Fall Guide 2026: The Season’s Must-See Museum and Gallery Exhibitions

There’s no art season like fall art season. The mid-September heat wave may still be fresh in all our minds, but spiritually I’m already lost in a land of sweaters and kickoffs, chili and cornbread, fly-fishing and firepits, and cool evenings at gallery hot spots fueled by community, conversation and cabernet sauvignon. Autumn weather may be fashionably late to Middle Tennessee this year, but the visual art scene is bustling, delivering a cornucopia of shows and displays that all touch on the handmade and the natural. Of course, I see all of this as more evidence of the Romantic renewal that is reinvigorating gothic cinema and pushing contemporary art toward the abstract renderings of the natural, revisiting the aesthetics of early American modernism and renewing transcendentalist themes. Expect natural materials, craft arts, painting and photography all made by (probably mostly) organic humans. 

Mono No Aware

Through Jan. 6 at OZ Arts

Mono No Aware at OZ Arts brings together work by artists Rima Day and Lanecia Rouse. The show is curated by Sai Clayton, and it takes its title from a Japanese term describing the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Vintage melancholy autumn, anyone? The exhibition spotlights found objects, photographs and books that act as carriers of inherited and collective memory. Day works in thread, fabric and paper inspired by nature and the human body, and the fact that her work has been featured in Beautiful Bizarre magazine should give you a sense of her visceral aesthetic. Rouse is the sister of Nashville poet Ciona Rouse, and her multifaceted practice spans collage, abstract painting and photography at the intersection of art and spirituality.

Andrew Combs: Skim the Sky 

Oct. 3-31 at Julia Martin Gallery

Opening reception 3-9 p.m. Oct. 3

Andrew Combs’ latest exhibition opens at Julia Martin Gallery in early October. Combs’ work has appeared in Martin’s group exhibitions, but Skim the Sky is his first solo gallery show. It features new paintings and assemblage by the Nashville-based singer-songwriter, who has pursued an increasingly serious visual art practice alongside his music career. Combs deploys acrylic and oil painting combined with woodworking into folky forms that find their footing in abstract expressions of horses, constellations and geometric designs. The opening reception on Oct. 3 includes a live music performance on the gallery’s porch around 7 p.m.

Dax van Aalten: Incidental Meditations

Oct. 10-Nov. 21 at Red Arrow

Opening reception 5-8 p.m Oct. 10

Red Arrow celebrates the harvest with Incidental Meditations, a solo exhibition of six new oil paintings by Tennessee-based artist Dax van Aalten. Nearly a decade into his relationship with the gallery, van Aalten continues his intuitive, process-driven practice in which forms suggest leaves, water, flowers, weather and terrain without resolving into specifics. The work smears the borders between abstraction and representation, landscape and surface, and renders impressionistic scenes that read more like places from memories or dreams. It’s gorgeous stuff, and it’s also right on time with contemporary trends pointing toward the formal, abstract and natural. This show is another example of Red Arrow’s commitment to the cutting-edge aesthetics that continue to earn its artists national attention.

Obscuring, Revealing

Oct. 19-Dec. 4 at Belmont University’s Leu Gallery 

Opening reception 4-6 p.m. Oct. 22

Later in the season, Belmont University’s Leu Gallery presents Obscuring, Revealing, a group exhibition of Nashville-based photographers who are testing the boundaries of documentary practice through personal narrative, formal experimentation, historical allusion, alternative processes, and the blurred line between fact and fiction. The show is organized by students in Tom Williams’ museum studies course in collaboration with director of galleries Katie Mitchell, and it features works by Caroline Allison, Sam Angel, Carolyn Benedict Fraser, Armon Means, Vesna Pavlović, Kristine Potter, Tamara Reynolds, Christine Rogers and more. Until Nashville manages to conjure a gallery dedicated to contemporary photography, it’ll take shows like these to demonstrate just how packed with talent our local art community continues to be. 

West Nashville Art Crawl

10 a.m.-5 p.m. Dec. 5

Just about the time the holiday panic really starts to chill your bones, the West Nashville Art Crawl returns to bring together artists and creative spaces across the West Side in a one-day celebration of art, music and culture. This drive-it-yourself tour includes creative venues, studios and artists’ homes across Sylvan Park and the Richland/West End neighborhoods, featuring ceramics, sculpture, painting, textile work, furniture-making and leather crafts from Zach Campbell, Roger Clayton, Twyla Lambert Clark, Bryan Rumfola, Audry Deal-McEver, Sarah Clinton and more, as well as exhibitions at LeQuire Gallery and Random Sample. Visit westnashvilleartcrawl.com for the full list of participating venues and artists. 

Fall Guide 2026: This Season’s Most Anticipated Arts Events

A futuristic art show at the Frist, a superhero opera, the Nashville Film Festival and more can’t-miss autumn events