“Treasure Island,” Maggie Sanger
Fort Houston is a cornerstone of Nashville’s contemporary art scene, and its new STATE Gallery + Studios project — a decade in the making — is a boon for local artists.
Fort Houston’s maker spaces act like microbusiness incubators for design and fabrication upstarts, and its gallery is a don’t-miss destination for First Saturday art crawlers. Perhaps most notably, Fort Houston helped establish the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood as Nashville’s busiest and best arts district. But the organization’s latest move finds Fort Houston starting a new era in a new location where its signature mix of creative industries and fine art continues to grow and become more refined.
Fort Houston began as the Brick Factory at Cummins Station 10 years ago. It made its public debut during the First Saturday events in February 2012, where it was the site for an official After Crawl party. At that time, Brick Factory was offering space for artists, access to equipment — including an array of woodworking tools — and various classes. Even back then, live performances, events and exhibitions were on the drawing board of possibilities for the space.
Through most of 2012, The Brick Factory’s After Crawl events established the space as the go-to spot for late-night art crawlers — it nearly always took the last mention in my Crawl Space column in the Scene at that time. Founders Ryan Schemmel, Daniel Heering and Josh Cooper — along with Zach Duensing, who joined the team soon after — also made good on their event plans right away, hosting rotating exhibitions of contemporaneous local artists. Exhibitions featured Emily Clayton, Greg Pond and Chris Zidek, notable national artists including Lani Asuncion and Jordan Martins, and performances by Nashville bands like Birdcloud.
The Brick Factory was already outgrowing its space in Cummins Station near the end of 2012, and when it moved to the storied May Hosiery building in Wedgewood-Houston in 2013, the project had already been redubbed Fort Houston. The move helped establish Wedgewood-Houston as Nashville’s go-to neighborhood for contemporary art, and it was indicative of a trend that’s seen galleries like Coop, Open, Watkins Art Gallery and Unrequited Leisure all leaving downtown to be a part of the Wedgewood-Houston scene. At May Hosiery, the dedicated exhibition space got smaller, but the organization and the After Crawl continued to grow.
Since then, the blood, sweat and tears of Wedgewood-Houston’s creative class has triggered a wave of development and gentrification that pushed artists and organizations out of the spaces that their efforts made valuable. The May Hosiery building’s transformation from a warren of artist-run studios and gallery spaces into a massive members-only hotel and club — the Nashville outpost of the London-based Soho House — was a traumatic loss for Nashville’s visual art scene. Fort Houston’s move to 2020 Lindell Ave. managed to keep its team in Wedgewood-Houston, and it also marked a coming of age that found Fort Houston officially establishing its eponymous fabrication company alongside the separate Artisan Support Project — the nonprofit that runs the shops, maker space, gallery, studio program and community education.
Fort Houston relocated to 217 Willow St., just south of downtown, in the middle of the pandemic at the end of 2020. The new space is — in a word — sprawling. Artisan Support Project’s artistic director Alyssa Beach spent her time during the COVID crisis wisely, growing a new program that’s providing artists with studio spaces and exhibition opportunities.
“The new studio program was conceptualized over the course of quarantine,” says Beach, “and the first year was officially April of 2021 through May of 2022.” During this time, the STATE Gallery + Studios project has hosted six artists who were given free studio space for a year along with solo exhibitions in the STATE Gallery. This is all funded by a scholarship program Beach created through a partnership with the Tennessee Titans.
“They’re the reason we were able to open the program and build the studios,” says Beach. “Annual endowments from the Titans are the type of sustaining gifts that allow our organization to help artists in need.” Exhibitions from program artists like Dylan Lynch and Joe Geis have been recent gallery highlights alongside shows by invited artists like Bob Bechtol. A new group of artists will be coming to the program on May 1. The six artists in this next round were chosen from 65 applicants, and most represent underserved BIPOC and LGBTQ communities.
“Our first group of studio artists was amazing, and I can’t wait for our next group to arrive,” says Beach.
Maggie Sanger installing work at STATE gallery
But before STATE’s next chapter begins, the gallery is hosting the latest exhibition from their class of 2021-22: Maggie Sanger’s Facade is an ebullient display of geometric abstracts that has me yearning for visual art to trend back toward abstraction and formalism. Sanger had a show of her sculptural, shaped paintings at Modfellows last spring, but Facade is a more purely painterly project. Sanger’s flat, smooth surfaces are meticulously arranged in compositions of elemental geometric shapes borrowed from blueprints and Sanger’s own memories of the architecture of various buildings where Sanger has lived or worked. Here, the artist paints in palettes that lean into grayscale, with some canvases punctuated by muted blues, violets, greens and oranges. These geometric paintings resemble some of the mural designs Sanger’s created around the city, but the color schemes with their subtle tonal shifts are more sophisticated and thoughtful than her purely decorative designs. And these more personal, expressive works speak to how resources like free space to work in and a clean well-lighted gallery to show work in can empower artists to improve and expand their practices.
Fort Houston will hold a reception for Facade on Saturday, April 9, from 6 until 10 p.m. Stop by to see the show, tour the new digs, and raise a glass to one of Nashville’s most resilient and innovative arts organizations.
