When 21c Museum Hotel opened its Nashville location in 2017, the Louisville-based boutique chain converted a historic downtown building on Second Avenue into an art-forward hotel, complete with unique art exhibition spaces throughout. For six years, 21c’s world-class art exhibitions were a highlight of Nashville’s downtown art district. Then spring 2020 brought the pandemic, followed by the Christmas Day bombing. Downtown Nashville struggled, and in July 2023, 21c Nashville officially ceased operations. This June, following a multimillion-dollar rebrand to Hilton’s Tapestry Collection, the hotel reopened as The Untitled Nashville Hotel at Bankers Alley.
Curator Anna McKeown is the hand that threads the needle between Untitled Nashville’s dual identities as a hotel and museum. She helped develop gallery programs that remained vital even as the venue’s branding kept changing. The galleries at Untitled Nashville emphasize local and regional artists, so hotel guests can experience contemporary Southern art at museum scale, while Nashville artists gain institutional contemporary art spaces in a scene that’s thirsty for more.
“We want to give our visitors a sense of place,” she explained after the museum’s grand opening last month, “but there also has to be a sense of play.”
The Untitled Nashville Hotel is the newest development in a broader revival of the downtown art district. In 2006, the commercial galleries on Fifth Avenue North and artist-led spaces in the Arcade co-founded the First Saturday Art Crawl, pulling together studios and galleries into a monthly event that became buzzworthy with locals and tourists alike, and saw Music City’s visual art culture landing mentions in national press. Eventually development pressure, rising rents and the creative migration to Wedgewood-Houston thinned the district’s creative ranks. The Arcade was mostly emptied when investors purchased it in 2021 and undertook a three-year renovation.
Now Arcade Arts has been established on the building’s newly restored second floor, where 12 rent-free artist studios welcomed their first cohort in October 2024. Events, workshops, gallery shows and curated programming have made Arcade Arts a multifaceted highlight of the district. The program’s spaces provide local artists and independent curators with crucial infrastructure, and its educational, social and cultural offerings restore the raison d’être of the original Arcade art scene: a broad selection of creative exhibitions, studios and happenings all in one place.
The new owners of the historic space want to help bring tourists and locals alike back to the downtown location
Tinney Contemporary has been on Fifth Avenue — now Rep. John Lewis Way — since the early days of the original downtown art crawl, before the First Saturday event dwindled to just a few venues. Through it all, gallery owner Susan Tinney — along with Joshua Edward Bennett, who has been the gallery’s director since 2020 — has maintained one of Nashville’s most consistent and ambitious exhibition programs by striking a balance between the tastes of the commercial art district and the stranger flavors of the neighborhood’s artist-led projects.
More recently, Tinney and neighborhood arts leaders like McKeown formed the Downtown Arts District Alliance. DADA launched its Second Saturday Art Crawl in January 2025, binding the neighborhood art spaces into a snazzy monthly event that reimagines the original art crawl. The crawl connects Untitled Nashville Hotel, Arcade Arts and Tinney Contemporary with other venues like the Downtown Presbyterian Church, which has hosted artists-in-residence in its upper floors since 1995. Those resident artists opened The Browsing Room as a curatorial outlet and project space in 2014. It has hosted more than 100 exhibitions, and remains one of the crawl’s most adventurous stops.
Artwork by Brandon Owen
Another influential downtown venue is Chauvet Arts, which traces its lineage to The Arts Company — the first commercial gallery on Fifth Avenue North. Anne Brown opened her expansive artsy exhibition emporium in 1996 and built it into one of the pioneering outposts of Nashville’s contemporary art scene. In November 2019, artist Jorge Arrieta took over ownership from Brown, and he rebranded it Chauvet Arts in 2020. Chauvet recently made the move to a new home on Union Street, where the gallery speaks with a distinct curatorial voice focused on Southern art and pop-inspired work. The new crawl also includes Visual Minds Co.’s creative third-space sensibility, and Swipe Right Art is curator and photographer Ashley Bergeron’s gallery project.
The name Untitled Nashville Hotel may have been chosen because of the spot’s affinity for artsy storytelling, but local gallerygoers with long memories will recall that the founding of the Untitled Artists Group in 1991 marked the beginning of Nashville’s contemporary art scene. The nonprofit, artist-run collective staged uncensored, unjuried, one-night-only pop-up exhibitions in nontraditional spaces across the city. The group’s early iterations are remembered for their irreverent themed art exhibitions, and for seeding Nashville’s visual art culture with a discordian, DIY ethos that insisted on local contemporary art at a time when nobody knew that was a thing. Untitled brought artists together with a sense of place, but they never forgot their sense of play.
