Joe Nolan’s Journalist Portfolio

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Fragile Figures: Beings in Time at 21c Museum Hotel in Nashville, TN

Fragile Figures: Beings in Time at 21c Museum Hotel in Nashville, TN

Whitehot Magazine — 21c Museum Hotel (Nashville) September 2019 through January 2021 The smartphone selfie is the most ubiquitous and pervasive expression of portraiture in the 21 century. But these subjective, reflexive images are contextualized in digital environments - primarily social media platforms - that can be purposefully reductive and redacted.

Kevin Guthrie's Work Is as American as Beer, Baseball, and Watergate

Kevin Guthrie's Work Is as American as Beer, Baseball, and Watergate

ARTnews — artist who draws portraits of pop-culture heroes and villains with pencil and crayon on the inner side of flattened cardboard boxes once packed with beer cans. The renderings are simple, but they brim with personality and social commentary.

Orrall History: Artist Robert Ellis Orrall's Collaborative Farewell

Orrall History: Artist Robert Ellis Orrall's Collaborative Farewell

Nashville Scene — Music Row's long history of commercial country hits is synonymous with many icons recognizable by just their first names - Dolly, Patsy, Johnny, Hank. But thrice-named singer, songwriter, producer, label owner and painter Robert Ellis Orrall is emblematic of the irreverent, eccentric spirit that has helped forge Nashville's contemporary independent music scene.

Far from Respectable: Dave Hickey and his Art

Far from Respectable: Dave Hickey and his Art

BURNAWAY — ADVERTISEMENT I heard the word aesthetics defined as, "the philosophy of beauty" for the first time sitting at my desk in a 10 th grade American literature class in the mid-1980s. It struck me as a contradictory notion at first, but then the seeming incongruities between what the 15-year-old me thought of as detached, analytical philosophy and voluptuous, seductive beauty only served to make the whole notion more mesmerizing.

Critic/Ally: Remembering Nick Tosches

Critic/Ally: Remembering Nick Tosches

Nashville Scene — Joe Nolan is a 21st-century Renaissance man. He's a poet, singer-songwriter and intermedia artist - as well as one of the Scene 's most longstanding cultural critics. In his new column "Critic/Ally," he'll muse about art, culture and whatever else comes across his periphery.

The Frist's New Lange Exhibit Illuminates the Work of a Social-Art Pioneer

The Frist's New Lange Exhibit Illuminates the Work of a Social-Art Pioneer

Nashville Scene — ©The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, gift of Paul S. Taylor The name Dorothea Lange might not necessarily ring a bell for every Nashvillian. But most would likely recognize "Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California," Lange's iconic 1936 portrait of a mother and her children in a migrant farmworkers' camp.

No Hands - Outland

No Hands - Outland

outland.art — Documentation of Shih Yun Yeo's Mind Ink Painting Machine, 2021 There's a video on Shih Yun Yeo's YouTube channel that documents the artist working on her exhibition "Creative Collisions" at Singapore's Galerie Steph in 2014. Yeo fills a plastic cup with black ink before circling a large, blank, stretched canvas laid flat on the floor.