PUBLIC ART REVIEW

NASHVILLE: A Bridge to the Future

Public Art Review, Issue 32, Spring-Summer 2005

by Jack Mackie

Last summer, the Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge that crosses the Cumberland River in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, was officially dedicated and opened. The bridge, previously closed to vehicular use due to structural inadequacies, was salvaged, repaired, repainted, and relit to become a focused illustration of the new growth and changes occurring in downtown Nashville. Prior to the official opening, seventy-five artists, designers, urban planners, and city residents met on the bridge at the start of the second of two public art workshops conducted by the Metropolitan Nashville Public Art Program. The workshops were the first manifestation of the city’s retooled public art program, now being launched through a series of new commissioned works and several large infrastructure projects.

The formal objectives of the workshops were to explore the numerous ways that public art can serve as a tool of urban design, to further conversations of the Nashville aesthetic, to select locations for the first Nashville public art projects, and to view the city from a new point of view-through the lens of public art. An unstated objective was to get local artists, architects, landscape architects, and planners into the same room to discuss their real and perceived roles in Nashville.
While there are terrific examples of art in the public realm in Nashville, many participants had little experience with public art-its forms, methods, and ever-expanding venues.

At the first workshop, participants viewed slides of recently built public art projects from across the country, including small-scale commissions and large-scale infrastructure work: neighborhood benches, paving projects, transportation projects, wastewater reclamations. Participants then focused on the Plan of Nashville, a fifty-year plan that will guide public policy, development practice, urban planning, and design for the urban core and neighborhoods adjacent to it. Through community-based visioning sessions, ten guiding principles were developed:

1. Respect Nashville’s natural and built environment.
2. Treat the Cumberland River as central to Nashville’s identity.
3. Reestablish the streets as the principal public space of community and connectivity.
4. Develop a convenient and efficient transportation infrastructure.
5. Provide for a comprehensive, interconnected greenway and park system.
6. Develop an economically viable downtown district.
7. Raise the quality of the public realm with civic structures and spaces.
8. Integrate public art into the design of the city-its buildings, public works, and parks.
9. Strengthen the unique identity of neighborhoods.
10. Infuse visual order into the city by strengthening sightlines to and from civic landmarks and natural features.

Workshop participants were randomly separated into eight teams and assigned a specific district of the city. Then the teams studied their district and located places and upcoming projects where the principles could be used as guiding tools to create public art. The eight-member teams then presented their conclusions to the full group using mappings, sketches, and text notations. The last exercise asked each participant to prioritize all the project areas presented. Out of this process the Shelby Street Bridge landings were identified as the primary location for the public art program’s initial project.

In the second workshop, participants met on the bridge, where they now saw their city from a new perspective and could see how the bridge connected the city both functionally and symbolically. From this viewpoint, over the river in the heart of Nashville’s greatest open space, participants were again asked, “How does the art program support the Plan and how does the Plan create public art opportunities?”

Workshop teams then reassembled at the Nashville Design Center, where they sketched public art ideas specific to the bridge and surrounding areas. They were encouraged to consider using industrial artifacts left from the demolition of a nearby river barge construction plant, and they were freed to dream without worrying about budget. Finally participants presented their ideas and tied them back into the Plan’s principles. Ideas were wide-ranging; sidewalk paving patterns and inserts that morph as one approaches the river, new bus shelters, barge artifacts stacked in totemic mode, immense arcs of water spanning the river. Numerous ideas were shared that would create public art as urban design, as investigations of cultural and ecological place-making, while creating unique icons descriptive of the Cumberland River, the bridge, and one of Nashville’s greatest public places.

Jack Mackie is a practicing public artist living in Seattle, Washington, and a Public Art Review advisor.