“Sister Hood,” TC
Tempter
Through March 31 at Bobby Hotel
If the winter blues start getting you down in the next few months, treat yourself to a stroll through the new art garden exhibition in Tinney Contemporary’s The Collection at Bobby program. Tempter is a flower-themed art exhibit, presenting a bouquet of contemporary landscape works. It’s a mindful display about the beauty and fragility of the natural world, and it’s a show about temptation, attraction and sex. It’s also an exhibit that highlights, compares and contrasts the styles of individual artists as they each offer their own unique takes on one of art’s most traditional subjects. Tempter boasts works from a national roster of artists including: David Onri Anderson, Reed Anderson, Sophia Belkin, Tiffany Calvert, Cherie Benner Davis, Courtney Egan, Lanie Gannon, Leah Guadagnoli, Alvaro Ilizarbe, John Paul Kesling, Sky Kim, Cristina Molina, Aliza Morell, Benjy Russell, Madiha Siraj, Ellen Weider, Herb Williams and Leif Zikade. Tempter runs through April at Bobby Hotel.
Back to the South Side
Feb. 4-26 at Coop
Artist Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series is a narrative collection of works the painter created to document the Great Migration — when thousands of Black Southerners left the region to seek economic opportunities and escape Jim Crow segregation between the 1910s and the 1970s. Back to the South Side at Coop finds Nashville-based artists TC and Ol Skool Mike revisiting this strategy of artistic documenting with an exhibition that reads like a dialogue between TC’s collages and fashion designs, and Mike’s street-art-inspired paintings — locals will remember Mike’s epic Bruce Lee mural on the wall at the old Kung Fu Coffee location at the Muse. Over the past 50 years, the Great Migration trend has reversed, causing author and demographer William H. Frey to declare a New Great Migration that sees black Americans returning to live in the South. Back to the South Side considers the reasons for and ramifications of this new movement to the New South. The exhibition is presented in partnership with the Tennessee Triennial.
Alex Blau: Certainty
Feb. 4-25 at Zeitgeist
Alex Blau should make any short list of the city’s best painters, and in February the artist will open her new solo show at Zeitgeist. Certainty includes two dozen of the artist’s abstract paintings, brimming with disparate patterns rendered in vibrant palettes. Blau uses airbrush, acrylics and stencils on linen and canvas. Her paintings contradict themselves: sophisticated combinations of abstract patterns with the look of a tourist-shop T-shirt; complex arrangements of banal elements — stars, flowers and fruits. In her artist statement Blau writes about her physical and psychological energies and how they interact with the energies in the world around her. Blau’s art has always been bursting with energy thanks to her lively lines and a gifted eye for color, and you can be certain that this will be one of the best local shows of the season. Certainty opens at Zeitgeist Gallery on Saturday, Feb. 4, with a reception from noon until 6 p.m.
"The Cracks Are How the Light Gets In," Louisa Glenn
Louisa Glenn: The Cracks Are How the Light Gets In
March 4-25 at Julia Martin Gallery
Louisa Glenn’s quilt-inspired paintings are composed of colorful lines and shapes that interact in repeating patterns to create playful canvases packed with movement and energy. Glenn has a habit of not painting all the way to the edges of her canvases, and the result is a look that makes her works read like hanging quilts — these paintings would fit right in with a show of textile art. There’s nothing overly complicated about any of the elements in Glenn’s work, but their sums add up to dramatic surfaces that are also reassuringly familiar. Julia Martin Gallery will host an opening reception for The Cracks Are How the Light Gets In on Saturday, March 4, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Buket Savci: Dreampond
March 3-25 at Red Arrow Gallery
Red Arrow Gallery keeps coming up in conversations about which Nashville galleries are making the gallery scene exciting again in the waning days of pandemic worries. The gallery opened 2023 with a strong show of Annie Brito Hodgin’s paintings in January, and their March show looks like the perfect exhibit to pair with the inevitable onset of spring fever — hopefully the only fevers we’ll be dealing with by then. When I first saw Buket Savci’s Dreampond paintings on her website they looked photorealistic, but they’re too stylized to be merely that. I’m not very interested in photorealistic painting, but I’m definitely interested in Savci’s sexy sorting of the bodies, limbs, inflatable pool toys, headbands and panties floating through her exhibition. It seems likely that the painter is using some sort of photo reference in her process, because these scenes feel staged in the best possible way — like stills from some weird lost movie. Our galleries are oversaturated with figurative, narrative painting, but these works engage viewers with their mystery. They’re weird and mythic, but also silly and intimate. Savci is based in Brooklyn, and this is her first show at Red Arrow. The gallery hosts an opening reception for Savci on Saturday, March 3, from 6 to 9 p.m.
Daybreak Arts
April 1-30 at Open Gallery
Nicole Minyard’s Daybreak Arts is an art studio and gallery focused on artists experiencing housing insecurity in Boomtown Nashville. Daybreak also manages an artist collective that puts art-making supplies, training an online marketplace, and in-person gallery exhibitions within reach for our Nashville neighbors who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. The Daybreak Arts community will take over the walls at Lipscomb University’s Open Gallery at The Packing Plant in April, just in time for spring decorating. If you’re looking for just the right fresh new art to hang on your wall, your purchases will directly support your artist-neighbors and Daybreak’s laudable and long-lived mission. Open Gallery will host a reception on Saturday, April 1 (really, I’m not kidding), at The Packing Plant from 6 to 9 p.m.
An interview with artist Jeffrey Gibson leads our guide to the season’s best art shows, theater performances, film screenings, book events and more
