Exhibitions
MARGARET LITTMAN: ARE WE DONE YET?
Julia Martin Gallery / 444 Humphreys St. April 5 - 26th (Reception: April 5 6:00pm - 9:00pm)
Margaret Littman
Artist Statement:
Are We Done Yet? examines what it means to be “done.”
We use the phrase in our vernacular: A server asks if you are done before clearing the table. We promise to make plans as soon as we are done with a project at work. We ask, in a whining tone, if that construction in Wedgewood Houston is ever going to be done.
Is anything really ever finished, though?
I’m a journalist and author. My reporting and writing is never “done;” I could keep asking questions and keep revising infinitely. Only deadlines force me to be “finished.” (Even Andy Warhol knew what made a piece done: “You know it's ART when the check clears.”)
A city is never “done.” A city that stops updating, stops supporting its residents, stops looking forward, will shrivel.
My idea of fun is to play with creation, learning over the years to sew, embroider, woodwork, paint, make eco-prints and more. My basement is my “Museum of Unfinished Projects,” the place where things I made for the process, not the product, go to gather dust. On exhibit this month will be select pieces from my collection of unfinished projects: a wood canoe, textiles, 35 mm negatives, manuscripts, millinery pieces and more. In addition, I’ll include pieces from collections I have inherited, largely woodworking detritus, quilts and embroidery. I’ll also feature select pieces from other Nashville creators, including printmaker Jeremy Lehmann and songwriter Jacky Dustin.
This exhibit is more than a static display. From the halls of Julia Martin Gallery, as a community, we’ll ponder the act of completing something. We’ll talk about what it means to be “done” with something and why being “done” is our default goal. On Saturdays through the month of April, visitors are welcome to pick up an unfinished piece and work on it. Participants are encouraged to take parts and create new works, or finish something how they imagine it was originally intended.
Donations to the gallery for this studio time are welcome, and there will be an assortment of keepsakes and merch to mark the occasion. There will also be opportunities to buy and earn merit badges for leaving a work partially undone.
Outside the gallery, there will be space to leave unfinished works of your own for someone else to complete, or to pick up something free left by another creator. These parts and pieces of work will be accessible 24-7 while Are We Done Yet is on display.
Margaret Littman is a Nashville-based journalist and author and serial arts and craft school attendee. She has a fine arts degree from Vanderbilt University and a masters of journalism from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. She’s spent vacations taking classes at Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts, the Bill Waller Craft Center in Mississippi, Memphis’s Metal Museum, Chicago’s Lillstreet,, the Coastal Arts Center in Orange Beach, Alabama and many others. She lives in Nashville with her rescue lab, Raja, and a house full of unfinished projects and to-do lists.
