Nashville, Tennessee

Contemporary Art Gallery
 

237 Rep. John Lewis Way N. 37219
Tuesday—Saturday
10 a — 5 p
615.255.7816



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Mark














TINNEY is proud to present Signal-to-Noise, a solo exhibition featuring works by Tiffany Calvert. The exhibition will be on display from November 7 through December 23, 2026. The opening reception will be Saturday, November 14, from 6 to 9 PM, in conjunction with the second Saturday Art Crawl.

Calvert’s prescient studio practice has been preoccupied with machine learning and image generation for the better part of a decade; her layered and glitched floral still-life paintings are only gaining more relevance as AI encroaches on every facet of modern life.  Calvert’s process begins with a dataset of 650 Dutch Golden Age still life paintings. These meticulously detailed floral works gained prominence during the Tulip mania of the 1600s, now regarded as an early financial bubble.

These images are used to train a diffusion-model AI developed in collaboration with computer science researchers Ulubek Kamilov (UW Madison), Shirin Shoushtari (Computational Imaging Group, McKelvey School, WashU) and Chad Henry (Director of Research and Innovation, Sam Fox School at WashU). This software is the subject of concurrent research for its usefulness in preventative medicine, medical imaging, and related fields.

Calvert prompts the software to generate a new image based on her custom dataset. Diffusion models interpolate noise into training data until static overtakes the sample, then reverse this process to generate a new image. Whereas the now widely available text-to-image AI platforms use datasets of billions of images (scraped from the internet without concern for the inherent biases ingested through this data, which is then kept secret under the auspices of trade secrets) Calvert’s model uses a comparatively minuscule, ethical dataset of images taken from the public domain. The generated images mimic the palette and general composition of the sample images, but uncanny deformities and glitches bely their origins.

Calvert chooses from these novel images and prints them to canvas. She then applies cut-vinyl masks, which are patterned after Cubist paintings, to the surface of the printed image. Calvert then applies oil paint over the unmasked areas in thick, gestural strokes. These painterly interventions in the ai image are a methodology for investigating the limitations of machine learning. Still-life paintings have particular resonance in Calvert’s inquiry for their art historical usage in responding to technological innovations—from the memento mori of golden age florals, to modernist fracturing of space in response to industrial alienation, to dada’s mutated figurative corollary to the ravages of WWI. In line with this tradition, Calvert’s abstract interruptions can be read as an identification with noise as evasive manouver—in an era where surveillance data is collated and weaponized against a human population by AI software, such a tactic becomes necessary. At the same time, abstraction serves as a metaphor for the reductive language of AI image classification, which reproduces the programmers' biases without fail.










TINNEY is proud to present Humors, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Dan Charbonnet and Cletus Wilcox. The exhibition will be on display from September 19 through October 31, 2026. The opening reception will be Saturday, September 19, from 6 to 9 PM.

Dan Charbonnet is a New Orleans-based artist whose interlaced paintings combine elements of fiber arts, collage, and mid-century abstraction. His most recent body of work, The Weight of Confetti, pays homage to his mother, who was a volunteer clown. To this end, he often draws his color palette from the clown paintings of Picasso, Cezanne, and other masters. Charbonnet begins his works by creating a preliminary image on raw canvas. These images vary from abstract, gestural markings, to more figurative drawings, to graphite rubbings created on various surfaces in New Orleans public spaces. The substrate (and the image) are then cut into strips, which Charbonnet paints, embroiders and then weaves into a lattice.

Cletus Wilcox is a multidisciplinary artist based in Louisville, KY. Wilcox approaches abstraction as a vehicle to express and process queer experience. His current focus is on large-scale color field paintings, made by layering layer after layer of oil paint which is suspended in transparent medium and poured in large swathes onto raw canvas. This is a high-risk process which relies as much on knowledge of paint chemistry and color theory as it does on chance. The paintings that result feel at once decadent and restrained, recalling mid-century works by Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko.

Humors implies a sense of levity, but also flux—nothing ages quicker than a joke, and nothing seems further afield than the once-scientific idea that there are four “humors” (corresponding with bodily fluids) that control our behavior. Both artists exemplify playful-yet-refined approaches to abstraction. They draw on American mid-century painting, yet are able to distance themselves from the cult-elevation of gestural painters, opting for a formalism that embraces constraint and chance without capitulating to the ego.

︎︎︎ Exhibition List








In a collaborative gallery swap, Tinney Contemporary and Whitespace Gallery are pleased to announce Volley, featuring a reciprocal group exhibition project between Nashville and Atlanta. Conceived as an exchange between two galleries and their creative communities, Volley brings together artists from each gallery’s program alongside broader regional networks in a dialogue that moves between cities, spaces, and perspectives.

Opening at Whitespace Gallery from June 13 through July 18, 2026, Volley begins the collaboration with a presentation organized by Tinney Contemporary featuring Cletus Wilcox, Dan Charbonnet, Dave Greber, Elise Thompson, Eric Sall, Esther Ruiz, Hannah Rose Dumes, Jack Kenna, Joey Slaughter, Lauren Taylor, Paloma Wall, and Sofia Belkin.

Opening at Tinney Contemporary from June 20 through July 25, 2026, Volley will feature a group exhibition organized by Whitespace Gallery, presenting artists Ashlynn Browning, Craig Dongoski, Jason Matherly, Kathryn Réfi, Sam Lasseter, Wihro Kim, and Zipporah Camille Thompson. The exhibition introduces a diverse range of Atlanta-based practices spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and interdisciplinary work.


The title,Volley, speaks to the spirit of exchange at the center of the collaboration: ideas, relationships, and artistic practices moving back and forth between Atlanta and Nashville. Rather than functioning as two independent exhibitions, the presentations operate as parallel conversations, creating unexpected resonances between artists and expanding dialogue across communities.

At a moment when independent arts ecosystems continue to evolve, Volley reflects a shared commitment between Whitespace Gallery and Tinney Contemporary to foster meaningful connections that extend beyond geography. Through this collaboration, both galleries seek to create new contexts for experiencing contemporary work while strengthening relationships between artists, audiences, and the broader cultural landscapes of the Southeast. 


June 13 — July 25, 2026


OPENING RECEPTION @ whitespace:
JUNE 13, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION @ TINNEY:
June 20, 2026

ART CRAWL RECEPTION @ TINNEY
July 11, 2026

︎︎︎ Exhibition List- Atlanta
︎︎︎ Exhibition List- Nashville












TINNEY is proud to present SPRUE, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Devin Balara and Nick Fagan. The exhibition will be on display from August 8 through September 12, 2026. The opening reception will be Saturday, August 8, from 6 to 9 PM, in conjunction with the second Saturday Art Crawl.

In fabrication, sprues are the ventricles through which material flows to reach a desired molded shape. This material solidifies, and creates a frame of sorts for the form actually being fabricated, as in the thin plastic armature that holds the individual pieces of a plastic model kit.

There is much hand wringing around problems of context these days; things are often taken out of context—we bemoan a lack of narrative framing, which allows images and words to be used for purposes other than their authors may have intended. This lack results from a hyperabundance of the other long-con, content. It’s become very hard to trace a thing back to its origin; there’s too many images, replicating and moving too fast, changing shape along the way. We might see a sprue as the congealed path of material after it has traveled from source to its destined form, a solidification of origin—wherein context becomes frame and container.

Devin Balara has of late developed a practice of visiting her local academic library in New Orleans, shopping the stacks in search of arcane symbols and forgotten diagrams, avoiding the dense text framing these runic emblems, avoiding too much context, which might deaden the mystical power of the image.
 

These abstractions then inform shapes Devin expertly crafts in metal in stained glass, and in mosaic and concrete sculpture. It’s hard not to feel the former ritual significance of these materials: to picture greco-roman mosaics, clerestory windows. The ritual subjects have been traded for abstractions, as if transmuted in some mystic and modernist iconoclasm.


Nick Fagan’s goodwill bin foraging yields afghans and doilies and halloween masks that germinate into framed textile works and tapestries. Seams emerge as linear compositional elements; sites of tension, like fault lines building tectonic stress. Some of the work evinces a violent flattening: the planar reduction of the foraged object, transmuted from 3-to-2D, demands the object be splayed open. Other objects refuse to be confined to the plane which Fagan has bound them to, transgressing the frame, reaching out across the Z-axis. Fagan’s work oscillates between delicate seamster’s patterning and a punky Dr. Frankenstein-ing that takes reappropriated granny textiles rather than body parts as source material.

SPRUE embodies a fixation on material. Immersing oneself in Balara and Fagan’s work, it’s hard not to grant the work a mystical quality. The commodity speaks, as they say, containing and relating its own material history to those that listen. The chosen materials and mediums both have their own abundant histories; the exhibition has its own ecology, a terroir of “contexts” that unravel, intertwine, and grow into something else altogether.



August 8 — September 12, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION:
August 8, 2026
6:00-9:00 PM

CLOSING RECEPTION
September 12, 2026
6:00-9:00 PM


︎︎︎ Exhibition List

















Women of Abstraction

Artists: Mary Long, Martica Griffin, Carol Mode, Sisavanh Phouthavong, Mildred Jarrett and Jeanie Gooden
September 1st - September 26th, 2019
Opening Reception: September 7, 2019 6-9 PM


Tinney Contemporary is pleased to present, “Women of Abstraction”, a group exhibition of new works by artists Mary Long, Martica Griffin, Carol Mode, Sisavanh Phouthavong, Mildred Jarrett, and Jeanie Gooden. In their latest exhibition, Tinney Contemporary aims to celebrate the complexities of abstraction. In not only its physical manifestation; but through its meaning, history, and energy, as well as, the artists who create it through their own unique lenses.

As a result of the lasting appeal of the Abstraction Movement, there is now an increased desire to uncover and recognize the women of the many periods of Abstraction throughout history. Vanguards like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler — who's groundbreaking work was largely misunderstood — have paved the way for the abstract artists of the past century. In 2019, being an abstract painter holds a highly dynamic and diverse set of meanings— especially when compared to the pioneers in the previous century. Each artist approaches material, shape, color, and space in ways that uniquely reflect their own cultivated experiences and ideas.








Street Cred

Artists: Mr. Brainwash, Seen, Blek Le Rat, Risk, and Chris Zidek
July 6 - August 23rd
Opening Reception: July 6, 2019 6-9 PM

Tinney Contemporary is thrilled to share our latest exhibition, ‘Street Cred’ featuring world-renowned street artists Blek Le Rat, Mr. Brainwash, Seen, Risk and Chris Zidek. ‘Street Cred’ is curated in collaboration with Brian Greif, co-founder of the Nashville Walls Project. Each of the artists featured began their careers through graffiti, developing their own signature styles across walls, subways, billboards --anywhere they could leave their mark. The artists featured have accreditations such as the ‘Godfather of Graffiti’ or ‘The Father of Stencil Graffiti’ and  paved the way for the largest art movement of the 20th century.

Blek Le Rat began his career in the streets of Paris in the 1980s. He is renowned as ‘The Father of Stencil Graffiti’ and has inspired countless modern street artists through his pioneering of stencil-work. He has left his mark on walls across the world and continues to work on walls both inside and outside the confines of a traditional gallery. His large stencils can be found in Nashville as well, including new work for Montgomery Bell Academy in 2018.

Mr. Brainwash uses elements of pop art and pop culture in the language of street art. His fame grew through his influence in the critically-acclaimed film “Exit Through the Gift Shop” in which Mr. Brainwash captures the street art movement alongside Banksy and others. His work has continued to attract the attention of critics, celebrities, and art fans alike with appearances in film, music and the art world.

Seen, or Richard Mirando, began his career on the East Coast when street art was still in its infancy. Infiltrating NYC subways in the 1970s, Seen’s use of bold colors quickly stood out through his push beyond tags with imagery of comic book superheroes. This skyrocketed his work to fame in the 1980s. Seen began to show across the United States through solo shows and group exhibitions with artists such as Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Kelly Risk Graval is widely revered as ‘The Godfather of West Coast Graffiti.’ Risk’s graffiti tag is reflective of his painting style. He is known as the first artist to set the benchmark for ‘Going to the Heavens’ or painting highly dangerous yet extremely visible spots such as overpasses or billboards. Risk has exhibited in major museums including LA MoMa, California Museum of Art, and numerous galleries across Toronto, Paris, and New York. Multi-dimensionally inclined, Risk has collaborated with Aerosmith, Michael Jackson, and the Rolling Stones.

Chris Zidek is a Nashville based street artist, whose work uses complex geometric forms to reference a history of pattern throughout human history. His recognizable murals can be found around Nashville in Midtown and the Gulch.














Jane Braddock | Ashes to Snow

May 4 - June 29
Opening Reception: May 4, 6-9 PM
Artist Discussion: May 4, 3-4 PM

Tinney Contemporary is proud to present new work by Jane Braddock. Her abstract paintings, based on a grid format, explore pattern and color. She considers these to be fundamental expressions of light. Like light, their juxtaposition creates vibration or energy, which is one of the original expressions of creation itself. Many of her current pieces include text culled from various sources spanning over 1000 years. These range from Du Fu, an ancient Chinese poet, to Muktananda, an esteemed holy man, to John Prine, singer songwriter. These in one way or another reflect her spiritual journey, which she considers the essence of her life and work.

Braddock has a BFA from Syracuse University. After a stint of 16 years in NY designing and coloring fabrics for the decorative trade, she moved to Nashville to pursue a full time career as a painter. Though she has traveled widely, the places and cultures that have most informed her work are Asian- from India to Japan.

“I am getting older. I am softer. I am moving inside the walls of my studio and pushing out the walls of my consciousness. I am comfortable with quiet and what is still. I have never been more home. These works reflect this time of my life.

My ongoing themes remain- color, pattern, process, text, and the omnipresent grid. Because all my work is square even when the grid slips off the canvas its presence is felt.

The energy of these pieces, in spite of some bold color, is introspective and the effect suggests space. Open space. Open except for beauty. Only beauty remains. I follow. Ashes to Snow.“

–Jane Braddock











Jason Craighead | Invisible Audience

Tinney Contemporary is pleased to present Invisible Audience, new work by Jason Craighead, on display March 16 through April 27, 2019.

This body of work is the first that Craighead has painted in his new Brooklyn studio. This is significant, as the recent transition from his long-time studio in Raleigh, NC, to this new studio in the robust, artistic community of Williamsburg led Craighead to think about where he would be doing his work from this point forward, and if the audience would change along with his altered physical location.

As a painter, Craighead asks who is it that we paint for each day? What “place” does it come from? What “place” does it eventually land? The simple answer for him is himself, but not in an artistically egotistical sense. The audience that drives his work each day is a mirror of sorts– a reflection of how he aligns himself to the world, moment by moment. He addresses what he gives power to, what he lets go of, what he sees in himself within, and far beyond the walls of his studio, just as each of us draws the pathway of our own lives by following in the simplest sense what we believe being human is really all about. The audience for an artist, then, is truly invisible as it is all things; it is the vastness of the human condition and all of its elements played out daily throughout generations of art and artists. Craighead believes his greatest artistic achievement would be for the viewer to be able to find his or her own reflection, or “invisible audience” within his work, whether it’s today or one hundred years from now. He addresses the powerful, timelessness of the thread of emotion that is shared by all of us.

Jason Craighead’s work is, at its core, a continuation of the artist’s exploration of the human condition, both personal and collective. Craighead’s work encompasses his recent experiences, preoccupations, and raw emotions. Our modern lives are entangled in a complicated world that is joyful, tragic, confusing, dark, wild, and brilliant. This is an experience to be shared; it is yours, mine, and ours.

Most everything starts on the studio floor to allow for what the artist refers to as “proper seasoning”, meaning while working on pieces that are on the wall, he is walking, dripping, spilling on the canvases and paper in the floor. Jason says this process, “allows for accident and mishap to become a natural collaborator” and, “is, in itself, evidence of process, of action…of me”. When a piece moves to the wall it is then shaped and formed with layers of drawing and painting until the pieces fall into a striking composition of gravity and space. The artist’s work echoes the well-known words of Edward Hopper, “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint”. When prompted for significance and inspiration, Craighead is known to provide literary references, various lyrics from songs and snippets of poetry to communicate what feeds his creative process. The effect of his work envelopes the viewer, inciting emotional reaction and engagement with his narrative.

Represented by Cheryl Hazan Gallery in NYC and Tinney Contemporary in Nashville, TN, Craighead is developing a strong collector base, both nationally and internationally. Craighead recently had his first major solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, NC in July 2018.











Carla Ciuffo | Portals

January 19, 2019 - March 9, 2019
Opening Reception: February 2, 6-9 PM
Second Reception: March 2, 6-9 PM


Tinney Contemporary is pleased to present Portals, a continuation of Carla Ciuffo’s exploration of integrating two dimensional artwork with moving video art and augmented reality. An exploration of alternative modes of artwork, Portals moves beyond the physical space of the gallery. Two dimensional art will become a gateway to view hidden stories. Changing the perception of space, augmented reality will release motion and energy that invites a different way of thinking about the virtual world and what a modern gallery might be. A selection of Ciuffo's animated short films will play in the back gallery, The Human Kind, with music by Tim Langford, MUSE, a collaboration with poet Avijeet Rabindranath Das and A Magic Lantern, honoring one of the original mediums of moving art.

Carla’s work lies somewhere between illustrative narrative, photography, and collage. Imagery is stripped down to its most basic elements, light and texture. Forever analyzing the enigma of being human, she continuously constructs and deconstructs the boundaries of her photographic world.