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Spaceman

Spaceman Mural Nashville Street Art

What happens when an artist is given complete freedom to create? Well, if the artist is Mobe Oner (aka Eric Bass), you might just get a surreal scene. Perhaps you might get something like a drifting spacesuit filled with butterflies, with the facemask broken open so the butterflies can escape. In this case, you get exactly that. It certainly doesn’t have much to do with pizza, despite being on the front of the Midtown branch of Donatos. And no, the closeup pictures below are not slightly out of focus. Originally, this was a wooden surface, but the mural was done on stucco, giving it a textured look. There’s a richness to the color that you don’t see in a lot of murals in Nashville. As for the spacesuit, it doesn’t appear to be a specific design, but it seems to most resemble the AL7, which used by NASA for the Apollo and Skylab missions and thus would be fixed in a lot of folks’ minds as what a spacesuit should look like. And anyway, the orange Space Shuttle suits wouldn’t look good here. The butterflies look a lot like Blue Emperor butterflies, but they may just be fantasy butterflies.

Spaceman mural Nashville street art

In all the rush to make murals interactive, maybe all that’s needed is an arresting image.

Located at 1915 Broadway. The mural is on the front of the building, facing the street. There is street parking right in front of the mural, unfortunately, and Donato’s has its own parking as well. Grab some pie and enjoy the art!

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Obie’s no more?

Pizza Mural street art Nashvillle

Of late, Nashville’s “Rock Block,” located along Elliston Place, has been under threat. First, Gold Rush closed. More recently, there was a controversial move to rezone the lots at Elliston Place and Lousie Avenue, currently the site of three small buildings collectively known as the Louise Douglas apartments, to allow a 15-story hotel to be built on the spot. Such a building would tower over longtime music venues The End and Exit/In and radically alter the character of the neighborhood, not to mention eliminate some of the only reasonably affordable housing left in Midtown. After much public outcry, the rezoning measure was withdrawn, though the long-term future of the area remains uncertain. One troubling feature is the apparent closure of Obie’s Pizza, which lies in front of The End and just east of the apartments. It hasn’t been open in a couple of months or so. There is a sign on the door that says they will reopen soon, but the number at that link I gave for them has been disconnected, and there’s no sign of activity. So their mural, made for them by Tyler Z. Key, in all likelihood will disappear sooner than later. Call it endangered art. The mural has been edited at least once. On Key’s Instagram page, you can see that the mural once had a large signature at the bottom reading “TiiKii Art.” If you look close, you can see where it’s been painted over next to the blue hand. Key apparently decided to go with a more subdued signature, reading “TZ Key.” Either way, check it out soon while you still can.

Located at 2217 Elliston Place. The mural is on the west side of the building. There’s some free street parking in the area, but not a lot. You can probably get away with parking in the lot in front of the mural for a short time if you just want to grab a picture.

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Pastaria

PastariaMain

Pastaria in One City is a branch of a St. Louis restaurant of the same name. Which is why the art outside the building was designed by Atomic Dust, a St. Louis branding agency. The script and figures of children are clearly much the same as from the original 2012 project in St. Lous. When the Nashville branch opened, Atomic Dust relied on 12 Point Sign Works and Brand Imaging Group for much of the local production work. There’s photo in this Atomic Dust blog post about the Nashville Pastaria projet that shows three men installing the mural above, one of whom has a “Brand Imaging Group” t-shirt, so they presumably did the installation. Since doing this work in 2017, Brand Imaging Group has become independent and is now know as Big Visual Group. It’s not clear if the “8” made up of words from a quote by Jane Jacobs is part of the Pastaria branding or not. The quote, which discusses urban design, would seem to fit the mission of One City, but as it also discusses children’s play, either is possible.

Pastaria8

Located at 8 City Boulevard, in the One City center, which is on the east side of the 28th/31st Street Connector, just south of Charlotte Avenue. There is free street parking and free garage parking. Grab some grub and enjoy the art!

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Mmm, pizza!

Italia

There are signs, and there are better signs. Italia Pizza and Pasta, known to everyone just as “Italia,” recently acquired an impossible to miss mural advertising its scrumptious pizza. Seriously, you have to look hard to find bad reviews of this place. Most people love it (and I say for good reason). Once housed in the old Dairy Dip (now occupied by the Urban Cowboy Public House), Italia has been at 16th and Woodland for several years now. Maybe success has paved the way to art, but it’s also true that right across the street is Lockeland Table, one of the very best restaurants in town, in Tennesse for that matter, and which also serves pizza. In fact, they are very different places and both very much worth a try if you haven’t yet. Italia has tables but is more of a take-out place, while you should get reservations for Lockeland. The mural is signed “MCM/Music City Murals Tomasek.” That would imply that Dean Tomasek, who works with Anthony Billups under the Music City Murals moniker, did this alone.

Located at 1600 Woodland, at the corner of 16th. There’s parking in back and some street parking. Order up a pizza or maybe some lasagna (or both!) and enjoy the art!

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