“Picasso/Calder Library Painting,” and “Picasso Figure Library Painting,” Jonathan Edelhuber
Many of Nashville’s art galleries will be opening new shows during Fourth of July weekend. The downtown crawl has been canceled due to the holiday, but there’s lots of new art displays going up on gallery walls across the city this month. Now that it’s officially summer, Nashville’s First Saturday happenings are starting to look more like the events we remember. Nashville’s daily COVID-19 cases are way down. You love to see it, and the cratering numbers bode well for the summer art season, which is hitting its stride this month.
Wedgewood-Houston
Channel to Channel opens Contemporary Art History Saturday night. This two-person show reflects on the people who have defined the visual art space since Modernism. Jonathan Edelhuber’s sculptures and paintings mix motifs and tropes from foundational modernists like Matisse and Picasso with palettes and techniques borrowed from comic book art. Edelhuber’s illustrations picture stacks of art history books along with images from works by various historically significant artists. The illustrations serve as picture-plane primers that place various artists in context with their creative peers and periods. José Lerma deploys a candy-colored palette of acrylics mixed with industrial silicone to create luscious portraits that combine art historical references with personal mythology. They send up the grand traditions of painted portraiture by ironically celebrating lukewarm bureaucrats like John Kerry and pop celebrities like Julio Iglesias. Lerma also includes everyday folk and family in his portraits, elevating unknown people and mundane accomplishments through the ritual of portraiture. We see art about art all the time, but the self-conscious twists this pair brings to their historical investigations make this colorful display more playful than pedantic. Channel to Channel will be open at 11 a.m. Saturday, and host an opening reception from 5 until 7 p.m.
Coop will welcome Shohei Katayama to Wedgewood-Houston on Saturday night. Katayama uses materials like iron shavings, magnets and oil-based Sharpie markers to illuminate unseen connections between natural systems. The pandemic made the connections — and weak links — between our human systems more apparent, and Katayama’s investigations into the complexities of global ecology feel immediate and of this particular moment. Coop will hold an opening reception on Saturday night from 6 until 9 p.m.
Also on Saturday, Unrequited Leisure will continue its women video artists group exhibition, Memory Work. The gallery will also be flying a new flag made by local artist M Kelley on its AIR_(space) flagpole. Kelley made a rad series of boldly colored flags for We Count: First Time Voters, the 19th Amendment anniversary exhibition at the Frist Art Museum last spring. I’m intrigued by what Kelley might have planned for this new display, but I have my fingers crossed for a banner that connects back to the artist’s ongoing interactive transmedia fiction project, Inbound Lands.
Zeitgeist Gallery will open In the Gallery, Looking at the Past, Present and Future on July 10. Zeitgeist’s space-sharing with Manuel Zeitlin’s architecture studio makes reopening the space to public events extra challenging, but it won’t feel like the old days until we can begin our crawling at Zeitgeist just like we used to. Nashville native, artist and curator Carlton Wilkinson’s In the Gallery art space was a staple of the North Nashville art scene from 1987 to 2007. Wilkinson’s curatorial ambitions have now morphed into his Wilkinson Art art brokerage business. Wilkinson is a founding figure of North Nashville’s contemporary art scene, and his decades of work as an artist, curator and educator give him an insider’s perspective on what the Jefferson Street art scene has been, and where it might be going. In the Gallery is both an overview of Wilkinson’s work as a curator and community builder as well as a creative commentary about one of Nashville’s most vital creative scenes by the people who built it and continue to evolve it. The show includes work from a long roster of artists including Samuel Dunson, David Driskell, Barbara Bullock, Sammie Nicely, Sam Gilliam, Craig Brabson and more. The show also includes a display of works representing the broader spectrum of the art of the African diaspora — a thoughtful addition that brings clarity and context to Wilkinson’s visual storytelling. Zeitgeist will be open for a preview of the show this Saturday from noon until 6 p.m., and the show will officially open during those same hours on Saturday, July 10. The gallery can also be visited by appointment. Masks are required.
David Lusk Gallery opened Emily Leonard’s latest display of bigger-than-life botanicals on June 29. The gallery will host a daytime open house on Saturday, July 24, from noon until 3 p.m. Hem will also be open to gallery-goers this Saturday during Lusk’s regular hours — 10 a.m. through 5:30 p.m.
East Nashville
Last but not least, The Red Arrow Gallery has officially synced its opening calendar to First Saturdays, but conflicts with the holiday weekend mean that we’ll be getting at least one last Second Saturday East Side Art Stumble on July 10. Danielle Winger’s bold, impressionistic flower paintings allude to paradisiacal gardens in her mellow, melancholy meditation, Between Two Gardens. The show runs through July 31.
