If you’ve been to Random Sample to see an art exhibition, or watch a live band, or even participate in a book club, you know just where to find its original home. It’s a white cinderblock building along 48th Avenue in West Nashville. It’s a good location — it’s near Rhino Books, Betty’s Grill and Richland Park. The neighborhood hosts vintage stores and thrift shops, bars and restaurants. It’s one of the only parts of town that still recalls the Old Nashville banjo-hemia of the pre-“It City” days. It’s the perfect neighborhood for a quirky cultural hub to grab a foothold in. It’s such a perfect spot, in fact, that I had my doubts when I heard that Random Sample was going to relocate.
The good news is that Random Sample’s new location is located just about a block away from that original space. But what’s even better is the fact that its new address puts the gallery right next door to Headquarters Coffee and Tea, in a storefront location at 4904 Charlotte Ave. Random Sample founder and owner Linda Parrott christened the space with a grand opening event on June 20. The move maintains the venue’s yee-haw-topian surrounds, but comes with a much larger footprint — and a massive improvement in visibility. It’s a fitting evolution for Random Sample’s humble programming, which has quickly become an outsized cultural offering in West Nashville’s surging creative scene. Seeing an independent, multifaceted arts space thrive and grow is always heartening, and it shows just how supportive and engaged Nashville’s art and music scenes can be when a project or a place offers real value to a community.
Random Sample’s blend of visual art, music and radical politics isn’t unheard of in Nashville, but its take is unique: The space is cleaner and more commercial than the typical punk infoshop/venue, but the art-curating and music-scheduling doesn’t align with the tourist market or contemporary art retail. Parrott has created a welcoming space with no pretensions of exclusivity. Random Sample books lots of genre-defying or experimental music, and the art curating often leans into raw displays by emerging artists. Parrott has hosted early solo shows by now-ascendant local talents like Sai Clayton and Shahnaz Lighari, and Random Sample is a cornerstone of the West Nashville Art Crawl events. Random Sample is made up of a lot of little components that appeal to niche audiences, but all those pieces add up to something greater than the sum of its parts.
‘HĀFU’ is on view through May 29 at Random Sample
Arts programming director Ivy Welsh and music programming director Andie Billheimer are Parrott’s longtime Random Sample partners. The trio is making the new space into a home for everything that made the original Random Sample great, along with some rad new additions. Welsh’s Renascence publishing imprint/indie bookstore can be found there, along with Alexis Özden’s Nashville Radical Library — a lending library, reading room and book club.
The new location also means more square footage for Random Sample’s shop, which sells art and gifts by local makers. The new retail space on Charlotte Avenue is adding records to its offerings. Billheimer’s Subliminal Archives project is the musical extension of Random Sample’s gift shop. Expect tunes from both local and international musical acts in and around the experimental/free-improvisation/jazz and electronic music genres. Music retail is an organic extension of the venue’s performance programming, and it parallels the gallery/gift shop combo that Random Sample’s visual artists already enjoy. Subliminal plans a highly curated selection of music including vinyl LPs, 45s, cassettes and CDs.
Random Sample’s bigger digs also include an artist-in-residence studio. Providing studio spaces for artists has been a longtime goal for Parrott, and she hopes to welcome her first resident artist sometime this fall.
The gallery at Random Sample is currently hosting a group show curated by local artist and educator Hannah Einhorn. Edges is a multimedia affair focused on the fringes of concepts and compositions alike. Einhorn’s curatorial statement points to how a strong composition will pull a viewer’s gaze into the center of a work. But then the curator questions whether artists and audiences are both missing something when they hurry over the details — artistic, conceptual, thematic — at a work’s peripheries. The show includes work from RayMarah Watson-Cunningham, Bridget Curtis, Zoe Nichols, Savannah Hodges, Zoe Stasia, Rae Young and Karley Davis, as well as Einhorn herself.
