The biggest news in local art this winter is the formation of the Downtown Arts District Alliance and its new Second Saturday Art Crawl. I love the alliance’s DADA acronym, and its reboot of downtown gallerygoing is dressed to impress: The Arcade is back and packing an impressive artists-in-residence program, Tinney Contemporary remains the undisputed champion of Fifth Avenue, and the Browsing Room at Downtown Presbyterian Church is a gem of a creative lab, where a thoughtful slate of regional artists is encouraged to bring its most experimental displays. Add Chauvet Arts, Bobby Hotel, Bankers Alley Hotel and Swipe Right to the roster, and DADA has the makings of a new chapter for Nashville’s downtown contemporary art scene. When Arcade Arts hosted its various art events in the lead-up to its artist residencies in the summer, you could sense the old ghosts on Saturday nights downtown. Those events proved that the downtown art magic is still there — it was just full of holes for a while. Don’t call it a comeback. Find out more at dadanashville.org.

The big winter news at Coop is actually big news for the entire year at the curatorial collective’s gallery at The Packing Plant in Wedgewood-Houston. Coop’s Ten in Tenn program squeezes in a decade of homegrown artists from the Volunteer State over the course of 2025. Coop has earned a reputation for introducing Nashville’s art scene to out-of-town artists and curators since its very first exhibitions in the original gallery space in the Arcade, during the heyday of the original Downtown Art Crawl. Packing 2025 with a whole year of artists based exclusively in Tennessee brings a cool twist to Coop’s curating. It’s going to be enlightening to see this broad survey and get a snapshot of the state of contemporary art from Memphis to Knoxville. Ten in Tenn got off to a strong start with Nashville artist Fjolla Hoxha’s irreverent and conceptual January installation and interactive performance, Building a Passport. The upcoming Ten in Tenn winter program includes a multimedia exhibition by Sepideh Dashti in February. Check out the full lineup at coopgallery.org. 

The Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award is an annual prize given to a graduating senior by the Vanderbilt University Department of Art. The prize funds a year of travel abroad, culminating in a solo exhibition back in Nashville at Vandy’s contemporary art gallery, Space 204. Hamblet Award recipient Adam Alwan’s Real/Heal is inspired by the death of his grandmother in 2023, 10 years after the death of his father. Alwan’s recent travels in Europe wove themes of distance and the passage of time into this exhibition about grief and memories, families and homelands. The show is up through Feb. 6 at Vanderbilt University’s Space 204. 

In 2025, we’ll continue to see forms and materials taking precedence over figures and messages in contemporary art. We’ll also see ceramics continue to trend in Nashville and pretty much everywhere else. For example, check out Paloma Wall’s New Relics exhibition at Elephant Gallery, which will be up from Feb. 7 through 28. The artist coils, pinches, extrudes and rolls slabs of clay to construct her hand-built urn forms, which speak to memories and mourning. I love this exhibition title, and Wall’s work offers a great example of how abstract art can still allude to figurative forms, and contain content without resorting to overt narratives. 

The don’t-miss pairing at the Frist Art Museum this winter begins with David C. Driskell & Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship. In 1976, artist and scholar David Driskell curated the groundbreaking exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950. The show became a cornerstone of art history, and announced Driskell as the foremost authority on Black art in America. The Frist show explores the art of Driskell and his contemporaries, offering a survey of 35 prominent Black American artists. The exhibition runs alongside Kindred Spirits: Intergenerational Forms of Expression, 1966-1999, which was co-organized and co-curated by the Frist and Fisk University. Kindred Spirits examines the legacy and influence of Fisk University’s Art Department, which Driskell led from 1966 to 1976. Both exhibitions run from March 14 through June 1 at the Frist.

Julia Martin Gallery will end the winter art season on a high note with a solo turn from longtime local Emily Holt. Holt was born in Memphis and moved to Nashville in 2003. She’s a multimedia artist and a high school art teacher at University School of Nashville. Recently, Holt’s been making small architectural assemblages from bits of detritus she gathers from the demolition sites of actual buildings in Nashville. Back in 2022, Holt teamed with Peggy Snow for the What Happened Here exhibition at Julia Martin Gallery. I gave the show a Best of Nashville notice, and I’m intrigued by what Holt has planned this time around: Instead of small sculptures, Holt is displaying big paintings. Her new works are unstretched collections of painted canvases that hang like tapestries, one layer in front of the next. The colorful abstract surfaces are cut away so that the successive layers create an illusion of a single painting with an exaggerated sense of depth. The paintings are strong to begin with, and the cutaways and layering upend the flat severity of midcentury picture planes. The show opens Saturday, March 1, at Julia Martin Gallery.