Daybreak Arts colors outside the clichés
This summer, three remarkable artists are set to bring sometimes-overlooked creative visions to the gallery experience in Downtown Nashville. As part of the curated Art Between the Avenues series, nonprofit artist collaborative Daybreak Arts will activate Gallery 64 inside the historic Arcade Arts venue, re-imagining the space as three immersive mini-galleries that promise to entertain and engage gallery-goers.
The displays amplify the creative voices of Sidney Sparkle, Blue and Bandy — three artists whose personal journeys through homelessness inform their distinctive artistic styles and stories. Daybreak Arts curated this groundbreaking show to highlight how art can become a vehicle for survival, transformation and profound human connection. The organization is dedicated to utilizing the arts to create income and connection for those who’ve experienced homelessness.
This show is the latest display in a mini-trend of local exhibitions by artists who’ve lived on Nashville’s streets, beginning with the excellent “Do You Know How Good You Are?” show by Room In The Inn artists at Julia Martin Gallery in June. It’s worth noting Daybreak artists have been creating, exhibiting and selling their work since 2015 — the organization just celebrated 11 years of collaborating and sharing art.
The artist Blue presents Lost in Transportation, a haunting visual diary born from her experiences with homelessness and her struggle for sobriety in Nashville. Armed only with a sketchbook, Blue documented the fleeting faces she encountered on city buses, at gas stations and during aimless walks through the city. Her portraits capture the raw humanity of people surviving, hoping and wandering. The Arcade display transforms these intimate, private sketches into a gallery experience that invites viewers into a world populated by resilient people, littered with glimpses of unexpected beauty.
Bandy delivers sharp social commentary with The Liminoid AI (Anthropop Incantations), an experimental multimedia exhibition that takes aim at Silicon Valley’s techno-dystopia. Through techno-whimsy and pointed critique, cyber-satire and generative art jeremiads, Bandy explores how AI has appropriated the ideas of human artists, while presenting an alternative vision that reclaims creativity from commercial commodification. The artist’s “The Root of All Evil” recalls Jasper Johns with an American Flag design that’s perfectly timed for this July. Bandy’s Old Glory is decorated with cash money: Benjamins, Grants and Jeffersons; Washington quarters and Lincoln pennies. The stripes of the flag are defined by columns of red-and-blue plastic toy soldiers along with their pint-sized tanks, helicopters and jeeps.
Sidney Sparkle’s Leave Me in the Glow of You is a vibrant and playful creative celebration inspired by Paul Reubens’ legacy. Sparkle weaves together performance art, digital art, and glow art to create the Sidney-a-Glow-Go — an invitation to party and be grateful for the magic of spontaneous creativity. Sparkle’s work is fun and off-kilter, reveling in the thrill of mixing found, random objects and materials into surprising forms, crazy characters and creative costumes.
What makes these three shows stand-out is that they’re not specifically about homelessness and poverty. Blue’s art is as fun as it is formalist, and Sparkle’s pop-art-inspired props and costumed selfies could fit on the walls of any contemporary venue. Bandy’s work has already appeared at top Nashville galleries like Zeitgeist, and this multimedia interrogation of AI art is more arch and conceptual — in the best way — than autobiographical.
Work about homelessness made by artists who’ve experienced it has a way of moving someone. Nashville’s visual art scene has become a place where those same artists feel free to make whatever they want, without stigma or the strictures of categorization, thanks in part to projects like Daybreak Arts, Room In The Inn, Julia Martin Gallery and Arcade Arts. We all benefit from the showing of this work.
These exhibitions opened during Nashville’s Second Saturday Art Crawl on July 12. They continue Fridays and Saturdays from 1–6 p.m. through July 26.