Art by Ted Desanto
Come out Saturday, February 6, from 6 – 9 pm for Nashville’s First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown, presented by 5th Avenue of the Arts, a monthly visual arts event in downtown Nashville. On every First Saturday, an alliance of art galleries and museums collectively invite the public to explore the vibrant Nashville downtown art scene. Admission free, the event welcomes approximately 2,000 attendees each month, bringing more attention and recognition to this energetic destination for visual arts. Here are a few of the highlights.
Art by Bruce New
Opening at The Arts Company, Contemporary Urban Folk Art From Kentucky: End of the Agrarian Tradition presents the shift from agrarian folk art to contemporary art through the work of four urban artists: Tad DeSanto, Joshua Huettig, Robert Morgan, and Bruce New.
“American folk art of the 20th Century has been understood to be folksy art of the people — “untrained, rural, loner artists” living mostly in the south, usually in poverty, and generally untrained and uneducated as artists,” remarked The Arts Company Owner Anne Brown. “At the beginning of the 21st century, some of these artists are coming to be viewed as significant American artists whose contemporary artwork has helped shape our modern visual culture, artists who will have a lasting influence on other artists, collectors, and audiences for years to come.”
Tinney Contemporary presents Drip Paintings – an exhibition of new work by Jane Braddock. Braddock has traveled widely beginning with East Africa in 1971. Her trips have informed her life as well as her art. In 1996 after a powerful trip to Tibet, and including a return to India and Nepal, her work changed dramatically. While reading Gita Mehta’s Snakes and Ladders she was electrified by the word Shakti- and felt intuitively that it described her new work. In Hinduism, Shakti is the divine feminine force of creation and is considered Shiva’s ‘other half’- he who gives that form consciousness.
Braddock found the color of India spilling from memory into her new work and she began painting vibrational fields of light.
Arts & Music at Wedgewood/Houston
Over in the Fort Houston district they also have a crawl Saturday night, and among the galleries and artists are David Lusk Gallery – Veda Reed and Beth Foley; Zeitgeist Gallery – Karen Barbour and Alicia Henry; The Packing Plant – Christian Vistan; Julia Martin Gallery – Megan Kimber; Channel to Channel – Heather Hartman; CG2 – Christina A. West; and Ground Floor Gallery – Amanda Joy Brown.
The ‘can’t miss’ show of the year is Th3 Anomaly at Abrasive Media, 438 Houston St, Ste 257. The world’s first and only gallery-sized graphic novel, Th3 Anomaly features 321 paintings in over 2,000 square feet of immersive, family-friendly atmosphere. Dozens of costumes and props were created, seventeen models portrayed characters in over 5,000 reference photographs, and a lot of paint, and more than 8,000 hours have gone into making the world of Th3 Anomaly, and now, four years after this journey began, it’s opening it to the public. A 124-page printed graphic novel and an ebook version of Th3 Anomaly will also be available for purchase.
