Three Spring Exhibitions and Events Focused on Marginalized Communities
In Nashville this spring, galleries and gatherings, artists and organizations are using spaces to explore issues of housing insecurity, racial and gender identity, and the enduring impact of marginalization on communities.
Below we explore three upcoming events and ongoing shows and their bodies of work. From the community-centered celebration of artists rebuilding their lives through Daybreak Arts, to the incisive, socially conscious legacy of Barbara Bullock at the Frist Art Museum, to Tamara Reynolds’s intimate portrait of identity and belonging in Appalachia, these exhibitions and events reflect a work where the art is not just aesthetic, but urgent to all of us.
Daybreak Arts to Host Spring Gala to Celebrate Its Artists with Lived Experience
March 28 at Events at 1900
At its annual gala on March 28, nonprofit Daybreak Arts will celebrate its artists and honor their stories and creative endeavors.
This is the 12th year Daybreak has hosted the Illuminate Art Gala, and this year it will be held at Events at 1900. There will be a live jazz band, live painting exhibition, food and drink, a photobooth and silent auction. The nonprofit’s artists will also display their art and showcase all they accomplished as they navigated homelessness and housing insecurity in Nashville. Many artists will be on site so that folks can meet the artists creating the work they are supporting.
“Each piece you see [at the gala] carries a journey,” Executive Director Nicole Minyard said in a release. “It represents someone’s courage to dream, to create, and to rebuild their life through art.”
Daybreak Arts provides free studio space, training and helps artists find opportunities to sell their work. The organization says it has paid out more than $100,000 to artists experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity in Nashville since it began its work more than a dozen years ago. The gala is attempting to raise $40,000 to help expand studio offerings, workshops and build more income opportunities for artists.
Last year, artists working with Daybreak collectively sold thousands of dollars in artwork. They showed their work across the city, and regained confidence and stability.
“Art has the power to give people hope, income, and community,” Daybreak Program Engagement Director Ashley Wroten says in a release. “At the Illuminate Art Gala, we celebrate not only the beauty these artists create, but the courage it takes to keep creating against all odds.”
Frist Exhibit Features Incisive Paintings, Illustrations from Barbara Bullock
Sistah Griot: The Iconoclastic Art of Barbara Bullock. Through Apr 26, 2026 at Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery at the Frist Art Museum
Guest curator at The Frist Art Museum Carlton F. Wilkinson put together Sistah Griot: The Iconoclastic Art of Barbara Bullock as a way to showcase “the incisive and still-timely work” of Nashville-based artist Barbara Bullock, who passed away in 1996.
Wilkinson says her art influenced so many Nashville artists through her “fearless and candid disposition.”
“Her legacy is one of radical honesty, spiritual awakening, and a commitment to healing through art,” writes Wilkinson. “Many continue to see her as a griot, a West African term for an oral historian and storyteller, and her works continue to be relevant as visual representations of both personal and collective experiences.”
The exhibition is part of the Tennessee Triennial and will be on view in the Frist’s Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery adjacent to the In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century exhibit, through April 26, 2026.
Bullock, who was known for her precisely rendered graphite illustrations and boldly colored paintings, was part of the Nashville art community in the 1980s and 1990s until she passed away from cancer in 1996. Her work critiqued racism, sexism, and classism — the Frist points to such paintings as Gentrification and The Hate that Hate Produced as strong examples. “In particular, Bullock offered satirical commentary on societal norms projected onto Black women born into upper-class families,” reads a description of her work. “She often featured herself as the main character in her paintings. In one such work, titled Falling or The Yellow Room, she expressed her discomfort with her privileged early life by depicting herself falling off the stairway balcony of her teenage home.”
The exhibition Wilkinson curated features around 40 works from private collections around the country. Bullock moved to Nashville in 1969 from Buffalo, New York, and studied art at George Peabody College for Teachers, which is now part of Vanderbilt University. When she suffered a stroke at 35, she used artmaking as part of her physical recovery for hand-eye coordination. Art classes at the Watkins Institute (now Watkins College of Art at Belmont University) took her from working with detailed contour line drawings of wrestlers, street pedestrians, dancers, and performing artists to the more boldly colored paintings she is most known for. She often said she was influenced by the double vision caused by her stroke and the work of M. C. Escher, but she maintained that the “ultimate goal of her practice was to help heal the world of social inequalities.”
“Barbara looked to history and mythology for inspiration, including the story of Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis, and related her struggles with her health to the ordeals of medieval saints and martyrs,” Wilkinson writes.
Wilkinson also says Bullock found her creative home in Nashville and considered her time in the city as a creative renaissance.
“She wanted positive change, although she often felt frustrated by the lack of humanity in what she had witnessed and experienced in her lifetime,” writes Wilkinson. “She chose to engage with the structural challenges of society by rejecting the seemingly charmed life she experienced growing up. Living modestly was Barbara’s truest form of spiritual awakening.”
Tamara Reynolds’ Melungeon Explores Folks Pushed to the Margins
Through June 26, 2026 at Begonia Labs at Vanderbilt University. Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7 p.m., on Saturdays from 1-4 p.m.
An opening reception for Melungeon, a new body of work by Tamara Reynolds, will be held Wednesday, March 25, from 6-8 p.m. at Begonia Labs.
The evening will be hosted by the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, and there the public will gather with Reynolds for an introduction to the exhibition and brief talk reflecting on the project’s origins, process and personal stakes for Reynolds. A release about the exhibit calls it a “quietly revelatory portrait” of Sneedville, Tenn., which is a community that has associations with Melungeon people, who are largely made up of lineages across African, Native American and European backgrounds.
Historically treated as racially indeterminate and often viewed with suspicion, Melungeon people were pushed to the margins of Appalachian life, carving out space in the ridges and hollows of East Tennessee, according to release on the show. Reynolds takes view of their intertwined legacy: “their histories of migration, mixture, and myth emerge as a lived inheritance: layered, complex, and evolving,” says a description of the work.
Reynolds worked closely with the community (her husband’s lineage included) to develop this work and create the images. The work shows connection rather than isolation.
“At a moment when American identity fractures along imagined lines of purity, Melungeon reminds us that mixture — mélange — has long been our nation’s story,” the description reads.
Melungeon is part of Somewhere We Are Human, the Spring 2026 public programs series of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice at Vanderbilt University.