Art museums are notoriously insular, and a community gallery can easily get shoved in a corner, overlooked and underused. But you have to walk through the Frist Art Museum’s Conte Community Arts Gallery when you enter the building, and curator Katie Delmez has made it more than worth the stroll. In the current exhibition, Murals of North Nashville Now, Delmez commissioned local artists with ties to historically black North Nashville to create 8-by-12-foot paintings, most of them showstoppers. It’s an investment in the black community and the local art scene that matters. Delmez is paying attention to what’s culturally important to our city, and letting artists stretch out and do some of their best work yet. ERICA CICCARONE
Best Curator
Katie Delmez, Frist Art Museum
Photo: Eric England
