Winter Arts Preview 2019: Visual Art

Frist Art Museum

The Frist Art Museum got a new name and new branding last year, and the venue’s consistently excellent programming finds Nashville’s premiere visual arts destination in fine form at the beginning of 2019. This season the Frist will host a variety of exhibitions offering giants of French art like Van Gogh, Monet and Degas; the photography and politics of Dorothea Lange; and a less-is-more contemporary exhibition from Italy.

Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Their Times: The Mellon Collection of French Art (Feb. 2-May 5) is a display of French art from the 19th and early-20th centuries, drawn from a collection at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. There are recognizable works by the exhibition’s titular artists here, but this display ranges from Romanticism to Cubism, offering a loose narrative about early modern painting in what’s sure to be a wintertime hit with Nashville gallerygoers. This show also gives a glimpse into the taste and vision of one of the great American collecting couples of the past century, Paul Mellon and Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon. This show looks great because of the works on display, but it’s an important exhibition for Nashvillians to spend time with, because it’s an entry point into the ongoing dialogue between collectors and canonical art history, and demonstrates the way they influence one another over time.

I’ve loved Dorothea Lange’s work since the first time I saw it in person at the Cheekwood Museum of Art way back in 1997, and Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (March 15-May 27) is the exhibition I’m most looking forward to at the Frist this season. Lange is best known for her Depression-era Dust Bowl portraits, but she produced work for three decades, capturing the hardships of Japanese-Americans at internment camps during World War II as well as the injustices committed by the American judicial system in the 1950s. This display includes work from every era of Lange’s career, but it also fleshes out our understanding of the person behind the lens with displays of letters, personal memorabilia and a video that puts photography and politics in context with Lange and her times. When it comes to the soul-stealing power of photography, the line between empathy for and exploitation of a subject is as thin as the glass that separates that person from the artist’s eye. Lange created a body of work that consistently highlights environments full of human suffering — without editorializing or propagandizing. Her empathic shots speak hard human truths we are still learning from and are still moved by in the 21st century.

Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani does a lot of things: He creates room-size exhibitions as well as sculptures and 2D works; he uses diverse and unexpected materials like soot, smoke and butterflies; he references art history in works that are unmistakably contemporary. That said, Parmiggiani’s work might be summed up best by what it doesn’t do. The works in Claudio Parmiggiani: Dematerialization (Feb. 2-May 5) offer contemplative images as an antidote to our visually frenetic times as well as quiet, meditative spaces that stand in contrast with the noisy buzz of this age. Parmiggiani’s aesthetic is full of subtle absences — of sound, of materials, of textures. These works imply more than they insist, hinting at empty spaces that they haunt with deft displays of light and shadow, and allusions to the natural world. JOE NOLAN

A 39 Year Retrospective, Part II at Cumberland Gallery

If I wrote a timeline of Nashville’s contemporary art scene, I’d begin at the beginning, naturally. But when did the first blossom of our scene as we know it bloom? Maybe the very first downtown art crawl in August 2006 would be the right place to start. But I could also go back 10 years further to the opening of The Arts Company in December 1996 — the cornerstone downtown gallery was the first to establish Fifth Avenue as an arts destination. That said, I’d probably reach back another 16 years to 1980, when Carol Stein founded her pioneering Cumberland Gallery in Green Hills.

Over the course of its venerable 39-year run, Cumberland has consistently ranked as one of the city’s top galleries, and it’s offered an oasis of culture in the middle of that Green Hills bouge. Stein’s space proved that an art gallery business could find an audience in Music City, and it gathered and nurtured a roster of some of the most talented artists in this city and beyond. Over the years I’ve spent hours at Cumberland, staring at Carrie McGee’s light-filled, suspended mixed-media objects or marveling at the meticulous detailing of Tom Pfannerstill’s sculptures of crushed A&W root beer cups and condom boxes. Billy Renkl’s always-inventive approaches to collage consistently kindled my forever-delight with the medium, and printmaker Mark Hosford’s anarchic narratives always spoke to pop culture and art history simultaneously. My favorite East Nashville art studio is the private studio of Bob Durham and Jeff Danley, two of Cumberland’s best painters. Meanwhile, Cumberland Gallery represents Nashville pop art star Red Grooms, and painter Barry Buxkamper has a Whitney Biennial on his CV. The gallery managed as a successful business for decades, but most importantly, it managed to do so while showing work that consistently spoke to the conversations happening in art centers like New York City and Los Angeles.

Just before Halloween, Stein sent out an email announcing that the gallery would be closing so she could focus on new projects and spend more time with her grandchildren. Stein’s done more to establish Nashville’s visual arts scene than nearly anyone else I might name, and while her eye for talent and her instinct for the business of art won’t be replaced anytime soon, the gallery’s very last exhibition offers a final opportunity to celebrate one of Nashville’s creative pioneers and the community she built. On Feb. 9, the gallery will host an opening reception for the second and final installment of its last exhibition, A 39 Year Retrospective. The show includes work by Sherry Karver, Kurt Kemp, Bill Killebrew, Ray Kleinlein, Leonard Koscianski, Ida Kohlmeyer, David Kroll, James Lavadour, Marilyn Murphy, Bob Nugent, Thomas Pfannerstill, Jim Phalen, Ron Porter, Billy Renkl, Andrew Saftel, Greg Sand, Max Shuster, Marko Spalatin, Jack Spencer, Fred Stonehouse, Suzanne Stryk, Robert Treat, Terry Williams, John Wilkison and Gavin Zeigler. JOE NOLAN

21c Museum Hotel

There’s a term in aesthetics called the uncanny valley, which describes the relationship between a nonhuman object’s resemblance to a human and the emotion that thing elicits. Think of one of those humanoid robots with a rubbery face and dead eyes that you’ve seen go viral — it almost looks a little too human. It’s the subtlety of the scare, that psychological mind-fuck, that holds its power. The bombshell exhibit The SuperNatural is capitalizing on that theme — that the relationship between the natural and the unnatural is closer than it appears — in a display of more than 70 works by a multinational array of contemporary artists who will fill all three floors of the gallery inside the 21c Museum Hotel.

“The idea is that this exhibition explores the construction of landscape imagery and imagery of the natural world under our current techno-culture,” 21c chief curator Alice Stites tells the Scene by phone from her office at the company’s headquarters in Louisville. “These visions narrate how the dreams and detritus of the industrial era generated the promise and peril of the digital age, and explore the potential for the visceral and virtual realities of the future — but also the real thing of Anthropocene, when the face of the earth is shaped by its human inhabitants.”

The concept of the Anthropocene era is an idea Stites comes back to again in our discussion of the exhibit — it’s a fusion of the natural and the man-made that is awe-inspiring in all senses of the term, both delightful and terrifying.

“What we see is both being shaped by technology and encrypted by our own projections of what the future can bring. But could technology solve some of these problems?” Stites doesn’t pretend to have an easy answer to this question, but rather leaves it to The SuperNatural’s artists to explore.

Among those artists are several whose work should be familiar to Nashvillians — Patricia Piccinini and Kate Clark both had works in the Frist Art Museum’s Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination exhibit in 2012. That exhibit, like The SuperNatural, used the idea of the human-animal hybrid as a way to disarm viewers. An antlered head created by Clark, a piece that combines taxidermy and sculpture, was a centerpiece of the Frist exhibit, and a similar work, titled “The Answer to Your Prayers” (which you can see on the cover of this issue), will be in SuperNatural. 

“It speaks to our anticipation of the future,” Stites says of the show’s artful hybrids, “and also our desire and longing for transcendence. Why would you want to merge with an animal if not to transcend the human condition?”

There is work of various media in the exhibit, including a virtual-reality piece from New York-based Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, who will be at 21c with Stites for the exhibition opening. Steensen’s VR exists in the intersection between imagination, technology and ecology, and his piece “Primal Tourism” allows viewers to explore the island of Bora Bora in the future.

“One of the things I really like about Steensen’s work is that he translates it into several different versions,” says Stites. In one version of “Primal Tourism,” you can enter an artist-created space built from tarp and plywood, put on a VR headset and explore the Bora Boran terrain. But if you’d prefer to just dip your toe into the virtual-reality experience, there’s a video monitor that screens the art-world equivalent of a movie trailer just outside.

“There’s a question that’s very much at the heart of the exhibition,” Stites says, “about what we do with the result of our drive for improvement if we’re looking to genetic technology to solve our problems. We know technology will expand at a rapid pace, but we can’t always control the outcome.

“How can we take responsibility for that?” LAURA HUTSON HUNTER