Art dealer David Lusk, who established his Memphis gallery in 1995, is opening a new 2,500-square-foot gallery in Nashville on March 1. Located at 516 Hagan Street next Zeitgeist Gallery, one of the city’s top contemporary spaces, the gallery is repurposing a former truck garage with Manuel Zeitlin Architects.
“Nashville is yearning for stuff,” says Lusk, discussing the booming city’s desirability as an outpost for his gallery. Besides being the setting of a hit TV show, the city is often noted for its growing “hip factor” and has been prominently featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Lusk is partnering with Dane Carder, a Nashville artist who met the dealer in May 2013 and was included in a group show that August. Though Carder has no commercial gallery experience, he has run a gallery, Threesquared, out of his studio for six years, located around the corner from the new Lusk space. Threesquared will remain open under the direction of Sara Estes, the gallery coordinator for Fisk University’s Van Vechten Gallery.
The expansion will widen the gallery’s collector base and bolsters the artist roster and programming. Lusk says that though most of his sales are within the region, he and Carder plan to be more aggressive in marketing their artists outside the region, through art fairs and other measures. “No one else in Nashville is pushing their artists nationally,” he says. For some years, Lusk has participated in Art Miami and Art Wynwood, the Pulse fair in New York and Los Angeles, artMRKT in the Hamptons and San Francisco, and the Texas Contemporary in Houston.
Lusk’s opening exhibition in Nashville will feature mixed-media works by 23 artists, including 13 from Tennessee, among them Maysey Craddock, Kit Reuther, Mary Addison Hackett, William Eggleston, and the estate of Ted Faiers. It will be on view March 1-29.
