In Nashville, Tennessee we are thought of as promoters of all kinds of art, being that we are a big recording site. However, this fact only seems to apply to music. In Tennessee there is no art community. It has died. The cause was shown in a grand play of actions the acts of the play include promotion of the talentless, theft from starving artists, and ignorance of location.
I was sixteen when I first entered this world of eccentrics and paint splattered old ladies. It seemed so wonderful as we were dressed up and wandering around the gallery like we knew today was the day someone was going to get a sale. As the youngest member there, I was barely talked to so I observed the strategies they employed. Some were loud and approachable, gravitating everyone's attention like they were the magnet and the room was filled with little filaments of iron that were the potential customers. Others sat in the corners and talked only to other artist, gothed up with detergent blue hair and brooding in a corner watching people look at their work. But when the night ended, there was residual excitement, but pockets left unfilled.
When one thinks of a gallery we imagine this great building that is perfectly styled to capture the imagination and lure people in with promises of making history. Madison Art Centre was a big white building in the middle of Madison's projects. Its white was the white you only see in two places: The white of ancient dinosaur bones and the white that happens after you wear new white shoes for two years. That streaked eggshell covered the walls of this once movie theatre. During gallery events it was necessary to check three times to make sure your car was locked so you would not leave to find a homeless man peeing into your Chevy or hitching a knife ride to the liquor store. We had fancy living statues outside with realistic scents and vile attitudes. Art is a business and even the smallest company usually know the saying "Location, Location, Location".
Mel was the most revered of our little community. His paintings were clean, they popped, and they were copied straight out of comic books. He was a brash firefighter with a big body and an ego to fit it. This wasn't entirely his fault. He seemed to sell about a painting a month at Madison. Selling one was a feat during a year, and thus people would inflate this ego by asking him his "secrets". The secret was, he was the only one that Madison Art Centre was promoting. All our money went to Mel and his canvases which looked like their subjects were pulled straight out of fifties comic books. Bombshell blondes with aprons and shocked expressions would stare at gallery goers as if screaming "Why are you even considering buying me".
Donald was a lesser of our rank. I have always felt he should have had Mel's place. He was the only artist I have ever seen make chrome on canvas look real. He did incredible motor cycle and car paintings with smiling motorcyclists showing off their hogs in the paintings. No detail was left out. You could sit in front of his painting and watch little frozen paint people walking out of his chrome and the grey bird flying in the oil sky reflected onto the handlebar. He never sold a thing. People would come into the gallery and roam. I could sit at the front doors during my volunteer hours and watch customers as they entered the doors and see their faces as their eyes snapped onto the frazzled women of Mel and their screen printed dots. Their faces audibly popped into a confused stare. If they made it through that without leaving, about an hour after they came in I would hear this soft amazed sigh from the second level of the gallery. In that dusty corner with no light, they had seen Donald's work.
Why were all the artists with potential being pushed aside? It is normal to market your best products. This was not the case in our state. I once heard one of the people that did talk to me, Rachel (a textile artist who produced some of the weirdest, most ridiculously ugly swathed torn cloth ladies I've ever seen or wish to see again) say "Why am I not selling? I am somebody in Chicago!". I swear the only though in my head was that she best run herself back to Chicago, this painted ship is going down. She was also widely marketed.
When Music for TN kids was introduced and we competed for the guitar projects my mother and I both won with our designs and went on to the auction when they were completed. The action went off fine, both pieces sold for over a thousand. I myself outsold 75% of my peers. This auction happened again. The same artists were featured, no thought was put to what had sold last year and Mel was once again in the paper with his crooning Madonna look-a-like as opposed to the macabre screaming rocker that tanked the year before but was still featured. However, this time once the checks for our share were put into the bank we began to question. Why are we only receiving 10%? Is the gallery getting any money from this? The manager assured us they weren't. Two years later, when I had taken myself out as a character in this cluster, it was in the news that the manager, Vickie, had been laundering the profits of this and whatever sales may have happened to fund her household and daughter's college.
Shortly after we left Madison Art Centre, we discovered Tennessee Art League.
The walls outside told a different story than Madison's. It had the office brick of every other building around it. Location was downtown Nashville, an active business location on the best of roads to get it seen. Three flags in yellow, purple, and red called customers in to view their works. When pushing on the door the mere heft of it gave the sense that only the strong could enter and lent it a feel of exclusivity that would appeal to any artist who wanted success.
Once past the door and viewing the works inside, my first look around told me it was much the same. The canvases featured on its blue-grey walls featured crumpled oil Lay's bags shining in the brush's sun and smeared nudes in pink, white, and blue that were unrecognizable but for the phallus. Once again I found real art in the corner. Shoved away like Cinderella cleaning the cellar. The sensitive works I found there with the technique and brushstroke that sang the stories of mothers, floods, and anything else besides "I ate these chips and want to gain my money back for more through this painting" made me smile and sigh simultaneously.
I had become jaded. I no longer sought art. The next mention I had heard of the TN art league was in the Tennessean newspaper. The cover had what at first looked like the typical confident artist crossing their arms beside their work, but turned out to be an artist crying in the gallery beside a piece on those grey gloomy walls. It was closing down.
The art scene in Tennessee was a suicide. Anything money is made with is a business. Art must be considered that if you wish to succeed in it. As of now, no gallery owners have perfected this art, and the only galleries that now exist double as framing shops and use their artists to sell the wooden couplers. Even then, one owner of such a shop that I had contacts with now works in Barnes and Noble.
The Music City Art Community has died. On its tomb are a cartoon figure screaming silently but passionately with Mel's signature on her bosom and a bronze marker with these words in bold: "I'm somebody in Chicago!"
