In The Gallery entertains a steady stream of visitors on a Friday afternoon—artists who have shown there, collectors who have bought there and people who have shown the photographs of owner Carlton Wilkinson in their own galleries. One woman brings in a drawing by Barbara Bullock, a Nashville artist who was a mainstay of In The Gallery until she died in 1996. The piece is a self-portrait, rendered in a fragmented way as if it had been torn neatly into sections and reassembled, reflecting the artist’s challenging personality and maybe her struggles with illness. It’s a disturbing work even with its careful execution, a good example of art that exhibits strong technique and a demanding vision. In The Gallery entertains a steady stream of visitors on a Friday afternoon—artists who have shown there, collectors who have bought there and people who have shown the photographs of owner Carlton Wilkinson in their own galleries. One woman brings in a drawing by Barbara Bullock, a Nashville artist who was a mainstay of In The Gallery until she died in 1996. The piece is a self-portrait, rendered in a fragmented way as if it had been torn neatly into sections and reassembled, reflecting the artist’s challenging personality and maybe her struggles with illness. It’s a disturbing work even with its careful execution, a good example of art that exhibits strong technique and a demanding vision. In The Gallery never gets too quiet, but people are visiting these days to say goodbye. After 19 years in business on Jefferson Street, overlooking Bicentennial Mall and the Capitol, Carlton Wilkinson is closing the gallery and moving to Wilmington, N.C. to take a job teaching art and running the gallery at the University of North Carolina campus there. His decision to leave his hometown closes an important chapter in the development of Nashville’s art world. Wilkinson grew up in Nashville, the child of well-known members of the black community. His mother, DeLois Wilkinson, helped organize the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in the 1960s and went on to serve on the Metro Board of Education. Through her, Wilkinson grew up exposed to writers and artists like Nikki Giovanni and David Driskell. He became a photographer and returned to Nashville after getting degrees from Washington University and UCLA. In the intervening years, he has established himself as one of Nashville’s leading art photographers, culminating in a major retrospective show last winter at the Parthenon. Wilkinson started the gallery a bit out of necessity, a bit by accident. He recalls that when he came back to town, “I found my art was always excluded just because of who I was.” Even though his early work included stylized landscapes that look almost like sets from an Alain Resnais film, “it made no difference what I did. I was labeled the black artist, the ethnic.” When he came to the realization that “there was nobody who was going to show my work unless I did it myself,” he decided to “open my own damned gallery.” Fresh out of graduate school in graphic design, Wilkinson also had some useful skills for running a gallery—“I could do my own photography, I could design my own cards, I could lick my stamps, clean the floor, I could hang you on the walls.” In The Gallery is known as an African American gallery, not just because of the owner’s identity but because of its artists, like Sam Gilliam, David Driskell, Marvin Posey and Sam Dunson. But the artists aren’t exclusively black. You will see Alan LeQuire’s work, and art by Latinos such as Jairo Prado and Noris Binet. Wilkinson says he took in “whatever came my way, whatever I encountered. I didn’t limit myself.” His goal was to “bring art together, and not have it so polarized.” Wilkinson’s ecumenical approach sometimes put him in a strange bind. One of his artists, William Buffet, paints genre scenes of New Orleans musicians, typical black art subject matter. But this painter happens to be white. When Wilkinson goes to national shows dedicated to African American art, he runs up against another kind of exclusion, one that forbids him to show white artists like Buffet. “Even though he does these African American genre scenes, I can’t show his work, because of the prejudice.” Nashville is a small enough place that after 19 years of showing and selling art, you would expect a gallery to have an impact. And Wilkinson does see a change: “Now people see the benefits of showing multicultural arts. That just wasn’t true when I started.” And to some extent, Wilkinson believes this makes In The Gallery less necessary. He says he’s proud of what he’s accomplished, “but it makes me a victim of my own success. It’s not necessary for artists like Gregg Johnson or Noris Binet to come to me. They can go anywhere around town and they’ll at least be considered on the basis of the merit of their work.” He does believe that Nashville and the nation still need galleries with a special focus on “artists who don’t have a home, who don’t fit in some of these traditional galleries here,” and galleries run by African Americans. He feels that “there’s still a lot of people who just don’t know, there’s still a lot of educating going on. But 10 years from now, 20 years from now, the lines will begin to erase.” Among his reasons for closing the gallery, Wilkinson cites economics: “Bushworld has hurt me tremendously financially. It is taking money out of the pockets of the middle class, who were much of my client base. Now they’re buying gas, health insurance, tuition, high real estate.” Also, the costs of overhead, things like insurance, have gone up. “You gotta have deep pockets” he says, to start a gallery, and “you gotta have deep pockets to continue one.” He does think that what he started and sustained with In The Gallery will continue. “Whatever was started here, if the people still want it, it will be created again. It won’t be me, and it won’t be my style exactly, but it will be something, and it may be in several spaces.”
