Search

nashville public art

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

Open Search
Tag

#pietown

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

Krest, 2018

Krest Graffiti mural Nashville street art

One of the earlier posts on this blog was about this very wall, and some similar-looking graffiti, only mostly in yellow. I worked out that the earlier one read “Krest,” but I didn’t have any idea who the artist was, and I gave it the cheeky title, “For that perfect smile.” You know, as in “Crest”? Well, this time around I know exactly who did it because he signed it this time – Troy Duff, aka Duffomatic, and yes, this one also reads “Krest.” In both cases, Duff did the work as part of the Hands on Creativity festival sponsored by Plaza Art. The earlier one was done for the 2015 festival, while this one was done for the 2018 festival. Duff was sponsored, at least for the second one, by Montana-Cans, a spray paint company. The previous one was painted over, presumably by the building owner, so Duff had a blank canvas to work with the second time around.

This little neighborhood squeezed between Lafayette and the interstate is known as Pie Town. Why that? Because apparently a few years ago some of the business owners wanted to rebrand the area, known for being a little rough around the edges. If you look at a map, it does sort of look lie a wedge of pie, bordered by Lafayette, 8th Avenue, and I-40. It remains surprisingly ungentrified for an area so close to downtown, though it is changing slowly.

Located at 617 Middleton Street. Nearby parking is easy. The mural is on the west side of the building, facing Plaza Arts.

0

Fire and Safety (Part 3) – In the alley

Alley mural street art Nashville

This photo is at an odd angle because of how narrow the alley is that hosts these three murals. The lie on the back (east) side of the Industrial Fire and Safety Inc. building on Ash Street in the Pie Town section of SoBro. The first two are by Audie Adams, who as part of Thoughts Manifested was a major contributor to the murals on the north and west side of the building as well. (See Part 1 and 2 below.) Somehow, Adams got a much better angle on the “wasp” mural than I did. Some of that may have been a better camera, but lying on the ground helped too! The brown mural at the end is by Jeff Bertrand. The image of the woman with a starry headdress shows up in some of his other pieces. Since I took these photos, a piece of fencing went up blocking this alley from the north side, perhaps to discourage homeless individuals from sleeping here. If you look close in the slide show below you’ll see there is no mural next to the last shot of the wasp mural. That’s because I photographed it first, in April 2017, when it was by itself, and took the other photos that October 2017 (I am nothing if not current!) after all the murals were finished.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Part 1 Part 2

Located at 608 Ash Street. The new Division Street extension complicates access somewhat. The mural above faces into a parking lot and alley on the north side of the building, on the opposite side from Ash. It’s easily accessed through the parking lot entrance on Ewing Ave between Middleton St and Fogg St, or down the alley that forks off of 6th Ave a little south of Lafayette Ave. Parking here is easy.

0

Survivor

Chromatics Full

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?

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

0

Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑