Crawl Space: A Fresh Perspective at Zeitgeist Leads April’s First Saturday Events

Spring is going to be one of the biggest art seasons of the year, with gallery exhibitions popping up all over town faster than the weeds in last year’s gardens. April’s First Saturday highlights include some of Nashville’s best-known contemporary artists dropping multiple displays in multiple mediums, and in multiple venues. To clarify — this is one of those Saturdays when you need to start crawling early if you want to see it all. Consider this list of my top picks as your guide, because the Art Crawl is everywhere this Saturday night.  

Downtown

I’ve recently been writing about how content-forward art full of messages and meanings is giving way to new trends that see figures and their narratives being replaced by abstraction and the ascendance of a new formalism. Here’s hoping some of the emerging artists who’ve made traction with activist art and identity messages will be able to steer into these new streams, which will call for more deeply personal works and a strong understanding of art without storytelling and sloganeering. The swinging pendulum will strand some and reveal hidden strengths in others. Every emerging artist in Nashville should go see Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton’s Ctrl-Alt-Delete at Tinney Contemporary on Saturday night. Houghton’s multimedia paintings and sculptures manage to be completely compelling as pure objets d’art thanks to their intriguing abstraction and the artist’s flair for innovative forms and materials. That said, Houghton is a Lao American whose work is infused with stories of Vietnam War refugees, like the artist’s family, who fled Laos to escape the United States’ illegal bombing of the country during the war. There’s lots of activism in art these days, but it’s tricky — most artists get it wrong. Houghton’s anti-war messaging has been clear and consistent over consecutive exhibitions for years — it’s a sincere feature of her work, not a glitch or a performance. Anti-war sentiment will always be counterculture and anti-establishment, and that means it can never tip over out of art and into propaganda. In Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the artist addresses the wars in Vietnam and Laos, but expands the conversation to current conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. The works also look at propaganda in the post-truth social media era. These are abstract times. Are you doing your part? 

Details: Opening reception 2-8 p.m. Saturday at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N.

If you’re going to crawl downtown, you should probably make it a surgical first strike at the beginning of the evening before the sun goes down — that’s when the tourist traffic is at low ebb. However you manage to park, it’s a short walk from Tinney up Fifth Avenue to the Downtown Presbyterian Church, where The Browsing Room is opening a show of works by brothers Joe Christy and Matt Christy. I can’t think about these two local artists without comparing them to the famous singing siblings found throughout Nashville’s music history. There’s no harmony singing like family harmony singing, and I think there’s something similar to be seen in the visual harmonies the Christys entwine in their new exhibition And the Horse You Rode in On — it even sounds like a country record. This show of collaborative paintings finds the Christys mixing figures and abstraction — the wacko palette feels like a contribution from Matt. The narrative scenes read like the dark and humorous sequences in the brothers’ co-authored crime novel, Tributaries.

Details: Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Saturday at The Browsing Room in the Downtown Presbyterian Church, 154 Rep. John Lewis Way N.

Wedgewood-Houston

Evan Roosevelt Brown is one of a handful of independent curators who are part of a happening trend in the region’s contemporary art scene. Freelance exhibition wranglers like Brown, Jay Sanchez, Clarence Edward, Meg Jordan and the Scene’s own arts editor Laura Hutson Hunter are helping pioneer novel beachheads and develop systems for a new wave of pop-up art happenings springing up across Middle Tennessee. Permanent art real estate will continue to be a challenge in Nashville, and the pop-up networks that Brown and others are establishing are going to be vital to growing a scene in shrinking square footage. Brown is taking over the walls at Zeitgeist this month with Vessels. It’s a multimedia show about form and function, but it’s also about the relationship between the artist and the art. It’s also an example of how enterprises like Brown’s can put a big group of emerging artists in one of the city’s premiere contemporary art galleries for a month. Vessels includes work by Andrew Morrison, Honey Pierre, Shanneil Clarke, Shabazz Larkin and Christopher LaTouche, John Lister III, Marteja, Elise Kendrick, DVALD, MegPie, Chase Williamson and Tyler René Angelo. 

Details: Opening reception Saturday 5-8 p.m. at Zeitgeist Gallery, 516 Hagan St.

Nashville’s own Kevin Guthrie brings New Janks to the Wedgewood-Houston happenings at Julia Martin Gallery. Guthrie’s colored-pencil-on-beer-box illustrations explore a variety of subjects, forming countercultural narratives and unique personal memoirs. The exhibition includes original Guthrie works that were used by the band Pavement as concert posters for recent appearances in Glasgow, Amsterdam and Detroit. The works are signed by the band, and Bob Nastanovich of Pavement and Silver Jews will be on hand to DJ the party on the gallery’s front porch, which is both slanted and enchanted. 

Details: Opening reception Saturday 6-9 p.m. at Julia Martin Gallery, 444 Humphreys St.

East Nashville

Paul Collins, Alex Blau and Alex Lockwood bring Close as Cutlery to Red Arrow in April. The Nashville-based artists are collaborators as well as friends (Collins and Blau are married, actually), and their first joint exhibition features Lockwood’s whimsical reuse sculptures, Blau’s gorgeous painted abstract dots, and Collins’ tree-trunk sculptures of the fictional St. Frisbee, patron of chill. 

Details: Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday at Red Arrow, 919 Gallatin Ave.