One of the artists studios at the Downtown Presbyterian Church
Most of the world may be subject to six degrees of separation, but in Nashville’s art scene it’s more like two or three. Artist Richard Feaster knows this web of connection all too well. He’s deeply enmeshed with the three institutions most people would argue are the most influential elements of Nashville’s creative community: the Frist, where he’s the registrar; Zeitgeist Gallery, where he exhibits his own work; and the downtown art crawl, where he helps curate the gallery Browsing Room. But at the center of Feaster’s involvement in local art — the beating heart that makes all those influences fall in line — is his studio in the Downtown Presbyterian Church, one of several studios in the building.
“It’s hard to overstate its importance,” Feaster tells me about the church’s studio program. Developed by local philanthropist Tom Wills in the 1990s as a way to utilize the 150-year-old church’s empty upper rooms, the church on Fifth Avenue North has housed some of Nashville’s most influential artists. Herb Williams, who is curator and director of the Rymer Gallery, made his crayon sculptures at a DPC studio. Beth Gilmore, who started Twist Gallery and pioneered the downtown art crawl, worked from a DPC studio. Jodi Hays, Rocky Horton, Hans Schmitt-Matzen, Megan Lightell — they’ve all worked beneath the high ceilings of the church, surrounded by the building’s patina paint job and good natural light.
Richard Feaster in his studio
Feaster grew up in Maryland and the Boston area, moving to Nashville with his parents when he was still in high school. He graduated from Brentwood High School, left town to go to college and eventually moved to New York. After all that relocating, when he came back to Nashville in 2002 and set up his studio near his parents’ house in Brentwood, it felt a little strange.
“In New York, I was living on the Upper West Side near Central Park, and my studio was in the Lower East Side in an old vaudeville theater,” he says. “So Brentwood and Cool Springs, these pre-fab buildings with their strange architecture — it just wasn’t cutting it.”
As counterintuitive as it might seem, a Nashville church has provided its artists-in-residence with all the grit and charm of a city studio. The space lends itself to the layered conceptual aesthetics of contemporary art, and its relative seclusion is perfect for Feaster’s work, which often plays with the results of chemical reactions. Even with his windows open, the smell of turpentine and spray paint lingers in the air, and a respirator mask is among his art supplies. Feaster has discovered the maximum size a canvas can be and still squeeze through the church’s relatively narrow stairwell.
“That ended up being the size of almost all the canvases in my last show,” he says. In this way, the church has literally shaped the art created within its walls.
It’s 80 by 60 inches, by the way.
