Rachel Bubis: As a TN native who has been living and working here many years as an artist and curator, how do you take the temperature of the current art scene in TN? Do you notice any similarities or differences between the Memphis and Nashville communities? Hamlett Dobbins: I haven’t been able to travel as much as I used to when I was working as a curator. I think the energy and activism in the Memphis art community ebbs and flows. We have spurts where there are lots of popup alternative spaces and then people move away or get full time jobs or get burnt out and they close and then a few years later there’s another spurt. I feel like there are great things happening at a number of the institutions in Memphis, particularly thinking about the college galleries here. Patty Daigle is continuing great programming at the University of Memphis Fogelman Galleries, same with Joel Parsons at Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. Now Cat Peña is running the gallery at Christian Brothers University. Dwayne Butcher organized a show for the newly renovated Art Museum at the University of Memphis. The Crosstown Concourse and Crosstown Arts will be a big bump for the community with a new space for exhibitions and its residency program. There are some new spaces and groups like the Orange Mound Gallery as well as The CLTV. I feel like it’s a good time to be in Memphis as an artist. Of course, like all communities, we could all use more patrons for the arts. I am afraid any observations about Nashville or Knoxville would be uninformed, based entirely on conversations with friends who live there.

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What could be more breathtaking than a series of photographs taken from the window seat of an airliner? If the clouds are right, the view can be unforgettable. But what if the Plexiglas you’re looking through is kind of smudged, as it often is? Or cracked? Even better, insists Catherine Erb, whose images of clouds and brilliant skies are on display from September 5 through October 7 at David Lusk Gallery.

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For years, Tyler Hildebrand’s wry, evocative work has been a refreshing addition to the Nashville art scene. Though cartoonish and often lurid, his bold, graphic work tells compelling, semi-autobiographical tales of distorted souls rapt in violence, vice or some absurd, very-American fate.  In his latest solo show, “The Retirement Party,” the artist says sayonara to the art world with over 60 signature mixed media pieces replete with fast food and sports imagery as well as cameos from Tim Allen, Oprah, David Letterman and. of course, Snoopy,

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One of the reasons I’m so enamored of Tyler Hildebrand’s multimedia painting and sculpture is because his subjects are so familiar. Hildebrand is fourteen years younger than me, but we have a lot in common: the artist is a former Nashvillian, but he was born in Cincinnati and he’s currently based back in Ohio. I’m currently a Nashvillian, but I was born in Detroit and raised in southeastern Michigan. Hildebrand’s work brims with images of Midwestern working class people and the popular culture of daytime television, country music, football, professional wrestling, fast food – all the same stuff everyone in that part of the country would recognize.

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There is only one flag in Jack Spencer’s photographic portrait of America. It withers under time and the elements, a symbol of bitterness instead of pride. It is at Wounded Knee, the site of the bloody oppression of the Lakota Native Americans over a century ago. The flag is a reflection of Spencer’s inner state as he started photographing in 2003 for what would become his book, “This Land” (University of Texas Press, 2017). The images started out dark — a reaction to jingoism that saturated the country after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and before the Iraq War.

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At 516 Hagan Street, Zeitgeist Gallery and Fashion Happening Nashville present “Wearable Surfaces,” an exhibition of collaborations between local fashion designers and artists.  A special ticketed preview reception will be held on Thursday, August 4 to benefit The Sewing Training Academy.  Next door, David Lusk Gallery hosts the opening reception for “The Retirement Party,” Tyler Hildebrand’s third solo show at the gallery. Hildebrand’s colorful, cartoonish multimedia paintings explore the ugly side of contemporary American culture.

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Confession time: Isn’t it true that when people look at exhibitions, particularly accumulations of precious objects, they mentally tally the pieces they would like to steal? Of course it’s true. I do it and so do you. Only theoretically, though. We would never actually purloin anything from a museum. We’re not even supposed to touch the objects and artworks.

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The Retirement Party, showing at David Lusk Gallery, is a compilation of work completed over the last two years. I started the work while living in Nashville, continued it during a yearlong residency in Baltimore, and finished it after moving back to my hometown of Cincinnati.

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Nashville may be known for its music scene, but it's also home to creatives making the city a destination for design, food, art and fashion. When Benjamin Goldberg was just a 23-year-old college graduate trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life, he and a friend decided to open a bar in an abandoned warehouse in The Gulch. The plan didn’t make much sense: The area, in southwest Nashville, was off the radar, and Goldberg had little business or culinary acumen. The space, though, epitomized where he wanted to hang out. “It was a snapshot of my life at that time,” says Goldberg, now 38. “And somehow the people in Nashville understood it and came out.”

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Kit Reuther is a self-taught painter and sculptor who was 7 or 8 when she took her first art classes in the magical backyard of beloved Nashville art teacher Chris Tibbott. She studied studio design at O‘More College and gradually evolved into making art her full-time career. She laughingly says, “I just slowly tricked myself into letting go of the regular paycheck and ended up in a completely risky but gratifying career.”

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