nashville public art

John Lewis, 1940-2020

About a month after his death in July, this mural of John Lewis appeared on Lafayette Street. It’s the product of Charles Key, who signs his work JamersonSGC (and also at times Low Key Art). It seems appropriate to post this today, just a couple of weeks before the 2020 election ends, as well as the night of the last presidential debate. Key’s mural, one of many pieces he’s done in the neighborhood, makes good use of the architecture, with the peak above giving it strong framing.

Lewis of course was an iconic figure of the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for voting rights. The mural quotes one his most famous lines, taken from a June 27, 2018 tweet: “Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Lewis was certainly not afraid of good trouble, and I can hardly list out all of his extraordinary accomplishments here. But I will recount two of my favorite anectdotes.

Before his death, Lewis was the last of the speakers still alive from the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King Jr. gavehis famous speech. But the speech Lewis gave was not exactly the speech he wrote. As historian Angus Johnston explains, the Catholic Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle who was supposed to give the invocation (and others) found Lewis’s original draft to be too incendiary, and threatened to pull out. Lewis negotiated with King and A. Philip Randolph, one of the elders of the Civil Rights movement, practically up to the moment before he began speaking. Lewis accepted a number of changes, and here’s the thing – you would not have known it from his performance. He delivered the speech with all the passion he would have given with the original draft. He knew the fight was a team effort, not a battle of egos.

Another anecdote: When Lewis went to Comic-Com International in in 2015 to promote March, the graphic novel about his life, he cosplayed himself. He acquired a coat and backpack and other clothes like the ones he wore on March 7, 1965 when he led the people who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. At Comic-Con, he led children around the convention hall in a mini-march. He repeated this at two later conventions. (Here’s a couple pictures if you can’t get past the Times paywall.)

Located at 20 Lafayette Street. The mural is on the south side of the building, facing away from downtown. There is plenty of on-site parking.

October 22, 2020 0

Handlebar Mustache

Mustache Bikerack sculpture Nashville street art

One of the first works of art which inspired this blog was this whimsical bike rack designed by Jenna Boyko Holt. It was installed in 2014 as part of the Metro Arts program of artist-designed bike racks that ran from 2010 to 2015. I’m not sure why I’m only getting around to it now, but there’s a picture of it in a collection of photos I made one day of art in my own neighborhood that was in many ways the genesis of this blog. It is in fact called “Handlebar Mustache,” appropriately enough. Here’s the design Colt originally submitted to Metro Arts. It was a little shinier when it first went in, but otherwise it has been gracing Porter Road for about six years now.

Colt is also part of Vermilion Murals. Some of their best-know work are the two murals on each side of Carter Vintage Guitars, one of a gigantic guitar, and another featuring Maybelle Carter. If you’ve been on 8th Avenue South near Division Street, you’ve seen them. As well as murals and designing bike racks, Colt also does her own paintings, some of which you can see at the link to her site above.

I often say I never see bikes attached to the Metro Arts bike racks, but the photo I took of it five years ago proves that’s wrong.

Today I wouldn’t even bother taking that picture because I like “clean” shots for the blog. Here’s the bike rack from one end, which may give you a better idea of how it is meant to be used.

Located at 715 Porter Road, the complex that includes Pomodoro East. It lies directly in front of Brightside Bake Shop, and is quite visible from the road. Their is ample parking at the complex, and street parking in the neighborhood on the other side of Porter.

October 17, 2020 0

2nd Avenue AT&T Art Wall – Cassidy Cole

UPDATE: This and all the murals in this series were destroyed in the Christmas Day Bombing.

Working left to right on the wall of window murals at the AT&T Central Office on 2nd Avenue (not to be confused with the more famous AT&T building in Nashville, the Batman Building on Commerce Street) the third work is by Cassidy Cole.

It’s part of series of murals on the building sponsored by AT&T, the Nashville Downtown Partnership, The DISTRICT, Nashville Metro Arts Commission, and The Studio 208. All are done by women, and the project was curated by Ashley Segroves of The Studio 208. They are all on vinyl, and went up in the summer of 2018. Cole is a graduate of Belmont University and until recently was based here in Nashville (she’s now in Los Angeles). Until its closure, her work was frequently exhibited at The Arts Company, now rebranded as Chauvet Arts, so you may have seen her work on the art crawls we did in the before times. There’s a nice profile of her in Interior Anthology. The print in the window is based on a painting called “Sufficient” (and no, you can’t have it, it already sold.)

You can see the other murals in this series (once I’ve posted them all, there are eight in all) using the links below. There’s a bit more information about the project in Part 1.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

This is how it looks along with the the other two murals in the left set.

Located at 185 2nd Avenue North. This is downtown – lots of parking, almost none of it free.

October 15, 2020 8

Threshold (The Cumberland Gear Ring)

Threshold Ring sculpture Nashville street art

One of the quieter of Nashville’s iconic outdoor art works is the giant gear ring embedded in the sidewalk along the East Bank Greenway, down by the Nissan Stadium. It doesn’t have the pizzazz of Ghost Ballet, the twisting red sculpture just a couple hundred yards away that’s impossible to miss from across the river on Lower Broad. It’s not controversial like Musica, the dancing pyramid of nudes just off Music Row. It’s just steady and serene, like a quiet sentinel.

There’s no plaque (unusual for city-owned art), so most people don’t know it has a name or any idea who’s behind it. It’s by Joe Sorci and it’s called “Threshold.” (That link is from Facebook. His website requires flash, which many browsers block. UPDATE: The website no longer uses Flash.) It was installed in 1999, and it’s the product of a grant from the Metro Development and Housing Authority (which may explain the lack of a plaque – Metro Arts is very good about signage). It’s art based on found materials. Like Ghost Ballet, it’s made from objects left behind by the barge companies that used to operate on the east bank. Specifically, it’s the gear from a steam crane that once loaded and unloaded barges.

Gear Ring Sculpture Nashville street art

It’s actually part of a set. Nearby there are some less well known pieces, including a mosaic embedded in the sidewalk and a long bar with a gear on the end. These are also by Sorci and were made from found materials as well. I’ll feature them in a later post.

Threshold sculpture Nashville street art

As you can see, I’ve photographed it in different seasons. I think that just highlights its unchanging solidity. It doesn’t show up on social media as much as some of the flashier art in town, but unless the city removes it, it’s likely be in place much longer than almost anything in town. People do like to get their photos using it as a frame, and an intrepid few climb it and hang from the top for a photo.

This image shows how that might be done. The internal partitions provide handholds that could be used as a kind of ladder to get to the top, if someone were willing to try. You didn’t hear that from me.

Gear Sculpture Nashville street art — Two Nashville icons together, Threshold and the Batman Building

Located on the East Bank Greenway, which parallels Titan’s Way. If you are on the river side of the stadium, its almost directly lined up with the middle of the stadium. There’s some free parking for the park on the other side of the pedestrian bridge that lies south of the ring.

October 12, 2020 2

Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery

Greenbrier Sign mural Nashville street art

Around the corner from one of the more spectacular murals in town is the façade of Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery. Nelson’s is a revival of a family business first founded in Nashville after the Civil War by Charles Nelson. It became one of the only high-volume distilleries in Tennessee, and was distributed widely until the state of Tennessee instituted prohibition in 1909. A hundred years later, two of Nelson’s grandsons restarted the business in Marathon Village. You can read about its history here.

The central logo is based on a logo found on bottles from the original business, reading “Green Brier Tennessee” instead of “Nelson’s Green Brier.” (The name comes from the location of the original distillery in Greenbrier, TN). The sign, or really collection of signs, is by Bryan Deese, a prolific Nashville muralist. Like a lot of signs, it has no signature, but Nelson’s credits him on their Instagram page, and includes a couple of shots of him working on it, one which makes clear he had an assistant. Not every business does that, credit sign makers (and sometime not even muralists) so good for Nelson’s.

An odd aside – as I was leaving from shooting (and buying a bottle!) a truck pulling a large flat-bed trailer festooned with flags pulled up. On the trailer was a preacher, railing into his phone (shooting a video) against the evils of alcohol and the audacity of Nelson’s having its doors wide open (not the ones in the picture). They were open for COVID safety, presumably. The spirit of Prohibition than fist shut down Nelson’s is still around.

Located at 1414 Clinton Street, at the corner with 16th Avenue North. There is some street parking on Clinton, and some nearby paid lots.

October 10, 2020 0

House of Blues Fences of Fame, Part 3

Berry Hill Faces Mural Nashville street art

Travelling clockwise around Columbine Park in Berry Hill, coming from Bransford Avenue, the third fence you come to is one of the youngest. I know from happenstance that the artist, Scott Guion, must have been working on it October, 2017, because I have a photo of from thent where the sign portion (see the photo at the bottom if the post) is white, the sign not yet painted. It’s one of several around the park sponsored by the Nashville branch of the House of Blues. The House of Blues calls them the “Wall of Fame,” but for obvious reasons, I went with “fences.”

BH Faces mural Nashville street art — Bob Marley, Minnie Pearl, Amy Winehouse

This fence is not as dense as the first two, featuring only six artists. It’s also a bit more consistent with ages, showing all of them in the middle/leat-middle stages of their careers, expect of course for Amy Winehouse, who of died young of alcohol positioning. All of them are icons of their genres. We see our first artist on the fences who is not primarily known for music, but rather comedy, Minnie Pearl. Bob Marley, James Brown, Prince, and Waylon Jennings round out an extraordinary list. One thing that is different about this fence from the fist two, it’s the first of the fences I’ve featured in which all of the artists are dead.

The blue house in the back was also decorated by Guion, as was the bit of fence in the back ground you can see in the picture at the bottom.

BH Faces Sign mural Nashville street art

See Part 1 of this series for why I’m just now writing about these murals. Spoiler alert: You can finally park in Berry Hill.

Located at 520 East Iris Drive. The mural faces south towards the park. Parking is available around the park.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

October 8, 2020 8

Guitar Skyline

Manuel Fuentes (aka USA Pro Art) is not the first person to create a guitar skyline mural in Nashville. That’s probably Allison Johnson‘s mural I featured in Acoustic skyline. But it’s probably the largest, and it’s certainly bold. The big “Manuel” is presumably the artist’s signature. And don’t adjust your set – check the roofline. It’s straight, but the parking lot has a steep slope.

The mural went up over a year ago, in April, 2019, sponsored by Off the Wagon Tours (aka Nashville Party Wagon), a “transpotainment” company housed in the building. They use a large green tractor to pull a big flat trailer around downtown with perfectly sober guests on board. Well, maybe not exactly. This link will give you an idea. Companies like theirs have been hit hard by the pandemic – currently they are allowed to operate at 50% capacity. With this mural, there are now at least two murals downtown sponsored by companies that cater to bachelorettes and similar tourists. The mural featured in Candy Hearts is the other example.

Fuentes has some other projects in town, but a lot of his work is in Portland, TN and nearby. Check out his Instagram page linked above to see some of it.

Located at 533 Lafayette Street. The building actually faces 6th Avenue South, and the mural is on its south side, facing away from downtown. The rather large parking lot is shared with Hermitage Lighting. Be sure to stay out of the reserved spaces.

October 5, 2020 0

Nashville murals, street art, graffiti, signs, sculptures and more