April’s Highlights Include Portraits, Butterflies and a Tribute to ‘Love Island’

Chase Williamson at Coop and a strong pairing of artists at Neue Welt top our list of art-crawl must-sees

“Permian Chapter,” Lain York

Chase Williamson’s multimedia painting exhibition, Souls Grown Deep, opens at Coop on Saturday night. The Knoxville-based painter is the latest Tennessee artist to be featured in Coop’s Ten in Tenn series. Williamson’s colorful portraits are brimming with feminist narratives, social justice messages and shout-outs to the horticultural traditions of African American women. The show’s gardening themes are perfectly scheduled for the early-spring art calendar, and this display pairs well with the David Driskell-focused exhibitions at Fisk University and Frist Art Museum. Souls Grown Deep is a showcase for Williamson’s adventurous use of materials, including oil paint, glitter and various fabrics. Williamson is a storyteller, and her attention to the formal elements of these works makes her an emerging painter to watch while she’s completing her MFA at the University of Tennessee. Opening 1-9 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Coop, 507 Hagan St.

David Lusk Gallery opens a two-person show featuring more outdoorsy themes for the April art crawl. Real pairs Bruce Brainard’s dreamy oil-painted landscapes with George Dombek’s butterfly collection compositions. I don’t know if romance and awe are in right now, but they’re certainly trending in the wondrous light of Brainard’s pastures of plenty. Dombek’s paintings nod to naturalist illustration, and his exquisite watercolor works dazzle with technique alone. But his knockout punch is the heightened, graphic style he brings to these winged and wriggling things. Reception 4-7 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at David Lusk, 516 Hagan St.

I’d classify most of the exhibitions at Neue Welt as contemporary formalist sculpture shows. That sounds really specific, and it is. But a better word might be specialized — or maybe just special. Gallerist-curator Mauro Barreto covers a lot of range in the niche, and always manages to bring strong shows to the Wedgewood-Houston crawl. Neue Welt’s April exhibition is another totally new example of what this little gallery does best. Caroline Hatfield deploys sculpture, installation and mixed media in her material explorations of environmental questions. Recycled metal, found objects and industrial supplies have all found their ways into Hatfield’s displays, and Epigraph is a sculptural narrative about the geology of storytelling, from stone to graphite, from fiber to fiber optics. Neue Welt will also be welcoming a new outdoor flag art project from Abilene, Texas-based artist Hollie Brown. Brown’s pastel-painted flag depicts a moment of scripted heartbreak from the reality television show Love Island. Between the pyramids and the drones and the simulation theories, you’d have to be crazy not to question your assumptions about reality in 2025. Also, this flag gives big beach vibes at the start of what I hope is a bright and beautiful spring art season. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Neue Welt, 507 Hagan St.

Charlie Smyth’s Landfill space at The Packing Plant has already become one of my favorite stops at the Wedgewood-Houston crawl since the artist opened the gallery in the former Red 225 headquarters in December. Landfill is located at the front of The Packing Plant. It’s the first gallery you see when you walk in the front door and onto Smyth’s big vintage rug, between the walls covered in brown fabric. There’s a desk and some small tables and plants in the room, and it feels as inviting as the Nashville studio-galleries of the early 2000s. Smyth doesn’t make work at Landfill, but it’s still a showcase for his multimedia paintings in vintage thrift store frames — they cover the walls in a cacophonous, chromatic salon-style arrangement. The abstract works boast bold palettes, and Smyth blends thoughtful meditation and offhand nonchalance into his patterns, forms, cut-and-paste collage and splash-and-drip flourishes. Smyth is also working on a new batch of otherworldly wire sculptures, but what makes Landfill a stop worth checking on is Smyth’s curating of works by his friends and peers in his monthly displays. Artists like Todd McDaniel, Briena Harmening and David Piñeros have all hung their work in Smyth’s bohemian boutique, and this month Landfill will feature paintings by Nashville painter Catron Wallace. Wallace’s colorful, textured, expressive canvases are a perfect complement to Landfill’s disheveled charms, and I’m expecting to see pastel colors popping against the gallery’s cocoa-colored walls. Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Landfill, 507 Hagan St. 

Zeitgeist Gallery has just come off of a big group show, but April finds the gallery getting back to hanging separate displays by different artists. These exhibitions read more like an ensemble of series by individual artists that can sometimes connect to or communicate with each other in unexpected ways. Seeing how they hang together is half the fun of Zeitgeist’s openings, and the gallery has a trio of regional artists in their lineup for April. Jim Ann Howard’s pencil-and-charcoal drawings of earth mother figures emerged from the artist’s six months of research at the Jungian Institute in Manhattan. The drawings in Mother Me Mother were originally created as illustrations in collaboration with author Donna Wilshire for the 1993 book Virgin, Mother, Crone: Myths and Mysteries of the Triple Goddess. Richard Painter’s work will be familiar to Zeitgeist regulars, and Burghers of Calais — his new series of five paintings on felt — speaks to both Auguste Rodin and Joseph Beuys. Zeitgeist director Lain York will also be showing a series of his multimedia paintings at the gallery in April. York’s Permian Chapterstitle references the geological period known for the largest recorded mass extinction in the history of our planet. Twelve raw birch panels read like shifting tectonic plates, and the thin white loops and curves, spirals and humps York adds to their untreated surfaces evoke a record of massive movements over epochs. Raw and minimal, the arrangement is unmistakably York’s, and it’s the most challenging contribution to this creative conversation about history and humanity. Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Zeitgeist Gallery, 516 Hagan St.