To wrap up BURNAWAY’s Best, we asked our experts to tell us about what they are looking forward to in 2016.
If you missed them, be sure to check out our Best Exhibitions of 2015, Favorite Reads, Cultural Experiences, and Movers & Shakers.
Happy New Year!
Erica Ciccarone (Nashville)
Writer
CAMPFIRE is a subgroup of the curatorial collective COOP that put together a fantastic show of paintings that reference landscape, while using it as an armature of bigger ideas. The works were by turns mystical, naturalistic, and cerebral, each reflecting a very personal consciousness in regards to landscape and self. The collective includes Nashville locals Karen Seapker, Jodi Hays, and Robert Scobey. They’re planning another show for 2016.
I’m looking forward to seeing how LOCATE Arts pans out. The nonprofit met its $50,000 fundraising goal in November, and founders Carri and Brian Jobe plan to launch a website that will unite contemporary art across Tennessee and make it more outward facing. In March when they gave a talk at Zeitgeist, they talked of organizing a Tennessee biennial. I’m excited to see where it goes and how it will impact contemporary art (and art writing!) across the state.
Lisa Tuttle (Atlanta)
Artist
Zuckerman Museum at Kennesaw State University, Hudgens Center for the Arts, Flux Projects, and expanded Art on the Atlanta BeltLine.
Amy Pleasant (Birmingham)
Artist
I am looking forward to Bethany Collins’s Lobby Project at the Birmingham Museum of Art in January. Also in January, the re-opening of the Lyric Theater in downtown Birmingham.
Keep your eye on Ann Catherine Carter and Zack Rafuls, both artists and founders of the Packing Plant in Nashville; Jane Fox Hipple, an artist based in Montgomery; and Hamlett Dobbins, a Memphis-based artist.
Rebecca Lee Reynolds (New Orleans)
Writer, assistant professor of art history at University of New Orleans
Brandan Odums emerged from the Prospect.3+ pack as an important voice for street art and public engagement with his ExhibitBE, a graffiti exhibition at an abandoned apartment block on the West Bank. I’m curious to see what he does next.
New Orleans Airlift is planning a new stop of the Music Box Roving Village at Central City in the spring. Details here.
What events will Prospect New Orleans be hosting to fill in the off years until Prospect.4 opens in 2017?
Will the new curatorial voices reshape our art scene? So far we’ve only had a taste of what they can offer.
Will the Confederate monuments come down?
Vesna Pavlović (Nashville)
Artist, assistant professor of art at Vanderbilt University
I’m keeping my eye on two promising students:
Alanna Styer’s “where it happened,” appeared at Watkins College for Art, Design & Film.
Alexis Jackson’s 1.4 Billion Black Lives was at Vanderbilt University Department of Art. She also won the $25,000 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award.
Mary Addison Hackett (Nashville)
Artist
Group shows don’t usually warrant a lot of press, but Jodi Hays and Karen Seapker are two Nashville painters whose independent curatorial projects stand out.
