“Inhaler,” Millicent Kennedy
Since 2024 is a leap year, we’ve got an extra day in February’s art calendar. That said, it’s still the shortest month, so if you want to see all the best new art happening in Nashville, you should probably plan to catch their First Saturday openings — many of these shows will be closed sooner than usual. February’s best offerings include a broad array of exhibitions, from photography and painting to textile art and sculpture. Many of this month’s top shows are by women artists, and two of them are about flowers. I’m feeling warmer already.
Wedgewood-Houston
It’s always a big deal when Caroline Allison opens a new show at Zeitgeist, and her latest exhibition finds the artist looking back at familiar subjects and themes while leaping forward with striking and surprising new techniques. With Waiting Between the Trees, Allison continues her examinations of the natural world, creating portraits of stones and picturing clouds in serene blue skies. I love a gorgeous landscape photograph, but Allison is too technically restless or creatively ambitious for that here. The show includes both photographed images and cyanotype elements in prints with nontraditional shapes — some are rounded, and some are literally folded and bent, and they’ll have viewers questioning whether they’re looking at a sculpture or a painting or a photo. Some of the works look like sections of sky being pulled right out of the fabric of reality. Waiting Between the Trees asks questions about the way we perceive and represent the natural world. It also responds to the breakdown of traditional boundaries between various creative forms that’s one of the hallmarks of contemporary art. But for all of the show’s more heady content, the natural subjects in Waiting Between the Trees are universally appealing, and Allison’s technical precision is always a highlight that even contemporary-art newbies will appreciate. Details: Opening reception noon-8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3, at Zeitgeist, 516 Hagan St.
Coop will host two multimedia textile-art displays at its space in The Packing Plant in February, and Transforming Antidotes is one of those great pairings where each artist’s work stands out because their displays play so nicely together. Millicent Kennedy uses print, natural dyes, textiles and found objects to explore and comment about the ways we preserve and archive objects and materials in the physical world. But the most interesting part of Kennedy’s show is the unexpected combinations of materials and techniques on display. Kennedy’s objects fall uniquely between illustration and sculpture, and that’s one of the reasons this is the Saturday night stop I’m most curious about. The other reason is Lisa Alberts’ equally unique combination of photography, textiles and soft sculpture — her work is a cool complement to Caroline Allison’s show at Zeitgeist across the street. Alberts’ art is about physicality and motherhood, and I love the way her mediums match her messaging. Her knotted and tangled pillow sculptures resonate warm and cozy vibes, and their earthy colors and photogram designs feel homespun and grounding with just a splash of bohemian funk. Details: Opening reception 1-9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3, at Coop, 507 Hagan St.
East Nashville
In February, Red Arrow welcomes Nashville-based artist Emily Weiner for her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Never Odd or Even. The display highlights Weiner’s distinctive paintings, thoughtfully ensconced within creatively crafted frames. Weiner’s oils on linen delve into symbolic and figurative realms, and Never Odd or Even is brimming with allusions to classical theater, ancient religious practices, celestial bodies and other natural forms loaded with mythic resonance. The elemental subjects she explores make Weiner’s art universally compelling, but her painted wood and ceramic frames make her work unmistakable. Red Arrow and Weiner got lots of attention and rave reviews at Future Fair in New York last year, and gallerygoers are talking about East Nashville’s only contemporary art space as the best gallery in town. They definitely have the best opening receptions. See you there. Details: Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3, at Red Arrow, 919 Gallatin Ave.
“Tender Garden,” Reed Anderson
Downtown
In my last column, I mentioned the colorful, sculptural paintings of Madiha Siraj when the artist’s latest exhibition opened at Tinney Contemporary back in January. That show continues through Feb. 17 alongside another chromatic display of paintings by Reed Anderson. Anderson’s abstract canvases and works on paper read like floral still lifes — it’s a sly combination of traditional and contemporary aesthetics, but it’s hard to think very much about art concepts when faced with the rambunctious beauty of this bodacious bouquet of a show. With Tender Garden, Anderson cuts decorative holes in his substrates, but also applies his paints in generous layers. (The process results in another compelling conversation about surfaces — and subsurfaces — in abstract painting.) The title also features some fun word play about the fragile beauty of flowers and plants, and the need to “tend” to our gardens. It speaks to the relationship between gardens and gardeners to say something about the relationship between painters and their paintings. But it’s the look and feel of these works that’s most intriguing — the artist’s cut-away canvases are the visual equivalent of a musical composition you remember for the pauses between the notes. Both of these flower-powered exhibitions are just what the doctor ordered as Nashville continues to thaw out after our January cold snap. Details: Opening reception 2-8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3, at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N.
