'Other cities keep me alive': Visual artists say Nashville's scene lags behind

The artist David Onri Anderson grew up in Nashville. He studied at Watkins College of Art before it was taken over by Belmont University. He has seen many classmates leave Nashville, drawn to larger cities to pursue their art.

“Honestly, I think they would have stayed if there were larger entities or institutions that could give you something to aspire to,” he said.

Anderson did stay, making paintings that swirl with color and are both mystical and mischievous. And he used what he had to support other artists. At his South Nashville home, he turned a detached garage into the Electric Shed gallery. In the cozy space with a high vaulted ceiling and unfinished rafters, he let artists he admired carry out any crazy idea they had. The first show, in 2018, was detritus gathered from construction sites bound together with stretch silicone.

While Anderson supports Nashville, he does not feel like the city supports him and his work.

“Other galleries in other cities keep me alive,” he said.

Nashville has art museums. Cheekwood. The Parthenon. The galleries at Vanderbilt and Fisk. The Frist Art Museum.

But Fisk Univeristy's gallery has space to show only a fraction of its art, which includes paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Cezanne and an unrivaled collection of 20th century African American works.

The Frist puts on wide ranging exhibits, from watercolors by the children's book author Beatrix Potter to collages by contemporary Black artists. But the Frist, unlike most regional museums, does not have its own collection. The Birmingham Museum of Art, for example, has a collection of nearly 30,000 works.

Nashville has galleries. But many in the art scene say there are not enough. The city has collectors, but often they buy their art elsewhere.

Nashville has art, but insiders say the city's scene is fragmented. Some look with envy to Dallas, with its multiple museums and lively art scene, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the annual ArtPrize festival draws hundreds of thousands.

"I'm a little shocked that a city this size doesn't have lots of public institutions to serve the arts community," said Amanda Hellman, who arrived from Atlanta last year to run Vanderbilt University's gallery. "I want, and I think others are going to want that, too, as the city changes."

Plans are taking shape, though, for new art festivals and museums. The people behind those projects can see a day when Nashville draws tourists who spend their vacations taking in art.

A different place

When Seth Feman was growing up in Nashville, he didn’t see many opportunities for someone like him interested in visual arts.

“The Frist Art Museum didn’t yet exist,” Feman said.

Now, Feman is the director of the Frist, which opened in 2001. He was appointed last year.

The Frist, Feman said, plays a crucial role in Nashville today. It shares art with the city, but in a changing city it is also a space where everyone, newcomers, natives and tourists, can meet.

Because the Frist does not have its own permanent collection, it neither takes donations from collectors nor buys works from contemporary artists. Collectors in Nashville might look to museums outside the city when they want to donate a piece. And Nashville artists miss out on the prestige of having their work in a local museum.

Feman, however, believes the Frist is better off without its own collection.

“It’s part of what attracted me to coming here. We are not defined by the content, because the content changes every three months,” he said.

Feman is thrilled with how Nashville’s art scene has grown since he left. But it’s not enough.

“Twenty years ago, it would have been hard to imagine Nashville was big enough for even one major art museum,” he said. “Now I think the city can sustain much more arts activity.”

Art where you live

The Zeitgeist gallery, now in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, opened in 1994. Lain York, the contemporary gallery’s director, has seen Nashville, and its art scene, rise and fall over the years.

“Traditionally, this was a very affordable and quiet place to make your work. And then you got out of town,” he said.

Today, he sees artists everywhere in Nashville — mainly out of necessity. Rising real estate prices have pushed artists out of neighborhoods where they used to cluster. He questions if Wedgewood-Houston, once a haven for artists, is still a “creative district.” He even wonders how long Zeitgeist can stay in the neighborhood. He sees a good side, however, to the change wrought by Nashville’s rapid growth.

“Any neighborhood could host an art crawl. The artists are working in their bonus rooms and garages,” he said. “The meat of the conversation is what creatives bring to communities for everyone. It’s really exciting.”

Samantha Saturn thinks Nashville developers and artists can work together. She co-founded Artville, a new art festival coming this fall to Wedgewood-Houston. For sponsors, she signed up prominent developers like AJ Capital Partners, the company behind May Hosiery Mills and Merritt Mansion.

Artville aims to connect Nashvillians with artists and galleries across the city, not just in Wedgewood-Houston.

“We need to create a story where people can build a relationship with Nasvhille as a visual arts city,” Saturn said. “Why can’t we compete on that level as a city now? It’s just very fragmented.”

Jami Creel has plans for a year-round addition to Nashville: a museum dedicated to contemporary art.

“If you look at similar cities in the South, they have contemporary art museums. They have more spaces and places for people to show their work,” she said. “We’re losing that opportunity for our community.”

Creel began the process of creating the Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville, MOCAN, in 2018. Since then, the “museum” has hosted pop-up exhibits, like the just closed Traveling Museum Project exhibit at Merritt Mansion. She wants MOCAN to have a fixed home by 2030.

A 'breathtaking' collection

The most ambitious project, one that could make Nashville an arts destination, is taking shape at Fisk University. The historically Black university wants to raise $35 million to build a new art museum.

Throughout the 20th century, Fisk supported leading African American artists such as Aaron Douglas, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Elizabeth Catlett, appointing them as faculty, hosting them for lectures and collecting their work. Pieces by those artists are the core of the school's permanent collection.

“It’s a truly breathtaking collection,” said Feman of the Frist Museum.

Fisk's current gallery can only display a fraction of the collection. Today, most of its paintings rarely leave storage, except when they are loaned to museums outside Nashville. The Fisk’s collection tells a story about Black culture in America that other museums ignored for years but now embrace.

“The purpose of a collection like ours, as it was being formed, was the deconstruction of the caricatures of Blackness,” said Jamaal B. Sheats, the director and curator of the Fisk gallery.

The Fisk collection also includes works by European and American modernists, who were inspired by African art and in turn inspired Black artists. A museum large enough to show the breadth of the school’s collection, which has roughly 4,000 pieces, would let visitors see this aesthetic exchange that played out across continents. A museum for the Fisk’s collection would draw visitors from around the world.

For Sheats, creating a museum for Fisk is a near sacred calling. The art in the school’s collection needs to be shared with the Nashville community.

“These institutions are repositories for the visual representation of the soul of humanity,” he said.

Todd A. Price writes about culture across the South. He can be reached at taprice@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Visual arts in Nashville: A fragmented group of museums, galleries