I remember the first time I visited Chromatics. I was with a friend of mine who is a photographer. This would have been in the mid/late 1990s. Digital photography was on the rise, but film was still common, particularly with professionals. She was picking up some prints they had developed for her. Chromatics was (and is) in SoBro, more precisely in Pie Town, but this wasn’t when SoBro was cool. Rather, it was cheap – a rundown warehouse district where a big building like this one was easier to acquire than today and must have been even more so in 1979 when Chromatics first opened. Chromatics survives, adapting and flourishing with the revolutions in photography, surviving when many in the business perished. And so too its mural. The panel down on the lower right says that it was “blasted out by TACKZ 7 miles ahead Ciudad de Lost Angeles 5.93.” TACKZ is the nom de plume of a Los Angeles-based graffiti artist associated with the Seventh Letter group (which is also responsible for the mural in Angels will rise), a group that goes back more than twenty years. I have seen older pictures of this mural where the colors are much richer (and where the building next door is industrial, not the hip Tennessee Brew Works), not faded like it is now, so I can easily believe it has been greeting the morning sun for twenty-four years, since May 1993. That would make it one of the oldest outdoor murals in Nashville. It survives, along with the store it advertises. And check out their website – another old school survivor! UPDATE: They have seen thoroughly modernized their website. When I originally published this, they had a very late 1990s-style page.
Located at 625 Fogg Street. The mural actually faces Ewing Avenue, except for a little addendum on the Fogg side. Chromatics has parking, though don’t park long unless you are doing business there. Maybe park at Tenessee Brew and enjoy the art along with your beer?
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