When folks write about art they’re often tasked with adding words into a space where there are none. Abstract paintings, textile designs and geometric sculptural shapes express themselves through color and texture and implied movement in a way that, in large part, supersedes storytelling.
When we see recognizable representations of figures and forms — people, animals, plants, architecture — we often automatically make up stories about what we discern, whether those tales have any connection to the artist’s intentions or not. But sometimes artists weave explicit narratives into a body of work, and understanding the story behind the images can be the key to unlocking their meanings. Omari Booker’s Fifteen at Elephant Gallery in North Nashville is unique because the whole exhibition features portraits of actual Nashvillians, and tells a true story of family, community and personal resilience.
At 6 feet 9 inches tall, Booker is the first person you see at local art gallery receptions. The Nashville native grew up playing sports like tennis and basketball, but was also moved by the “magical” experiences he had as a kid seeing art in museums and galleries. Booker’s creative awakening began with an art class his senior year at Montgomery Bell Academy. He was offered a basketball scholarship to Belmont University where he started his freshman year as a math major. However, after taking several creative courses as electives during three years at Belmont, Booker transferred to Middle Tennessee State University and changed his major to art. It was during his incarceration for cocaine possession that art became a daily practice, a lifeline to a creative career and the new start the exhibition celebrates.
“The drug possession was in 2008. That arrest led to a 15-year prison sentence doing three and a half on the inside, and then completing the arrest on parole,” Booker said. “My parole actually finishes April 11. About a year and a half or two years ago, I realized that I was gonna be off parole. I didn’t really consider the time ending because it was so long. I was in my late twenties when I got arrested. I saw 42 as my age when the sentence was over — 42! It seemed like a million years. It’s like, when you’re 29, you’ll never be 40. Seeing that that time was coming, and the impact that art has had in my life, it sort of struck me to mark the completion of the sentence with the show.”
Fifteen pairs works completed in the last few years with pieces Booker made in his cell at the now-closed Charles Bass Correctional Complex in South Nashville. The exhibition even includes a poem written to a small bird that Booker would meet at his window every morning:
This Black Bird by Omari Booker
This black bird lands on my window
The same bird every morning
I guess it’s the same
All I’ve seen is its shadow
But it says hello every day, every morning
I fly away with my little black friend
Every day, every morning
My mind on its back
Free on its wings
Though I only see it through bars
We meet at the screen
It visits me every morning, every day
It brings me hope
It feeds my dreams
They’re only bars, they’re only screens
It’s only tears, it’s only screams
And to be born, we need these things
So for now, I guess I’m free
My little black friend
It visits me
Every morning, every day
Written in Charles Bass Correctional Complex, 2012
Fifteen is a multimedia display that reflects Booker’s facility for matching varied materials and techniques to his subjects. The exhibition feels like a piece — it’s tied together in its explorations of portraiture and its focus on the community that supported Booker through the challenges of the last decade and a half.
“A lot of the show is about the impact of my incarceration on the people that I love and care about,” Booker said. “I’m represented, but it’s mostly about the people that kind of ushered me through the journey.”
Fifteen consists of nearly 40 works on canvas, paper and even the various remnants of materials Booker had to scrounge together during his time as an artist behind bars.
“Some stuff was made with, like, a grease pencil, like from the kitchen when we were writing the weekly menu on a grease board,” explains Booker. “And then you would find charcoal pencils. And you’d get some paint, because some people had been in since the 1980s and 1990s and there used to be more educational programming in prisons. So there’d be like some leftover paint from way back and, you know, sometimes you could get a little bit of that.”
Two works in the show portray Booker with his partner. In “Valentine, 2012” Booker has his arms over her shoulders while she looks up lovingly at his smiling face. It’s a grease pencil drawing on a piece of material cut from a prison kitchen apron and stretched across a piece of corrugated cardboard — the “stripes” of the cardboard fluting create a distinctive, unmistakable design on the surface of the work.
“Valentine, 2012” hangs in Elephant’s long gallery corridor along with a host of smaller works, including framed paintings and drawings made with pencil, ink and coffee on the travel permit forms that Booker had to fill out any time he left Davidson County during more than a decade on parole.
“Hope, 2023” pictures the pair on a large colorful canvas that’s hanging in the main gallery along with a number of other large works on canvas. Viewers will recognize the young woman in the painting as the same one in the drawing, but Booker paints himself with his skin and face and hair replaced by a bouquet of blossoming flowers. It’s a motif he repeats in a number of the works in Fifteen and they’re the formal highlight of the show.
“I was thinking about growth,” says Booker “There was sort of like the idea of these people who poured into me so I kind of grew. That’s why I’m represented in flowers. So, growth and also death and absence, because being incarcerated there’s so many ways that you’re absent from the whole world.”
Elephant’s main gallery features an interesting bit of design layout, which includes a large canvas self portrait Booker painted from a photograph taken of him in his former jail cell. It bookends the display along with another self portrait of Booker relaxing in a chair in his studio in his condominium in Bellevue in 2023. Nowadays, Booker’s non-stop art hustle finds him filling his calendar with gallery shows, commissions, festivals, benefits, murals and creative community projects. He’s also expanded his practice to Los Angeles where he has a studio space and he’s building a network on the West Coast.
In addition to his poem and some other didactic information, the exhibition’s wall text also includes a quote from Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl whose book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is inspired by Frankl’s experiences in a concentration camp during World War II.
The quote reads: “I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”
You can see the book on a shelf in Booker’s prison cell self portrait.
“For as unjust as the system is in a lot of ways, it’s like anything else that’s unjust if you come out of it. Victor Frankl doesn’t write the book without the Holocaust, you know?” says Booker. “That doesn’t make the thing good. It’s just when humans are put in pressure cookers you kind of go one way or another. A lot of why I was able to come out on this side is the support system and the people that have been around.”
Fifteen runs through May 20 at Elephant Gallery