Occupation: Chief Curator, Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Years living here: Nine
Hometown: Pittsburgh, Pa.
Passions: Family, art, music, food, wine
Your absolute favorite place in the city? Frist Center, hands down. After that, can’t decide—Cheekwood Sculpture Trail, Yazoo Tap Room and The Family Wash.
Describe your Nashville in three words for us? Smart, engaged people
Who do you think has influenced the lifestyles of Music City? So many people, so many lifestyles … perhaps I should go for someone who oozes style? Let’s say Manuel, the couturier.
Tell us about some of the exhibits you have on the books for this year? Currently on view is “Paint Made Flesh,” an exhibition I organized featuring 40 works by internationally renowned modern and contemporary artists who use paint to create powerful metaphors for the human condition. Included are works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Alice Neel, Susan Rothenberg, Georg Baselitz and others.
Also on view in the main-level Ingram Gallery is “Medieval Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art,” a brilliant selection from one of the world’s great collections of Medieval, Byzantine and early Renaissance works. In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery is the exhibition “Mike Hoolboom: Imitations of Life,” a highly provocative and hypnotic work by a Toronto-based fringe filmmaker, which integrates images drawn from mainstream cinema, newsreels and science fiction films to define the cultural subconscious of the 20th century. This is a must for film buffs.
Can you tell us something about the Frist Center we may not know? Dark secret: Many of us here talk more about food than art. We love to prepare international cuisine and to share the results with each other. It pays to be friends with a Fristie.
What is the best city event you’ve attended? It’s a toss-up between Patti Smith’s concert in a parking lot and the DeVotchKa show at The Basement.
What’s your Nashville neighborhood and why do you like it? East of East Nashville. Peaceful, nice old Tudor-style house with lots of land, near Shelby Bottoms and the new pedestrian bridge, Turnip Truck, Rumors East and Marché.
Why is Nashville is a great place to call home? The people are great, so many restaurants to choose from and you can’t find a better city for all kinds of music. I also like its size—in a metropolitan region our size, one person can make a difference.
Which exhibit are you most excited about? “Paint Made Flesh,” because it adds to the scholarship of late 20th and early 21st century art through great catalogue essays by world-renowned art historians, while enabling us to fulfill our mandate of helping visitors to connect with art in meaningful ways. Everyone experiences the world through the body, and the artists in the exhibition provide a common language to help us see and discuss the things of the flesh in the context of self, art and history.
Your best secret for navigating downtown? Avoid downtown on game day. We live in East Nashville.
Favorite local celebrity? Does Alison Krauss live in Nashville?
What charitable cause or organization you are most committed to? Rocketown. I especially like their ever-changing graffiti. Those guys are good.
If you were to take visitors to one residential street in the city—which one would it be? Eastland Avenue between Gallatin Road and Chapel Avenue—just cool old houses and a slight funk factor.
What are your favorite places to shop? Lazzaroli, Corrieri’s Formaggeria, Trader Joe’s, Woodland Wine Merchant and, of course, Goodwill (for my radically chic sons).
What’s the one thing you’d like to see change to improve the lifestyles of Nashville residents? I would love to see an architecture boom, with adventuresome new structures becoming part of our urban landscape. This could accompany an increase in daring public art projects, letting the world see at first glance what a creative community Nashville has.
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