The Joint Project, Nashville

Vintage cars and rock’n’roll in the Motor City’s pop-up exhibition “Sensual Steel”

14 June 2013

Nashville may be famously known as Music City, but a new event is helping to raise the presence of visual arts in the city.Joint Project is the brainchild of independent curator Susan Sherrick and social media consultant Libby Callaway.The project, which is now in its second edition, rallies together local and national artists to bring fresh artwork to Nashville.The Joint’s happenings operate around a theme that compliment other cultural events occurring simultaneously in Nashville. Their first event earlier this year in April centered around Nashville’s Fashion Week, and now Joint Project 2 coincides with an exhibition of Art Deco cars and motorcycles called “Sensuous Steel” at the Firth Center for Visual Arts, as well as the Bonnaroo music festival. Combining the themes of vintage cars and rock’n’roll, the three-day series of events will center around an exhibition of car and motorcycle-themed photographs by masters including Joel Meyerowitz, William Claxton, Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon.

“Nothing like this has existed in Nashville before,” says Sherrick, who worked at high-end galleries like David Zwirner, Fraenkel Gallery and Howard Greenberg before adopting Nashville as her home. “The artists here want to see the arts community explode, and we hope this will help.” To fuel the building momentum within the local art scene, Sherrick and Callaway enlisted both locals and outsidersa series of vintage Harley Davison and Indian motorcycles share the exhibition space, as well as a pop-up shop by LA’s Filth Mart, featuring vintage rock t-shirts. While the event draws on the broad cultural diversity present in Nashville, Sherrick adds, “The events are always about the art.”