“Nashville: A Pandemic Observed” – Art Exhibit

Illustrating their divergent perspectives and practices, four photographers from Nashville, Tennessee, USA, each with a solid foundation in newspapers, have prepared a pandemic-era exhibit at the Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville. The work is also slated to be added to Vanderbilt University’s permanent fine art collection. The project is as much a study of photographic styles as a record of the pandemic.

Exhibit Dates: July 1–September 30, 2021
Gallery Hours: Mon.–Fri., 9am–4pm; Sun., 3pm–8pm
Artists’ Reception: July 15, 4:30pm–6:30pm
Cost: free and open to the public
Parking: complimentary, Lots A & B (campus map)
Purchase art: click here

Per CDC guidelines, Scarritt Bennett Center requires all who visit our campus, regardless of vaccination status, to wear a mask while indoors.

About the Artists
Joon Powell wields both a digital SLR and a 4 x 5 film camera to show her family’s isolation during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing from the tradition of Emmet Gowin or Sally Mann, Powell documents her family often using a series of diptychs to deepen the images’ meaning.

Bill Steber documents blues music and the American south using antiquated photographic processes. A tenured portraitist, Steber’s work is informed by a lifetime of visual storytelling paired with an extensive knowledge of music and the history of photography. The specific pandemic portraits created for this exhibit utilize a wet plate process, which gives the images a haunting timeless quality.

Veteran newspaper photographer and photography instructor, John Partipilo encapsulates Nashville’s diverse population with the observant and patient eye of a painter. His photographs of Nashvillians as they experience isolation, protest, sickness, and more, lay bare the experience of many southern Americans at this unique historical moment.

Dawn Majors’ photos are a quiet exploration of the intersection of nature and humanity’s odd creations, with a gentle affirmation of her own identity. At once painterly and specific, macabre and whimsical, Majors’ full-on embrace of her cellphone as a tool shows a jaunty appreciation for pedestrian discoveries with an escapist appeal.

For questions about this exhibit, please contact Sue Bock at [email protected].

Listen to an interview with the artists: