Tennessee State Museum, and he collected vintage letterpresses and blocks and everything. This was before any of this was cool. Nashville’s printing history and Printers Alley’s past was just a story some of us held on to. … [My uncle] was preserving that story of letterpress printmaking in Nashville for a time when we could bring it back here to where it belongs.”
