In much the same way musicologists ride the back roads making field recordings of aging blues and folk artists soon to be no more, Peggy Snow has increasingly directed her prodigious artistic talents toward creating lasting visual records of older buildings scheduled for demolition. As this paper is being produced, Snow is standing at the corner of 46th and Charlotte, braving the cold to immortalize the endangered Charlotte Avenue Church of Christ. Even if you doubt that buildings have souls, Snow's oil-on-canvas works seem to capture them: Rendered in a swirly, organic style reminiscent of late-period van Gogh, her lovely, enchanted subjects seem to live and breathe. She's already memorialized several departed Nashville landmarks—the Union Station train shed, the old Father Ryan High School, the Community Baptist Church and the Jacksonian apartment building—and her passion for preserving these doomed structures seems to be as much a divine calling as an artistic concept. She's been getting some national attention of late—she was featured in the summer issue of Bejeezus, a bi-yearly art book from Louisville recently lauded in both Utne Reader and Arthur magazine. This show will feature the finished painting of the Charlotte Avenue church, works depicting other Middle Tennessee buildings, and a few canvases from her stay in Marburg, Germany, last spring, after a European tour by her experimental psyche-folk band The Cherry Blossoms.
Mondays-Sundays. Starts: Dec. 19. Continues through Jan. 21, 2008
