Being Be

Artist Omari Booker paints a portrait of life on the streets at Elephant Gallery

Nashville’s Bordeaux neighborhood is home to a historic Black community and is named after the famous French wine region. In 2021, the neighborhood’s unique architecture was touted by a local interiors magazine, and in 2025 there’s a 30-acre, 300-plus homes project in the works for its rolling green hills in northwest Nashville. Local artist Omari Booker and his partner Tara moved to the neighborhood a few years ago, just in time to witness the encroaching wave of development and to see the human toll of Nashville’s lack of affordable housing and meet a man living on the streets.

“My partner Tara introduced me to him,” explains Booker. “She drove by him and snapped a photo once before she got out of the car. When she got home she told me, ‘I saw this guy. You’re gonna wanna paint him.’ We’ve been together for so long she has a good idea of the subjects I’m drawn to. A few days later she went up and introduced herself and met him, and I met him probably a couple days after that. I painted the one painting with no intention of it being a series. And then I kept seeing other paintings of him that I wanted to make.”

Booker’s new exhibition, Be, at Elephant Gallery in North Nashville, is an art show built around a single subject: a man named “B” who spends his days in the Bordeaux neighborhood where he sleeps beneath a pavilion located on church property.

“So he’s outside and I see him every time I drive by,” explains Booker. “That sort of fed this really deep interest. Then once I got to know him, it was over the top. He’s such an interesting spiritual person. He lives under the church pavilion. He just lays down there and sleeps at night. He’s got a pretty good relationship with the church. He keeps the place pretty tidy. He just has a section of carpet and he sleeps right there when it’s 15 degrees outside. When it’s a hundred degrees. When the tornado came through North Nashville he was out there, literally outside. He just exists in that space.”

Booker pictures B in painted portraits like “Be on Steps,” which shows B sitting on some of the church steps in front of the barn-red pavilion where he shelters at night. B’s hair is a tangle of black braids above his lightly closed eyes and beatific smile. Another painting, “God,” pictures B standing on the steps, flashing that same smile. He’s holding his fingers in an improvised mudra and his head is haloed by a golden sun floating in a pale blue winter sky. The effect is iconic.

“I’ve asked him if he considered himself unhoused or felt like he was,” says Booker. “He said, ‘No, that’s my home right there [the church pavilion]. I’ve got it. That’s mine. That’s my home.’ So I’ve been really intentional about not labeling him. He lives one day at a time on what he has at the moment. And what he doesn’t have at the moment, he doesn’t give a lot of energy to. I would say presence is his thing. He’s pretty much right where he is, and so his conversation is never about what’s going on in the world. It’s pretty much hyper-local, focused on this block where he is.”

In addition to his portraits of his neighbor, Booker also paints B’s stomping grounds around the church, picturing the neighborhood through the eyes of his new friend. In “The Food,” Booker paints a stretch of Clarksville Pike, picturing a Sonic, a Waffle House and a KFC franchise all frequented by B. The restaurants’ architectural profiles, signage and color schemes are unmistakable, but Booker omitted any words on the signs or facades, creating the effect of familiar spaces seen through repetition rather than detailed observation. The scene is both familiar and undistinguished, a nowhere you can find everywhere in suburbs across the country. Among the show’s most striking pieces is “Roma’s” — a portrait of B that Booker painted on a Roma Pizza & Pasta pizza box.

“There’s been some major development lately right there in Bordeaux,” explains Booker. “I’ve talked to him a little bit about it and he kind of pays attention to the stuff that’s popping up around him. He never really gives a heavy opinion on it, but he sees it. He hears it.”

Nashville’s development wave has already reached into the suburbs, and B is a native Nashvillian who represents a population with nowhere affordable to live. “Guard Home” is a portrait of B assembled from 12 small paintings in pine frames — the same pale lumber used in house framing. The multimedia work incorporates swatches of the Home Guard brand polyolefin house wrap that’s a ubiquitous feature at Nashville development sites. After years of breakneck building, Nashville’s unhoused population grew by 4.1 percent since 2024. The reasons for this are as complicated as the overlapping social, economic and personal issues that converge in the stories told in these pages — and that Booker tells through his paintings of his neighbor and the Nashville he calls home.

Be runs through Oct. 25 at Elephant Gallery.