Arts

Portrait painter Washington Cooper was born near Jonesborough on September 18, 1802, the third of nine children. The family moved frequently, and young Cooper lived near Carthage and Shelbyville. He briefly received some art instruction in Murfreesboro before settling in…

Illustrator and mural painter Dean Cornwell executed several exceptional commissions on Capitol Hill in Nashville during the Great Depression. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 5, 1892. Cornwell began his professional career as a cartoonist for the Louisville…

The Cox Mound, or Woodpecker, gorget style is a particularly beautiful and enduring symbol of Tennessee's prehistoric inhabitants. A gorget was a pendant, or personal adornment, worn around the neck as a badge of rank or insignia of status and…

In 1947, the most popular song in the United States was “Near You.” It was listed for a record-setting seventeen consecutive weeks as the nation’s number one song on Billboard magazine’s Honor Roll of Hits. It has been called the…

Nancy Cox McCormack Cushman, internationally recognized sculptor, was born in Nashville August 15, 1885, to Nannie Morgan Cox and Herschel McCullough Cox. After the deaths of her parents, she attended an Arkansas boarding school but soon returned to Nashville, entered…

For more than fifty years, dance companies have encouraged and supported the development of a high quality of dance throughout Tennessee. Through professional, civic, and educational affiliations, these ballet, jazz, tap, modern, and contemporary dance companies provide excellent opportunities for…

The traditional dances of clogging and buckdancing are popular forms of percussive dancing that originated in the southern Appalachian mountains. Though the eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish settlers brought with them the clog, a step dance characterized by a very erect…

Charles Decker Sr., master potter and proprietor of Keystone Pottery, was the largest producer of utilitarian and folk art ceramics in East Tennessee between 1873 and 1906. Decker was the binding influence behind a family business that produced items made…

There are many historic examples of decoratively painted interiors across the state of Tennessee. While some of the paintings have been lost, many works from the late eighteenth century to the New Deal era have survived, indicating the wide variety…

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, with paintings by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, and Monet, its collection of eighteenth-century porcelain, and its stunning gardens, has long been one of Memphis's key attractions. With the recent acquisition…

Isaac Dockery, an African American brickmason and builder, was born a freeman in the Jones Cove community of Sevier County. Dockery moved to Sevierville before the Civil War, where he worked as a merchant clerk in the home of Henry…

John Wood Dodge, portraitist and photographer, was born in New York City, the son of a goldsmith and watchmaker and his Canadian-born wife. Dodge was apprenticed to a sign painter, under whom he began to copy, then paint, original miniatures.…

Aaron Douglas, African American artist and professor at Fisk University, was born in small-town eastern Kansas and displayed an early aptitude for drawing. His mother recognized his talent and supported his pursuit of an art career. Douglas attended high school…

The Dover Flint Quarries, listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, comprise one of the most significant prehistoric quarry sites in the Southeast. Located in Stewart County, the Dover quarries were the primary source of the famous…

Ralph E. W. Earl, portraitist, was the son of Connecticut painter Ralph Earl (1751-1801) and his second wife, Anne Whiteside of Norwich, England. Born in England, Earl studied under his father in Northhampton, Massachusetts, before traveling to London in 1809…

Few folk artists can claim the widespread recognition by the world of fine art that William Edmondson achieved during his lifetime. The first African American artist to have a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Edmondson continues to…

John Adam “Sleepy John” Estes, was born in Ripley, Tennessee, around 1900. A highly skilled blues musician, Estes played a pivotal role in reestablishing rural blues within the American music canon during the folk blues revival of the 1960s. His…

A major contributor to the arts in Memphis from the 1950s until his death in 1985, Edward Spencer Faiers was significant as a teacher and an artist. He moved to Memphis in 1952 and joined the faculty of the Memphis…

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened in April 2001 in the former U.S. Post Office building in downtown Nashville. Constructed in 1933-34, the building, an example of Depression-era “Stripped Classicism,” was designed by the local architectural firm Marr…

Edwin M. Gardner, illustrator, portraitist, and cartographer, was born near Pulaski in Giles County, but while still a young boy, he moved with his family to Mississippi, where he probably had some formal training in art. While in his teens,…