“Shifter,” Ryan Rado
It’s not summer yet, but all the shows opening this Saturday night will run through the official beginning of the hot weather season on June 21. And by the time you read this, kids all over the city will have already been out of school for a week. We’re gonna go ahead and call these new exhibitions the first shows of the summer, using the logic we learned from the classic summertime film Caddyshack: “We can do that. We don’t even need a reason.”
Wedgewood-Houston
Karen Seapker’s new painting exhibition, Green’s Your Color, made for one of the most striking debuts at May’s First Saturday happenings in Wedgewood-Houston. (Read Laura Hutson Hunter’s review of the show in our May 25 issue.) It’s also a great example of why I’m constantly praising Zeitgeist’s longish exhibition schedules. This is a big exhibit, but also a show packed with little details, and it’s definitely a display that rewards multiple viewings. The work is inspired by the backyard garden that Seapker can gaze at from her home studio in Donelson. My favorite home design trend is blurring the line between exteriors and interiors — bringing the outside in. Seapker’s new series is bursting with garden greens and forms that resemble seeds, leaves, stems and even gardener’s hands. She manages to be perfectly on time with current tastes without sacrificing the pastel palettes and abstracted figures and forms that have become her signature. My favorite works in the show pair small wooden platforms with large, low-hanging paintings — the arrangements read like altars to nature, natural beauty and abundance. Some of the platforms are themselves decorated with small objects, bringing a sculptural sensibility to the show. Seapker’s woodwork is as precise as her painting, and these new painterly installation works represent an intriguing step forward for the artist and her practice.
Crawlers might know Ryan Rado as the curator of the Rockwall Gallery in Houston Station. Rado is also an artist in his own right, and his latest solo exhibition is an exploration of the city of Detroit and Rado’s off-and-on relationship with his late father. Rado grew up in the Motor City, and it’s the place the artist always returned to when he had opportunities to visit his dad. The contradictions of the storied and sordid city of Detroit have inspired countless creatives — like the late great Marvin Gaye, who said, “Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.” (If you think it sounds impossible to love and loathe at the same time, just gaze into the troubled stare of any longtime Lions football fan.) I also grew up in Detroit, and I appreciate the way Rado brings both the grandeur and grit of the city into his work by utilizing unexpected materials, like the velvet surfaces he drenches with gooey oozes of acrylic paint and punishes with heavy-handed mark-making. Detroit Was Always a Mystery to Me is co-presented by The Forge and Risology Club, and curated by The Forge’s Alyssa Beach. The show opens at Rockwall Saturday night. Afterward, we’re going to order some Buddy’s pizza, pick up some Faygo pop at the party store, play euchre and listen to Mitch Ryder records until the cows come home.
East Nashville
I love an exciting new solo show as much as the next art gallery rat, but there’s something charming about the group shows that art venues program during warm-weather months between the banging art-gawking seasons of spring and fall. It’s often just a neat trick to expose a broad roster of artists to potential walk-in customers, but sometimes these diverse displays are greater than the sum of their parts. Case in point: Nashville Hot Summer at Red Arrow. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the scorching title, but this display of smaller works by nearly a dozen artists is one of my must-see shows opening this weekend. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings and sculptures by a choice selection of gallery faves, including Julian Rogers, Calli Moore and Aaron Worley. It also marks the Red Arrow debut for local visionary Benji Anderson, whose The Fitful Portal show at Elephant Gallery in 2022 won my Best of Nashville Writer’s Choice for Best Solo Gallery Exhibition.
“Everything That Rises Must Converge (Flannery O’Connor),” Dana Jo Cooley
Downtown
The Downtown Presbyterian Church’s artists-in-residence have done an outstanding job of bringing The Browsing Room gallery space back to life after it was shut down during the pandemic. The programming of the gallery varies as much as the personalities of the artists who curate it, but there’s always an emphasis on experimentation inside their rather generous white cube of a display space. In June, the DPC artists will be debuting their own new works in The Browsing Room, but they couldn’t resist the opportunity to gamify the curatorial side of the project and learn a thing or two about democracy and good taste along the way. A Different Town Hall: Artists in Residence at DPC started with the idea that none of the artists would choose which of their own works to show in the exhibition. They decided that each artist’s work would instead be picked by their studio mates, the other artists-in-residence in the church’s iconic creative spaces. This led to the establishment of a democratic process including popular voting, majority rule and even one dissenter. One of their biggest challenges was trying to pick strong works that represented these artists’ individual practices, but that also fit together into a cohesive exhibition. The Browsing Room’s self-deprecating press release describes the results of their democratic experiment as “a versatile selection from a hung jury.” The show includes paintings, pen-and-ink drawings, sculpture and textiles created — and curated — by Richard Feaster, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, Rolin Smith, Sarah Hart Landolt, Mel Beall, Dana Jo Cooley and Janet Decker Yanez.
