"The Observer," Marilyn Murphy
2016 was a turbulent year for Nashville’s visual arts culture — exhibition spaces opened, closed and moved, and Wedgewood-Houston became the new center of the city’s gallery scene. Looking forward to 2017’s winter offerings, here are our predictions for the best sights to see during the cold weather months.
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Autumn is my favorite art season, but there are undeniable charms to be found in the low light of a warm, quiet gallery while winter whistles past the windows. No place in town offers a bigger, better, more visionary escape from the falling temperatures than the Frist Center.
Seven Samurai is the last film in the Frist’s Samurai and Cinema movie series, which accompanies their amazing exhibition of samurai arms and armor, Samurai: The Way of the Warrior. The Frist’s mini film fest swung into action with Akira Kurosawa’s bloody Yojimbo, and it seems only right to bookend the series with another of the master’s classics. Seven Samurai’s titular warriors are hired by defenseless villagers to protect them from marauding invaders. This movie is one of the most thrilling screen epics of all time, but its timeless themes of courage and hope in the face of oppression are the reasons why it continues to endure. 7 p.m. Jan. 13 in the Frist’s auditorium
Secrets of Buddhist Art: Tibet, Japan and Korea was curated from the Newark Museum’s world-renowned collection of Buddhist art, and organized exclusively for the Frist. Vajrayana Buddhism has a tradition of secrecy inspired by a history of political repression. This secrecy resulted in complex works of figurative art that represent the forms, forces and figureheads that make up the Buddhist tradition’s complex cosmology. The show’s opening day will include a gallery performance by seven Tibetan monks who will construct a sand mandala that will remain on display through the run of the exhibition. Feb. 10-May 7
Stop Me Feeling is an installation of colorful sculptures and meditative paintings by U.K. artist Claire Morgan. Morgan’s ecologically minded practice stages scenes of humans interacting with nature, illuminating the connections shared by living beings while also exposing the often senseless nature of death. This is Morgan’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., and it’s fitting that her show opens here in the so-called “post-truth” era — when the abundant evidence of human-caused global warming can be willfully ignored for the sake of politics. Feb. 10-May 7
East Nashville
The loss of East Side Art Stumble stalwarts like Sawtooth Print Shop and Gallery Luperca dealt a cruel blow to East Nashville’s still-fragile gallery scene in 2016 — Sawtooth moved to 2100 Dunn Ave. near the fairgrounds, and Luperca is currently partnered with Red Arrow in the East Side Project Space in the Packing Plant building in Wedgewood-Houston. Despite the chaos, things are looking up on the East Side here in 2017.
Red Arrow is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its gorgeous Gallatin Avenue gallery space with an exhibition by the same artist who inaugurated the then-brand-new digs last January. Nashville artist Daniel Holland’s Slow Violence won a Best of Nashville nod from the Scene in 2016. Holland makes big, bold abstract paintings, but Young Professionals will be packed with smaller works priced to sell as Holland funds his upcoming move to NYC. Get ’em while you can! Jan. 14-Feb. 5 at Red Arrow
The Nasty Women Exhibition is Nashville’s version of similar shows happening across the country. These exhibitions, fundraisers and creative performances constitute displays of solidarity among artists supporting the rights of women, people of color, the LGBT community and all immigrants in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. The Nashville show was curated via a call to artists of all ages, races, religions, sexual orientations, gender or non-gender identifications, economic backgrounds and citizenship statuses, and the exhibition includes work from all over the United States. The event will also feature live performances by Alanna Royale, Brineaboy, Fame + Fiction, Stephcynie Curry, Ariel Bui, Michelle Muldoon and more. All art sales and tickets will benefit the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. Go to thebasementnashville.com for times and tickets. Jan. 31 at The Basement East
Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery
Marilyn Murphy’s Realism Subverted celebrates the career of the local artist, a lioness of the Vanderbilt Department of Art — and the painter behind this week’s Scene cover — who will retire this year after 37 years of teaching at the university. Murphy’s work borrows from the pop-culture imagery of the 1940s and 1950s, and her paintings and drawings play with surreal juxtapositions of staid suburbia and the supremely strange. I’m a big fan of Murphy’s graphite drawings, and this celebration of the artist’s work is required viewing for longtime admirers and Nashville newbies alike. Jan. 19-March 3 at Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery
The Dada Effect: An Anti-Aesthetic and Its Influence is one of the 2017 exhibitions I’m most excited about. Dada was a short-lived but influential international multimedia art movement that began in Zurich right in the middle of World War I, fueled by an anti-war, anti-bourgeois ideology. The Dada Effect gathers works from Vanderbilt’s Fine Arts Gallery Collection along with several outside loans to demonstrate how Dada’s ideology and aesthetics directly impacted the development of modern art and literature throughout the 20th century. March 16-May 27 at Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery
OZ Arts Nashville
Korean artist Heeseop Yoon brings her massive, immersive drawing installations to OZ Arts Nashville this winter, creating a chaotic environment for viewers to explore while discovering messages about consumer culture. Yoon creates huge installations, and I can’t imagine a better local venue for displaying her obsessive, towering line drawings than this space, which has made its name with exhibitions that double as interactive events. Hide and Seek will be created from reference photographs of Nashville locations that Yoon snapped herself last spring. It’ll be interesting to see if the sites she renders will even still be standing in our cityscape by the time her show opens, and that documentary aspect of Yoon’s project makes Hide and Seek feel like a game played for keeps. Feb. 9-March 18
Wedgewood-Houston
Zeitgeist Gallery opens the year with two exhibitions by a pair of the biggest names in Nashville’s gallery scene: Richard Feaster is one of the best abstract painters in the Southeast, and his Psyche Pastorale exhibition features the spills, drips and pools of paint in a display of works named after psychedelic rock songs. Alex Lockwood’s Awful Things features the artist’s signature whimsical found-object designs in an examination of the history of human torture. It’s equal parts silliness and sadism, and here’s hoping the exhibition is as insightful as it’s sure to be formally delightful. Jan. 7-Feb. 25
Nashville artist Hans Schmitt-Matzen’s upcoming show at David Lusk will be a high-profile exhibition for the Nashville artist, whose work spans painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography. Leviathan will offer a selection of wall sculptures along with neon-light sculptures of dynamic, dancing lines inspired by the doodle drawings of the artist’s young son. Feb. 7-March 11
Coop’s move from the Arcade to the Packing Plant last year made Wedgewood-Houston Nashville’s best neighborhood for gallery going. Coop ended 2016 on a strong note with a powerful display of photos by Tracey Baran, and the gallery’s upcoming Donna Woodley-curated exhibition, Genesis, boasts some of the biggest names in the city, including Samuel Dunson, Brandon Donahue and Marlos E’van. Feb. 4-26
