“Without Form” Grace Hall
May finds Nashville smack dab in the middle of the always-bustling spring art season. Spring decorating and wedding season all conspire to make this month a big one for gallery sales and museum events. Now’s the time to grab that one-of-a-kind gift or just the right piece for your newly painted bedroom. Highlights for this month’s First Saturday events include a solo display by an emerging artist whose busy exhibition schedule has her burning through curatorial calendars as quickly as she’s trying on new styles. Another don’t-miss display is a throwback to the earliest days of Nashville’s contemporary art scene, arranged by an OG curator with a global perspective on community art. My backyard roses are just starting to bloom, and we’ve been getting a lot of those familiar Middle Tennessee “80 degrees and a frost warning” weather reports for weeks now. Baffling climate patterns or not, it’s only fitting that one of the highlights of this weekend’s First Saturday happenings will be outside.
Wedgewood-Houston
The first Saturday of May marks the midpoint between last year’s inaugural Zine City Fest and this fall’s event, appropriately dubbed the 2nd Annual Zine City Fest. Free Nashville Poetry Library founder and ringmaster Matt Johnstone conceived the small-mag-a-thon as the library’s contribution to last year’s Artville festival. The celebration of small publishers, offbeat authors and DIY bookbinders is a natural extension of the Show & Sell outdoor art bazaars that the library organizes during most First Saturday afternoons, outside its digs at The Packing Plant. This month’s Show & Sell event is appropriately dedicated to zines. Longtime S&S supporters Dicey’s Pizza and Jackalope Brewery are supplying food and drink alongside a roster of Middle Tennessee little literature specialists, including SALT Weekly, Emma Lambiase, Zaki Daouk, AP Comfort, Sara Carter, Matt and Joseph Christy, Aaron Zvi Felder and Dylan Simon. Johnstone estimated about 2,500 visitors during the fall’s Artville event, so this weekend’s sneak peek will give you a better chance to linger and connect with some new favorite authors and DIY printed-word geeks before the bigger, busier event during this year’s Artville fest in September. Johnstone’s getting the bands back together this weekend from 4 p.m. through sunset — just in time for you early crawlers to catch a bookish buzz before you hit the galleries. 4-8 p.m. at The Packing Plant, 507 Hagan St.
We have a long way to go before we get too excited about autumn art events — especially when Saturday afternoon zinesters will be only a few steps from the front door of Free Nashville Poetry Library’s neighbor, art gallery Red 225. The Packing Plant space is hosting a Saturday night reception for Grace Hall’s Small World, marking the start of the second month of a two-month stand for this cozy solo display. Hall recently completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but she’s already participated in numerous group exhibitions in both Nashville and Chi-town, and she’s coming off of another solo exhibition at Random Sample just last year. Nashville’s embrace of student artists is one of the hallmarks of our contemporary art scene — you can thank Watkins College of Art for cementing that legacy in the culture. And while Hall is relatively experienced for an emerging artist, she’s still on a restless search for her unique creative voice. Hall’s Random Sample show, Microcosms of Introspection, included shaped, biomorphic abstract paintings as well as sound elements. Small World features a collection of multimedia paintings that all feel of a piece, but they also look like they were made by a totally different artist than the one who made Microcosms of Introspection. Kudos to Hall for embracing a breakneck pace of growth and not limiting her reach in hopes of finding a comfortable compromise on the path to discovering her own distinctive vocabulary. See this show now, because I’m hoping Hall’s next one might be something completely different all over again. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. at Red 225, 507 Hagan St.
Sai Clayton
Hillsboro Village
I can’t remember the last time a Hillsboro Village event blipped on my First Saturday radar. Cheers to this display, which reminds me of the days when coffeehouse art shows were one of the few options for emerging artists anxious to share their work in Nashville. Hillsboro Village is actually the cradle of Nashville’s contemporary art scene, which was born when the original Untitled Artists Group installed its first pop-up display in a room above Multi Bob restaurant in the early 1990s — the location where Hopdoddy Burger Bar stands today. Artist and curator Ben Vitualla knows all about those early times in the DIY badlands of the city’s art scene — Vitualla cut his teeth in one of the first incarnations of the Untitled Artists Group, and his ahead-of-its-time community art curating at his Blend Studio helped to make The Arcade a highlight of the original Downtown Art Crawl. For May, Vitualla’s organized Pacific Family at Fido. The show features works by local artists with roots in Asia-Pacific regions including Heather Moulder, Aimee Cericos Cedro, Giro Gabayoyo, Sean Redondo, SuengHee Brown Alliman, Nozomi Takasu, Kazu D Hishida, Andy Anh Ha, Erik Sharpnack, Sai Clayton and Vitualla himself. May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and this show is a celebration of AAPI artists working in design, printmaking, drawing, painting, digital art and photography. Opening reception 5-9 p.m. at Fido, 1812 21st Ave. S.
