The winter art season is coming in hot with new spaces and familiar faces to brighten the dark days. The biggest local show of 2026 will be the In Her Place exhibition opening at the Frist Art Museum at the end of January. That expansive display of varied works by notable Nashville women artists will mostly hold the spotlight for the winter season, but gallerygoers in the know will also find a lot to love sprinkled like a Southern snow among Nashville’s commercial galleries, institutional displays, artist-led venues and even storied spaces being given a brand-new spin in 2026.
January
McLean Fahnestock and Beth Reitmeyer, RADAR615
Lain York continues to program the former Zeitgeist gallery walls in a collaborative effort with architectural designers MZA as a new curatorial project called RADAR615. The squad is reimagining its mission, getting in touch with the design/gallery space’s origins, and continuing to connect with the community through interdisciplinary collaborations and performances. The space opened for January’s First Saturday crawl with a performance by Guts Galore, a DJ, rap/spoken word, light and video crew from Detroit who recently relocated to Murfreesboro. RADAR615’s January programming includes a breakthrough display from one of Nashville’s premier new-media artists, McLean Fahnestock, as well as local sculptor Beth Reitmeyer. Fahnestock mixes video and sculpture in her technically dazzling conceptual installations that satirize and critique the commodification of idealized spaces. Come for the two-story-high video waterfall (“Drum Solo: Hyperbole for the Undiscovered Country”), stay for the seagulls with video monitors for heads (“Decoy Flock Egregore”). Reitmeyer has presented various installations that feature her illuminated geode-like fabric sculptures in gallery and outdoor displays all over the city. This new, immersive, interactive installation demonstrates that two missing ingredients in Reitmeyer’s work have been more space and more freedom. This new work really opens up and goes big, and it’s a big win for Reitmeyer as well as RADAR615. Reitmeyer’s States of Flow installation includes strewn stacks of her sparkling geodes, a lounge space for viewers to relax and watch the installation’s video component, and a stack of blank paper slips for viewers writing a one-word response to a question about 2026 supplied by the artist. All the responses will be sewn by Reitmeyer into a wishing well at the base of her own massive artistic waterfall during the run of the show.
TINNEY/20, Tinney Contemporary
Tinney Contemporary has occupied its current space since 2006, when Susan Tinney sought a permanent location for her habitual pop-up exhibitions, which had previously taken place in her living room and in friends’ homes. Now the gallery celebrates its 20th year with an expansive group exhibition to kick off its 2026 winter season. TINNEY/20 debuted with an opening reception on Saturday, Jan. 10, and the show features works from more than 50 painters, sculptors and photographers who have exhibited with the gallery over the past two decades. Tinney is the last of the flagship commercial art galleries that established Nashville’s Fifth Avenue of the Arts district. Founder Susan Tinney’s showroom was a highlight of the original downtown art crawl, and the gallery has consistently appealed to collectors and hosted the kind of experimental installations and challenging content that keeps gallerygoers guessing. The exhibition offers a moment to reflect on the gallery’s enduring legacy as a stalwart institution whose voice has helped define the vibrant contemporary art community in Nashville. If you missed the opening, the gallery will also be hosting a closing reception on Feb. 14.
‘Lyrical Reconstructions’ opens Thursday at Haley Gallery in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Willie Cole: Old School, Haley Gallery at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
The Haley Gallery at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum opened Willie Cole: Old School on Jan. 15. The exhibition showcases new works by the acclaimed American sculptor and printmaker, including a new series of seven chalkboard paintings. These text-based paintings feature multiple acronyms generated from the artist’s poetic riffing on keywords including “Dixie,” “Hate” and “Love.” The exhibition includes Cole’s largest chalkboard painting, inspired by the word “Patriot.” Cole brings poetry to painting like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Glenn Ligon, while simultaneously deploying text as art like Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly. Examples of Cole’s chalkboard paintings are featured in the collections of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to this new group of paintings, Haley is also showing a series of rarely seen artist studies, created over more than three decades. The studies illuminate Cole’s process for developing his acronyms for larger works. Willie Cole: Old School runs through March 13.
February
Print Fair, Browsing Room
Browsing Room presents Print Fair, a traveling exhibition celebrating the democratic nature of printmaking and its power to create conversation and build community connection. The exhibition originated in chats between longtime advocates for artist-led initiatives — Adrienne Outlaw and Janet Decker Yanez. The show is traveling between multiple church-based art galleries, where each host city adds its own local artists, creating an ever-growing collection that reflects the vibrancy and diversity of regional printmaking communities across cities including Nashville, St. Louis, Chicago and New York. The exhibition features artworks that are reproducible, accessible and rooted in community. Unlike one-of-a-kind artworks, prints offer collectors and viewers an approachable entry point into contemporary art. Nashville’s contribution includes prints from Hope Kise, Bryce McCloud, Ripley Whiteside, Ashleigh York and others. The show is up through Feb. 26, but the gallery will host a reception on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14 — in coordination with the Downtown Arts District Alliance (DADA) second Saturday downtown art crawl.
Apokalypsis, Random Sample
Apokalypsis is a group show curated by Random Sample’s Ivy Welsh featuring work from seven emerging Nashville-based artists — Liv Cullison, Olivia Daniels, William McClatchey, Fox Nelson, Nicole Tatum and Eva Wurst, as well as Welsh herself. The show includes a wide range of mediums, from welded steel to oil-on-canvas, collage, papier-mâché and film. Apokalypsis is an ancient Greek word meaning revelation, and the exhibition explores themes of transformation and illumination through diverse artistic practices. There’s an opening reception from 6 until 9 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 1, and the show will be up through March 29.
March
Benji Anderson’s The Fitful Portal is on view through March 31 at Elephant Gallery
Benji Anderson, Elephant Gallery
Elephant puts a cap on Nashville’s winter art season with a solo show by Benji Anderson. A self-taught visionary artist, Anderson creates surreal, imaginative multimedia worlds that often feature symbols, creatures and fantastical landscapes washed in vibrant palettes. The artist’s zines and comics — as well as his signature detailed drawings on Etch A Sketch toys — only begin to hint at Anderson’s playful creative range. I raved about the artist’s last solo show at Elephant, where Anderson created a floor-covering mandala mural. The exhibition’s working title is Toxic Waste in Paradise. Anderson’s work is nothing if not unpredictable, and many of this display’s details remain mysterious as of press time. But that’s all the more reason this farewell-to-winter show is a don’t-miss for me. The exhibition opens March 13, and is slated to run through April 20.
Nashville Rep and Nashville Shakespeare Festival's co-production of 'Fat Ham' tops our highlights of the season's theater, art, dance, film and book events
