The best part of any airport is the moving walkway. It’s no contest. A moving walkway is a compact theme park — a moment of play wherein your normal walking pace is swept up in a riptide. The only thing that could possibly make it better is to involve art. Nashville International Airport’s Concourse D extension — the first major project completed under the airport’s $3 billion upgrade — includes three artworks created for the Arts at the Airport program.
A highlight of those artworks is Twine With My Mingles, an installation from Nashville-based creative studio New Hat. At 8 feet tall and nearly 180 feet long, the display spans the entire wall above a moving walkway and is made of woven Tyvek wristbands, like the kind you’d get at a music festival. From concept to installation, the project took a year to create.
To see the piece, New Hat — that is, artists Elizabeth Williams and David Meaney — escorted me through security and into Concourse D. The walkway offers a relatively quiet moment within the concourse, with windows on one side and the massive New Hat piece on the other, more colorful than perhaps any other artwork in the airport.
Elizabeth Williams and David Meaney
“New Hat tenet number one is: ‘Color is joy,’” Williams says. “That’s just a part of everything we do.”
Craft history and art history are the other cornerstones of New Hat’s visual language, so they turned to rural Southern crafts to represent not just Nashville but the whole of Tennessee. “I had this book that Kelly [Diehl, New Hat co-founder] and I originally had in the studio called Of Coverlets,” Williams explains. “The Tennessee Craft Guild in the ’70s went across Tennessee and, Alan Lomax-style, collected specimens of old coverlets, found the provenance, the weavers, the county, the history of the family, and they did this glorious book. … It goes through all the different counties across Tennessee [by] the different weaving patterns.”
In true folk tradition, in the 18th and 19th centuries, generations of families who were too poor for store-bought bed covers reimagined coverlet patterns. The airport installation’s title is a nod to that process — “Twine with my mingles” is a lyric from “Wildwood Flower,” a Carter Family cover of an Old English song.
“The lyric was like, ‘Oh, I’ll twine ’mid the ringlets of my raven-black hair,’” says Williams. “But because they were so country, they thought it was ‘I’ll twine with my mingles’ instead of ‘ringlets. I thought that really spoke to a really very Tennessee thing.”
We ride the walkway together while they point out each pattern: Cat Tracks and Snail Trails, Queen Anne’s Lace, Dolly Pratt. The Tyvek wristband material is inherently temporary — they’re not designed to last longer than the weekend of a music festival, for example — so the woven bands have been epoxied many times over to protect them. There are eight standard wristband colors and three custom New Hat colors: a muted peach, a light pink and a pale green. The star color is a screaming orange that was a complete accident: a coral red that turned neon when they sealed it.
A post on New Hat’s Instagram account gives what Williams calls a “conservative” estimate of the work behind it all: more than 160 hours of planning with Jonathan Malphrus of Steric Design, 1,250 hours of weaving by 24 (paid) weavers, and material that would be the equivalent of something like 100,000 wristbands.
“A quilting circle is a quilting circle for a reason — because it’s a huge feat that takes lots of people to do,” Williams says. “We didn’t know how much help we would need, and how dedicated the people who were helping us would become.”
Mingles is so seamlessly incorporated into the airport’s architecture that you’d likely have no idea that it’s made up of individual boxes — 77 in all. The hallway has five columns that needed to be worked around, but rather than break the piece into sections, New Hat opted for an intentional fragmentation of the line, with some boxes sticking out more than others. It’s not fabric-like, but there is something of an undulation to it.
It’s the biggest installation New Hat has ever done, and it was also an entirely new concept and process for them. Folks familiar with loom-style weaving may note that some of the designs have been meticulously over-woven; rather than just using two colors (the warp and the weft), New Hat incorporated as many as four colors. “I hope a weaver walks down here and [thinks], ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’” Williams says.
“‘Surely they didn’t do this,’” Meaney says, and then adds: “Yes, we did.”
Mingles is exactly what I’d want someone to see when they step off a plane in Tennessee, possibly for the first time. It’s homegrown Southern folk craft, with new materials brilliantly grafted to its history. As of press time, New Hat’s proposed plaque hasn’t yet been installed, but when it is, its best and final line will bring the project home: “We aim to take what’s old, make t new, and keep it true.”
“The coverlet was maybe the nicest thing in the room,” Williams says of those rural Tennessee family homes. “We wanted this to be Southern hospitality, a statement of: ‘Welcome to our home. We’re putting out our finest china for you.’”
