“Another Birthday Alone” by Mary Sims, on view in Summer Stories at David Lusk Gallery
At the very beginning of the pandemic, Nashville’s gallery community showed some smart organizing, and the art crawl videos that streamed on the Nashville Gallery Association’s YouTube channel back in the summer and fall of 2020 represent the high-water mark for gallery cooperation and planning during the pandemic era.
Since then, it’s felt more like an every-gallery-for-itself affair. Every creative venue in the city has different challenges with space, ventilation and staffing, and every month when I write this column it’s a challenge to parse fluctuating hours, and to determine whether they are having a special event, a talk or reception, or having nighttime hours at all.
In July 2022, the Fourth of July holiday weekend finds Nashville’s gallery community split in half: This Saturday the downtown galleries, David Lusk Gallery and Zeitgeist Gallery will all be participating in some form of First Saturday shenanigans. However, The Packing Plant’s creative spaces and The Free Nashville Poetry Library’s Show & Sell Maker’s Bazaar in Wedgewood-Houston and The Red Arrow Gallery in East Nashville will be taking the holiday weekend off. They’ll be holding their receptions and sales on Saturday, July 9.
Downtown
Philip Holsinger’s We Are Nashville: Act One is a multimedia portrait of our city that includes text, video, audio and the photography that makes up the centerpiece of the show. Holsinger captures Kurdish holiday celebrations, battling boxers and Nashville’s spicy-bird connoisseurs at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. The show opened at Chauvet Arts at the end of May and will continue through July. It’s a big display, spanning two of the gallery’s generous rooms, and the extra-long run is fitting for a sprawling exhibition featuring so much to read, watch, listen to and look at. If you can’t get enough of Holsinger’s portraits, be sure to check out his dramatic, colorful documenting of traditional Mexican bullfighting. The photojournalist’s Matador series is as colorful, dramatic and intense as its subjects, and prints are available through the gallery. Chauvet is open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. this Saturday.
Tinney Contemporary will be sticking with its June show through July 9. I reviewed Amber Robles-Gordon’s Sovereignty exhibition for the Scene — it’s a prime example of how artists can incorporate political and social content into a body of work while also making art that’s formally striking. We’ve seen lots of messaging about social and political issues in the contemporary art of the 21st century. However, much of that work will never be remembered or reconsidered — timely art is rarely timeless. Robles-Gordon’s work is visually successful irrespective of its critiques of the U.S. policy toward — and governance of — its populated territories and the District of Columbia. I’ve seen powerful political art and dim political art, and I often question whether visual art is an effective medium for political messages. But the work in Sovereignty is formally distinctive. Tinney Contemporary will be open this Saturday from 2 to 8 p.m.
Wedgewood-Houston
Zeitgeist’s Shipmates exhibition continues in July after an energized opening night during June’s First Saturday events. Painter Daniel Reidy, sculptor Greg Pond and musical collaborator César Leal’s multimedia installation offers a spatial and structural retelling of Herman Melville’s maritime epic Moby Dick. Reidy’s large canvases deconstruct Melville’s tome alongside the history of Western painting, Leal creates whale songs with his trumpet, and one of Pond’s more musical sculptures features a one-string bass guitar neck that’s fretted to play “Smoke on the Water.” The show is actually an ambitious visual distillation of the book — a sprawling display anchored by big works. It captures Melville’s vast seascapes and soulscapes, but — like the story — it’s also jammed with myriad weird details that have me already planning a third visit to this show. Here’s hoping this July run will also include a few new sculptures that are currently delayed at a manufacturer. I definitely want to see this display at full sail. Zeitgeist will be open from noon to 6 p.m. this Saturday.
The new show at David Lusk Gallery is inspired by summer reading lists, beach-read faves and all things literary in the warm-weather months. Summer Stories pairs a baker’s dozen of Nashville art professionals — including the Scene’s own Laura Hutson Hunter — with works from artists represented by David Lusk Gallery, Red Arrow Gallery and Zeitgeist. Each curator, designer, writer or architect responded to a particular work of art with a book recommendation. It’s a show that points to traditions and nostalgia, old friends and sun-dappled memories that smell like coconut and chlorine. The collaboration constitutes a literary extension of the plastic arts, and it serves as a bookend — it’s a pun — to the Zeitgeist show, which provides a plastic extension of literature. My research says that summer reading lists date back as far as the 1890s, but I think they skipped the Catholic classrooms of Generation X. Summer wasn’t a reading time for me until I was becoming an adult reader in high school. As a kid, summer was a season of outdoor anarchy in our neighborhood in Detroit. Bike ramps were built, firecrackers cracked, fences climbed. A Kool-Aid mustache was a sign of good taste, and we made up a variety of baseball games that, instead of batting, featured bouncing a tennis ball off of a street curb to the opposing team on the other side of the road. We called it “curb ball” and had to call “Time out!” every time a car drove by. In my memory, everyone is playing “Le Freak” with the windows rolled down. I wonder if there is a book about that? A painting? The exhibition includes work by Mary Sims, Alicia Henry, Caroline Allison, Huger Foote, Ted Faiers, Marcus Maddox and others. The gallery will be First Saturday-ing from noon to 6 p.m.
