In my consistent effort to bring you timely updates on Nashville’s outdoor art scene, I bring you this mural by Jack Coyle that went up in late December 2020. Ok, so not that timely but I try! The Capital City Computers building is something of a mini-art gallery. Besides this Coyle piece found on the back wall, there are two other murals. On the north wall, there is a mural of colorful, wavy lines by the artist who goes by Sterbo. That mural appeared at the same time this Coyle piece did. The south wall has long hosted what I call the Young Warlords mural, a portrait of Bill G ..read more

Because I took a break from the blog for a while, I’ve missed some new art. But I also have a back catalog, if you will, of older art that still needs to make it to the blog. And the double mural at the Commodore Grille is an important work I should have put on the blog a long time ago. What makes this work important is its location, for the Commodore Grille sits in the Holiday Inn building on West End. This makes the murals at the Commodore Grille some of the very first murals on a building owned by a national chain in Nashville. Depending on how you define “major,” it might also qualify for ..read more

Back last summer, in June, a bright, vibrant mural appeared on the side of The Local Distro in Salemtown, facing onto their outdoor dining area. It was the product of many hands, a true community mural put together by a number of artists, nonprofits, and the children of the neighborhood. (According to the Tennessean, many came from the nearby Chetham Place housing community.) (I have been having technical trouble with featured photos. If you don’t see the full mural at the top of the post, scroll down to the bottom.) Leading the project was the artist Omari Booker, who just happens to be a gra ..read more

If you’re standing on the west side of the upper decks of Topgolf and look off to your right, you might see a train, because there’s a track down there. Indeed, if there wasn’t a net to catch golfballs, you could hit a passing train. Look across the street, and you’re guaranteed to see a train – well, a mural of one, anyway. (I have been having some issues with featured photos. If you don’t see a photo at the top of this post, scroll down to the bottom to see the full mural.) This mural of a fanciful Shiner Bock Train hauling a giant can and an even larger bottle of the brew went up in early S ..read more

I had already planned to write my next blog post about this giant mural at One Drop Ink when the Tennessean decided to feature one of the artists who created it, Elisheba Israel Mrozik, earlier this week. That was of course about yet another mural she’s produced (along with the help of a number of young artists) – I need to post more to keep up! (I have been having some trouble with featured photos. If you don’t see a photo at the top of the blog post, scroll to the bottom where I repeat it.) Mrozik is the owner and an artist at One Drop Ink, and this particular piece is a collaboration with a ..read more

One casualty of the pandemic is that I don’t spend as much time driving around town as I did before, and so I didn’t discover this mural from February 2020, created at the tail end of the “before times,” until quite recently. That it’s somewhat hidden away in a less-trafficked part of Germantown didn’t help, but in a recent drive around the neighborhood, it’s one of a few new works of art I found there that have appeared during the months of the pandemic. This particular mural is a production by the Murfreesboro artists Travis and Alicia Maynard, who work under the moniker Murfreesb ..read more

After Madison Mill closed its factory off Charlotte Avenue and moved to Ashville, NC in 2015, the dilapidated campus of buildings it left behind remained empty for several years. With its abundant walls and concealed spaces, it became a favorite target for graffiti taggers. In 2016, Stonehenge Realty Group proposed turning it into a mixed-use project with retail and 400 apartments, but this stalled after significant objection from residents of the Sylvan Park neighborhood, where the old factory is located. The following year, Stonehenge proposed a new project to be called The Millworks on Cha ..read more

I call this the Big Grey Bird because I own a copy of Birds of Tennesee and this screaming bird at Elegy Coffee doesn’t seem to quite fit with any of them. Maybe it’s a bird from somewhere else and maybe it’s a bird from the mind of the artist. To me, it looks a lot like a small parrot, but parrots generally have hooked beaks. But it doesn’t really matter, it’s still a great mural. It’s the work of Nashville artist Brian Wooden. You may have seen some of his images of headless, sharp-dressed men around town, but he works in many styles, including a wild, cartoony style found on a mural f ..read more

Back in April, 2019, I thought I had completed a series on the fourteen (and only fourteen) murals of the Off the Wall project. Well, while there was a hiatus in new murals for about a year, Tinsley Dempsey, the person behind this large outdoor gallery, has since managed to get more walls for the project, more artists, and apparently more funding. Three new murals have appeared since the end of what I will now call the first phase of the project, including one by Nino C. Flores that went in at the end of 2020 and and one from Tarabella Aversa that went in the previous April. Dempsey has ..read more

This is the sixth and last in the series I’ve been doing covering the murals in the dog park in The Gulch. In the summer of 2019, MarketStreet Enterprises, the city-appointed master developer of The Gulch, opened a contest for new murals for a dog park that was then still under development. The new dog park lies at the top of a hill on the west side of The Gulch, overlooking I-40, just uphill from the Turnip Truck. The artists who won the contest are largely new names in the Nashville mural world, expanding the roster of our local muralists. This mural is the sixth fr ..read more