Search

nashville public art

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

Open Search
Tag

#downtown

2nd Avenue AT&T Art Wall – Emily Leonard

Peonies mural Nashville street art

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 fourth work is by Emily Leonard.

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.

This mural is based on a work Leonard calls simply “Peonies,” because that’s what it is, a somewhat abstract image of peonies. At one point, prints of this this image were available, but I checked her shop and they are sold out. It’s part of a series of floral works she has done. While an abstraction of peonies, it’s also the “realistic” of the murals in this series.

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.

Below you can see it context, along with murals by Tess Davies and Jade Carter.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

ATT Murals Nashville street art

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

7

Frankie Pierce Park, Part 1

Frankie Pierce Mural Nashville street art

As part of the massive Capitol View project off of Charlotte Avenue, the developers agreed to create Frankie Pierce Park, a green space that includes a children’s playground that was built as a public-private partnership between Capitol View and Metro Parks. It lies in a triangle of land between two elevated railroad lines that separate Capitol View from Capitol Hill. Real estate folks like to call the area around Capitol View “North Gulch,” but it used to be known as Hell’s Half-Acre, long a Black neighborhood, which was torn down in the mid-twentieth century.

Frankie Pierce Mural Nashville street art

Because of its history, it’s appropriate that the park be named in honor of one of Nashville’s most important Black activists, J. Franke Pierce.  Pierce was a civil rights activist who played an important part in the women’s suffrage movement in Nashville, and who opened the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls in 1923, which remained open until 1979. Her work for women’s voting rights is honored in the Alan LeQuire statue of suffragette activists found in Centennial Park I wrote about in These women came to vote!.

Frankie Pierce Mural Nashville street art

This mural, as well as two others nearby that I’ll post about later, is the work of Anthony Billups of Music City Murals and Olasubomi Aka-Bashorun, and it went up back in August. On his Instagram page, Billups discuss the fact that every day they worked on the mural, they were questioned by police. Billups, who is white, found himself needing to defend Aka-Bashorun, who is Black. Billups says that he has never been questioned by police on any project before, but police repeatedly questioned what Aka-Bashorun was doing. He says:

It was also apparent that when I showed up, the situation de-escalated because I am white. What if I hadn’t been there??

All this while they were working on a mural honoring an important Black activist.

Frankie Pierce Mural Nashville street art

Located at 130 Lifeway Plaza. That’s the address of the park. The mural is found on the south end of the park, on the left side of the eastern railroad bridge, right off of Nelson Merry Street. The easiest parking is off of Nelson Merry, on the other side of the western railroad bridge, at Capitol View.

Part 2 Part 3

Frankie Pierce Park sign
2

2nd Avenue AT&T Art Wall – Cassidy Cole

ATT Cole Mural Nashville street art

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.

ATT Murals

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

8

Guitar Skyline

Guitar Skyline Mural Nashville Street art

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.

0

2nd Avenue AT&T Art Wall – Erin Elise Laughlin

Laughlin Mural 2 Nashville street art

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 second work is by Erin Elise Laughlin.

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. This one seems to have faded a little bit, if you compare it to what it looked like when it first went in. Or it might just be my photo. Here’s a recent video of her work using a pouring technique, but she also uses other methods.

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 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

This is how it looks alongside some of the other murals. Laughlin’s is in the middle of the nearest set

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

8

Bubbles at Capitol View

Bubbles mural Nashville street art

This is one of four murals either by or involving Anthony Billups of Music City Murals that are found at the Capitol View complex: this one, the ones I featured in Spread Love and Riding!, and a set of murals at Frankie Pierce Park he collaborated on with Olasubomi Aka-Bashorun, which I will feature soon. I thought I’d put this one up now because, more so than most outdoor art, it’s inevitably temporary.

I did not realize when I posted Spread Love that both it and the bubble mural are on panels covering the windows of an empty retail space. Rather than have the windows look like part of construction site, the management at Capitol View opted for art. But of course, someday that space will be rented, and the panels will come down. I imagine the pandemic has slowed interest from retailers and restaurateurs for the time being. Note the padlock above the train engine, and you’ll realize there’s a door in this mural.

Of course, since they are on panels, it’s entirely possible that both murals will be repurposed. Hopefully, Capitol View will find some use for them once the space is rented.

The mural may not have been specifically designed for people to get their picture in front of, but there is an obvious pose! (Especially if you can jump.) The train references the rail line just a block east, and the jumble of buildings from Nashville’s skyline is roughly what you would see if you could look east to downtown without obstructions.

Skyline mural Nashville street art

Located on the 400 block of 11th Avenue North, right next to the Clean Juice at 412 11th Ave N. There’s some street parking on 11th and nearby, and you can access free parking (meant for the businesses in the building) off the alley on the east side of the building, towards the State Capitol.

0

Third and Lindsley Part 1 – Find Your Look

Musicians Mural Nashville street art

Just a few days ago, I featured a mural at the independent music venue The East Room. Today, it’s the turn of the venerable Third and Lindsley, which has been in operation for almost 30 years. The anniversary comes up in February, but in announcing their reopening for October 1, the management speculated about not holding the anniversary party until September, because they’ve been closed for six months. Let’s hope the re-opening works out for them. Any music venue shutting down would be a loss, but it’s hard to imagine Nashville without Third and Lindsley.

As any Nashville icon should, Third and Lindsley has art. In total, there are three outdoor murals, two relatively new ones by the artist who goes by Blue Hayden Art, and an older sign painted on a retaining wall. I say relatively – the two Blue Hayden pieces went in about a year ago. Both are part of a trend I’ve noted before, murals very specifically designed for people to stand in front of and get their picture taken. I’ve taken the title for my post from an Instagram post from the artist that shows people doing just that (swipe to the second picture).

This one is related to those paintings of groups of people with cutouts that you can stand behind and stick your face in. Here you stand in front, under one of the hats, grabbing one of the instruments. It’s really designed for a group to participate in, which make sense if you know how things work at Third and Lindsley. Crowds waiting to get into the venue line up in front of this wall, so for a show night, at least before social distancing, groups were already standing in front of this spot anyway!

I’ll feature the other two mural over the next couple of weeks or so. I once said I’d never do series posts again (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc.) but some projects really require it.

Part 2

Located at 818 3rd Avenue South, at the corner with, you guessed it, Lindsley Avenue. There is very limited street parking, and a pay lot. During the day on weekends it’s easy to park at neighboring businesses.

0

Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑