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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ARTISTS




EXHIBITIONS


UPCOMING:
 

Joey Slaughter | Hatchback Tetris

Lovie Olivia | Solo Exhibition

Wendy Walker Silverman | Solo Exhibition

RECENT:

 
Benjy Russell | DARK BIG BANG

Sky Kim | Cosmic Downloads

Group Exhibition curated by Kimia Ferdowsi Kline | Fount 

Eric Sall | Orange You Glad I Didn’t Say Banana?

   
MORE...
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Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Serious Fun, a solo exhibition by Martica Griffin. The show runs from Saturday, July 12 through August 16, 2025. The opening reception will be on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 2 to 9 pm. The exhibition will take place as a part of the second annual Art Between the Avenues event, in space 61 on the second floor of the Arcade.

Martica Griffin’s latest exhibition features mixed media collage works that mark a departure from her usual painting practice. This body of work emerged from a Shakerag workshop, led by local artist Jodi Hays, which reinvigorated Griffin’s long term love-affair with collage. Bringing in found materials, these dimensional assemblages build upon her patchwork style. The commonplace objects employed in their making provide artistic constraints as well as imbuing the work with a sense of immediacy. Dyed and folded paper, corrugated cardboard, and faded printed material create vibrant, textured geometric compositions that convey the playful process of their making.

Nashville, Tennessee-based artist Martica Griffin uses energetic lines, organic structures, geometric forms and sensual colors to create her works. She primarily works in abstraction on canvas and paper using a wide variety of mediums including acrylic, oil, collage, plaster and crayon. Her work is characterized by layers of color, lines of gesture and a combination of natural and architectural shapes. Her visual language reflects landscape, popular culture, and history.

A native of Valdosta, Georgia, Griffin graduated from East Carolina University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. She has done post-graduate work at the School for Visual Arts in New York and studied with internationally acclaimed painters. Her work resides in various public and private collections.

︎︎︎ View exhibition list


















Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Let’s Go Swimming, a summertime group exhibition, blending the extraordinary talents of Sophia Belkin, Megan Greene, Esther Ruiz, Elise Thompson, and Yanira Vissepó. The show runs from Saturday, July 5 through August 16, 2025. The opening reception will be on Saturday, July 12, 2025 from 2 to 9 p.

It’s as if the long, hot summer of the southern gothics somehow manifests its own antidote, an oasis as reprieve from the heat. Picture the swimming hole of your youth. Barefoot, clambering up worn roots of the bur oaks on the banks, carefully avoiding shattered Miller bottles and cigarette butts, up to the highest ledge. A place of inversion: the surface mirrors the sky, the branches overhead—suddenly, the illusion is shattered by the front-flip bravado of high divers, the occasional riotous bellyflop. Weightless in free-fall, violently breaking the surface, weightless again in the brisk water. Breathless, nose plugged, cheeks puffed, peering up at the surface from among the reeds. Nowhere else can hold this commingling of sanctuary and transgression—bildungsroman baptismal, the smell of dark and damp earth, dirt-weed psychedelia. Hallucinatory sun-poisoning, cool mud and water remedy—everything shimmering in heat waves, ultraviolet and super-saturated.

The works in the exhibition investigate organic forms and imagined environments through various modes of abstraction. Pools and plants, waves and wells, stones and splashes are revealed through each artists’ expressive mark-making, acute attention to detail, and innovative use of materials. Collectively, the works accomplish a sort of thaumaturgy, evoking an impossible landscape, a mirage that doesn’t dissipate as you draw closer.


︎︎︎View available works
︎︎︎Download exhibition booklet














Tinney Contemporary is proud to present DARK BIG BANG, a solo exhibition by Benjy Russell. The exhibition will be on display from May 17, 2025 through June 28, 2025. The opening reception will be held on May 17 from 5 to 9 PM. A second reception will be held on June 14  in conjunction with the DADA (Downtown Arts District Alliance)  Second Saturday Art Crawl.





DARK BIG BANG draws its title from the leading quantum theory on the origin of dark matter in the universe: a separate, second big bang that unleashed all the unseen and immeasurable dark energy comprising the majority of the known universe. Russell draws a parallel between this cosmological phenomenon and the root traumas experienced along our own human timelines—events that affect our everyday existence, yet are often difficult to pinpoint. These moments can stem from ancestral trauma passed down generationally, childhood trauma, past experiences of death and illness, as well as moments of "root joy," which shape how we move through life.

Mapping his own intergenerational history led Russell to uncover his Choctaw family’s involvement in the devastating and genocidal Trail of Tears, ending in the artist’s home state of Oklahoma; his family’s land allotment under the liquidation of communally-held tribal lands into privately owned properties; and his grandmother and great-grandmother’s forced attendance at a Catholic Indian Boarding School near his hometown. The latter was an instrumental tool in the erasure of Indigenous culture and the loss of generational knowledge in his family—and Indigenous families across Turtle Island (a term for North and Central America used by many Indigenous peoples).

The work in DARK BIG BANG finds Russell re-contextualizing traditional Choctaw crafts such as basket weaving, pottery, beadwork, and embroidery—crafts that use natural elements to create art through pattern and repetition. Embracing these diverse materials and practices, the artist constructs three-dimensional sculptural objects and environments, which he photographs to create lens-based "drawings." Russell utilizes  in-camera effects to create lens-based works rooted in sculpture, performance, and process. His multidisciplinary practice defies neat categorization within the traditional boundaries of photography.

Russell’s varied approach and materials speak to his own complex history as a queer rural artist raised on the Chickasaw reservation, now a widower and AIDS survivor. This Venn diagram of identities and histories is mirrored in geometric goddess figures constructed from lighting gels commonly used in gay bars and nightlife culture; multi-panel pieces featuring his HIV medication photographed on velvet, reading more like embroidery than photography; kaleidoscopic sets made of mirrors and roses whose logistics are impossible to discern; and blocks of bulletproof acrylic floating in space.

DARK BIG BANG is both a meditation on trauma and a celebration of the joy that can arise from our shared human experience. Through this innovative body of work, Benjy Russell invites viewers to embark on a journey of reflection, healing, and hope—a journey from darkness into a reimagined future.


︎︎︎ View online exhibition list
︎︎︎Download exhibition catalog + editions list
 ︎︎︎ View artist cv















Tinney Contemporary is proud to present Cosmic Downloads, a solo exhibition by Sky Kim. The exhibition will be on display from April 5, 2025 through May 10, 2025. The opening reception will be held on April 12 from 2-9 PM in conjunction with the DADA (Downtown Arts District Alliance) Second Saturday

Sky Kim examines the relation between the cosmic and microscopic using water-based paint and crystals. Her work is central to a larger practice of meditation, informed by sacred geometry, astronomy, and quantum physics. Anemones and coral flowers, molecular and interstellar forms all bloom in transfixing mandalas of vibrant watercolor and Swarovski crystals.

Cosmic Downloads speaks to an attunement with the universe and an awareness of our place within it. The imperceptibly small is mirrored in the unimaginably large. Cosmic Downloads revels in this symmetry and locates the observer at the center.

Born in Seoul, Korea and she received a M.F.A in Painting from Pratt Institute. She is a recipient of the National Korean Art Competition Awards, a Pratt Institute Art Grant and Jersey City Art Council Fellowship. She has exhibited and participated in art fairs in major venues around the world, including the US, Denmark, UK, Mexico, Germany, Canada, and Australia and has been lecturing as a guest artist, panel and keynote speaker at universities and art conferences. Her work has received international critical acclaim in Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street International, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Juxtapoz Magazine, The Korea Herald, Artlog and The Korea Daily, Artefuse and Arts Observer, and on WMBC-TV.  

    ︎︎︎View exhibition list    
    ︎︎︎View artist page










Tinney Contemporary is pleased to announce Fount, a group exhibition showcasing the works of Tyler Rene Angelo, Lindsy Davis, Hannah Rose Dumes, and Sabra Moon Elliot.

Fount signifies a source or origin—a wellspring of creativity where ideas and materials converge. The featured artists explore abstraction with a spirit of openness and improvisation, embracing play and spontaneity. Organic forms and vibrant colors interact dynamically, guided by intuition. Underlying this exploration is a subtle yet persistent reference to the body—through form, gesture, or materiality. Some works evoke the figure explicitly, while others suggest corporeality through fluidity, texture, or the physicality of their making.

The exhibition unfolds as a call-and-response, where each mark, form, or gesture acts as a point of connection within a larger creative system. Like a river branching in response to its terrain, the artworks shift and evolve based on artistic impulses, mediums, and constraints.

Despite differences in form, Fount alludes to a common creative source—an ongoing process where materials and ideas flow, merge, and generate new visual languages. This generative movement echoes the body’s own capacity for transformation, adaptation, and expression.




Tyler Rene Angelo’s pieces blend refined craftsmanship with experimental techniques, resulting in works that bridge the gap between abstraction and functionality. Angelo’s practice challenges traditional expectations of art-making, transforming materials into artifacts of innovation.

Lindsy Davis delves into the tactility of her chosen mediums, layering textures and forms in a way that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Her work is a response to modern domesticity, highlighting the physicality of the creative process, making the material itself a central narrative.

Hannah Rose Dumes employs bold compositions and whimsical color palettes that evoke a sense of movement and spontaneity. Her works invite the viewer to engage with abstraction as a playful and exploratory process.

Sabra Moon Elliot is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with the relationships between structure, color, and larger cultural and social phenomenon. Working across sculpture, installation, paintings, and ceramics, she is inspired by the inherent structures and form found in nature as well as outsider American quilt-making traditions.


︎︎︎View online exhibition list







Kimia Ferdowsi Kline earned an M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a B.F.A. in painting from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded a full-tuition Danforth Scholarship.

She has mounted solo exhibitions at Turn Gallery (New York), Marrow Gallery (San Francisco), The Elaine L. Jacobs Gallery at Wayne State University (Detroit) and 68 Projects (Berlin). Select group shows include Ceysson & Bénétière, The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, CANADA Gallery, Vanderbilt University, and The Drawing Center.In 2015 she was awarded a grant and residency through the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2018 she was honored to be nominated for a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Most recently, she is thrilled to be working on a monograph with Radius Books.

Guest lectures and teaching include Yale University, Vanderbilt University, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, SUNY Purchase, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Brooklyn College, Wayne State University, and Chautauqua Institute.

As a freelance curator, she consults for various private collectors and corporations.

Select press includes, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Cultured Magazine, New American Paintings, Architectural Digest, The Harvard Advocate, Departures Magazine, & Travel + Leisure.

She splits her time between Nashville and New York.