How Good?

Nashville artists struggling with housing know what’s good at Julia Martin Gallery

During Delia Seigenthaler’s decades-long career as an artist and educator, she’s built a reputation as a multimedia magpie with a feel for materials and an eye for the visual surprises afforded by unexpected combinations of elements and objects. Working fluidly between 2D and 3D media, she approaches art-making like an archaeologist of the everyday, assembling personal narratives from found objects and fragments that others might discard. Her puppets and doll-like sculptures are unsettling, but in her collage works similar characters take on the look of colorful cartoons. Her process is intuitive — compulsive collecting followed by assembling sculptures over time. It’s a process that can look more like excavation than creation.

Since retiring from her post as a beloved art teacher at University School of Nashville, Delia Seigenthaler has scratched the teaching itch by bringing her love of intuitive art-making to unhoused Nashville artists as the leader of Room In The Inn’s arts program. Room In The Inn’s welcoming downtown campus includes a spacious art room with lots of natural light, courtesy of an enviable window view of downtown. That’s where Seigenthaler led, encouraged and coaxed her students through their creation of the work in “Do You Know How Good You Are?”

Seigenthaler calls herself a “closet artist,” and there’s something pleasantly contradictory about that admission given that her latest curatorial project is putting less represented artists under a spotlight at Julia Martin Gallery. The one-time residential home is the perfect place for a show about struggling with affordable shelter, and the popular spot hosted a packed house in the Wedgewood-Houston arts district during the exhibition’s First Saturday opening. The exhibition includes a variety of paintings, sculptures and collages that tell the artists’ own personal stories in visual expressions of pain, joy, sorrow and hope.

“Do You Know How Good You Are” includes an impressively detailed model of a greenhouse flower shop (“The Little Flower Shop”). It’s really delightful — traditionally feminine and pretty, and bursting with colorful, fantastically over-sized blossoms. It’s by an artist named Ray McMinnis, and a selection of paintings he created for the show are even more intriguing. McMinnis puts pastels to paper and acrylics to canvas to evoke stylized landscapes with dramatic light and vibrant, unreal color palettes. “Magic Hour” is an electric mustard sunset in a magenta sky. Long black shadows retreat from the treeline, and a mountain range is gilded in last light. A comparatively still and muted scene of a cypress tree in a courtyard (“Cypress Tree”) is made almost as dramatic as “Magic Hour” with McMinnis crowding his feathery green branches across the paper, their ends extending past the edges.

A self-portrait by Joe Spence is detailed with glowing yellows, whites, reds and turquoise set against black. The effect is like a DIY black velvet painting made with just pastels on paper. “Joe’s Self Portrait 1” is one of the most stylized in a show full of style, and it makes a good complement to one of Do You Know’s most memorable works.

Kenyatta Jones’ “Man with the Blue Bow Tie” is a small collage on paper. It pictures the dapper title figure standing in a blue-green room. There’s a fireplace mantle behind the man and there are paintings hanging on the wall in the background. Above the man’s crisp collar cinched with the cool-colored bowtie, his head looks like it’s completely wrapped in bandages. The scene is surreal and unsettling. Has there been a tragic accident? Does the Invisible Man have a new reality show? It’s no surprise that both “The Man with the Blue Bow Tie” and “Joe’s Self Portrait 1” have both sold to collectors. All of the sales from the exhibition benefit Room in the Inn, giving these artists an opportunity to support their creative practices while they build their audiences, just like any other artists finding a way to make a home while making art in Nashville.

One of the most inventive works in the show combines painting and collage in a unique combination of found object art and brushwork. Lanzell Drew’s “Irving Berlin” is a record sleeve of the album “The Best of Irving Berlin” by Reg Owen and his Orchestra. The original LP was released in 1957 and the cover art is emblematic of the period: all 30 tracks are listed at the top of the cover alongside the famous RCA Victor puppy dog logo; the background is a marbled beige; Berlin is pictured in a bronze-colored jacket, a white shirt and a black tie — the image looks like a colored photograph combined with illustration. Drew uses acrylics to paint over the portrait, leaving the rest of the album cover as-is. The result flattens out the portrait and turns Berlin’s bemused expression into the inscrutable gaze of something like a mime with a lounge gig. It’s weird and funny, and it’s a cool combination of elements for an art gallery in Music City. I hope to see more.

Room In The Inn’s founder Charles Strobel’s philosophy was that everyone is worthy of love and remembrance. Strobel was a native Nashvillian and a renowned nationwide advocate for the disenfranchised. He passed away at the age of 80 in 2023. Strobel believed that — along with food, shelter, warmth, and human connection — creative expression is a fundamental part of the human experience. The phrase “Do you know how good you are?” is one of the mottos you’ll hear a lot about at Room In The Inn. It’s a question Strobel would ask the men and women he served, friends, family and others he ran into around town, and you can buy the words emblazoned on stickers, hats and T-shirts at Room In The Inn’s website.

In the context of an art exhibition, the question reads “Do you know how talented you are?” And Seigenthaler — the program leader and the curator — sees the display as a showcase for our too-often overlooked neighbors and fellow artists. It’s an exhibition that gives Nashvillians — and Nashville’s art scene — a reason to look: To look at these fantastic objects, and at the unique, resilient, complex creative people who made them.