pink = where I went
This was my first time in Tennessee. Two creative, generous women I hadn’t previously met brought me there. Artist and teacher Katie Hargrave invited me to give a talk and collaborate with her students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and artist Jodi Hays invited me to do a show in her artist run space in Nashville.
In December 2016 when I posted on Facebook that I was doing this project, Katie (a fellow alum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was one of the first people to reach out and invite me to stay with her. Katie is the coordinator of the UTC Art Department’s Foundations program; in addition to teaching, she creates and oversees course curricula for Freshman and Sophomores. She applied for and secured a grant to fund my visit and created a student assignment inspired by my project in which four classes of Foundations students were engaged.
I met Katie for the first time the night before my talk. We stood in her kitchen drinking whiskey while she told me about her students and the project they’ve been doing, which was loosely inspired by my project. Students went to unfamiliar parts of Chattanooga, talked to people, and did drawings based on personal observation of those places.
marigold petals drying in Katie’s kitchen
I had a wonderful experience with the UTC students, who were some of the most engaged and responsive students I’ve encountered. After my talk, many rushed down to the front to talk to me. They were eager to tell me about their hometowns; about their grandparents’ families in deep Appalachia “being too poor to own slaves”; an annual ham festival; close-knit communities; a high school summer job in a plantation gift shop. I wish I could have gone everywhere they suggested. The places I ended up going were ones that several people told me to go, or that were near other places I was going.
I went to Rock City.
Rock City is located on and inside of Lookout Mountain, where the Cherokee suffered defeat in the 1700’s, the Confederate army suffered defeat in the 1800’s, and a woman named Frieda Carter made a magical world for gnomes in the 1900’s. These histories sit on each other’s laps on this piece of land in the 2000’s, where black lights and glitter have earnestly upheld Frieda’s vision.
Walking through the rock formations sprouting little gardens, the odd exposed wire sticking out, I was trying to process this piece of land’s complicated history and then I’d come upon jaunty gnomes playing accordion under some rocks lit up purple and bouncing around Tchaikovsky at full volume and my brain would short circuit and I just accepted that this was weird, beautiful shit, and is there any other country that could do this? (that would let this happen?) and tears came.
A few people I talked to told me about how Chattanooga was the center of the Cherokee Nation before the U.S. government removed them from their land and forced them to walk to Oklahoma through disease and starvation on what is now known as the Trail of Tears. The path that was the Trail goes through downtown Chattanooga.
I followed the signs until there weren’t any more. I may have taken a wrong turn near the end.
The culmination of the UTC students’ work inspired by my project, and my visit, was an exhibition in the student-run gallery which included both my work and student work - all works on paper. Mine were the only framed pieces, with the students’ drawings floating around mine, salon-style.
Katie told me the students were so excited to have their first opening be with a “real artist.” At the opening, I was happy that many students came up and introduced themselves, and some showed me which drawings were theirs. Katie seemed to not only know all the students in all four classes (not just those in her class) but also whom they all had as their teachers in other subjects. She asked them how they were doing, remembering details from past conversations and what was going on in their lives.
Collaborating with Katie in this way was an honor, and I’m happy that my work was used well by her and all of these students. She is the rare powerhouse with the ability to see what is at hand, conceptualize what is possible, and then make it happen in a way that is relevant to many people.
Here she is in her garden sharing fruits of other labor.
I drove up to Nashville for my opening at Jodi Hays’ space, Dadu. I was introduced to Jodi when she reached out to me via email one day saying she had been following my work since being on a panel for a grant I applied for but didn’t get. (The elusive gem of a failure that later turns fruitful!) We planned this show over the course of a year; it was great to finally meet her. Dadu is a building in her backyard that serves as her studio and a gallery for pop-up shows.
I showed the same work that was in the UTC show - framed works on paper of Arizona, Mississippi, Louisiana, and North Carolina.
Mississippi works on paper installed at Dadu
North Carolina works on paper installed at Dadu
Like Katie, Jodi is an energetic connector of people and communities. Many artists in the south that I’ve since met know who she is. She is a mama to three kids, and I sense that she is as active in the communities surrounding her kids as she is the art community. Both groups showed up for my opening, which says much about Jodi’s ability to create inclusive spaces that aren’t watered down. I talked with several artist mamas while their kids jumped on the trampoline. It was hot and buggy and felt like summer.
That night people (mostly women) wanted to talk about politics. I was amazed at the political diversity of the (mostly) women having these conversations, compared to the homogeneously liberal crowd at home in Seattle. As we talked, Jodi’s three-year-old daughter came in and out, intermittently making arrangements of cookies on the studio rug.
One woman was afraid I wouldn’t like her if she told me her husband voted for Trump. An artist who thinks highly of Rand Paul told me about how her family worked on his campaigns when she was in high school. Another told me how she liked Obama personally but didn’t like his policies. Talking about Trump, one woman who lives in Atlanta said, “I’m in the manufacturing industry and he’s hurting us.” She explained details of tariffs and suppliers and how we as a country think we’re cutting costs now but they will be costs we’ll have to eat eventually. A woman said that after losing a lot of money on the sale of her home in 2010, she ended up being resentful of the government. I talked with these three women for a while who hadn’t met each other before that night.
Stephie, Arletta, and Beth
My dear friends Kim and Gaby, and Gaby’s son Wiley, drove over the mountains from North Carolina in their car with failed air conditioning to come to the opening and see a little bit of Nashville together. Wiley played Pokémon Go as we walked around, which added an interesting sense of urgency for the invisible.
Gaby, Wiley, Kim at the Opryland Hotel
We went to the Opryland Hotel, where one of Katie’s students who grew up in Chattanooga, Jules, told me to go. Jules said his family would go there on vacation when he was a kid. He described it as a giant greenhouse with a hotel inside and a river going through it. All true.
We had a pricey lunch among autumnal garden displays and then took a boat ride down the river. We passed orchids growing from wet walls, lemon trees, waterfalls, a giant cowboy boot, and more (never too many, Tennessee!) gnomes.
If Dolly Parton had been in town while we were there I probably would have gotten to meet her. Gaby has been friends with Dolly since she was a teen and usually stops in to see her when she’s in the area. Since we missed Dolly we decided to at least go look at the outside of her house in Brentwood.
Gaby grew up in Hollywood and at 13 was introduced to Dolly by her entertainment industry parents. She visited Dolly on the sets of 9 to 5, the Tonight Show, and Rhinestone. When Gaby was 17 she asked Dolly if she would have dinner with her. Dolly said yes, and the first of many magical, life-changing Dolly days followed. There is a great picture of Dolly in teenaged Gaby’s bedroom where Dolly is appreciating all of Gaby’s Dolly shrines and Gaby’s teenaged mind is being blown. Gaby levitates when she talks about Dolly.
It made me happy to imagine Dolly picking out these giant bright orange wreaths to hang outside her house, though she probably isn’t the one that does that.
