Weeklong Festival Will Feature Large-Scale Works for Interior and Exterior of Pioneering Contemporary Arts Center, Including:

• Celebrated French Street Artist JR’s Global Portrait Project, Inside Out
• Israeli-American Street Artist Addam Yekutieli (aka KNOW HOPE)’s New Text-Based Billboard & Photography Exhibition, Vicariously Speaking

• A New Edition of Tony Youngblood’s Modular Art Pods Installation, Featuring 80 + Nashville Artists

• Live Outdoor Music Performances by Paul Burch and the WPA Ballclub and The Great Aspirations of Sun Conductor
• Plus Daily Artist Talks, Food Trucks and More

NASHVILLE, TENN. – May 19, 2016- OZ Arts Nashville will present the inaugural OZ Art Fest, a visual art festival, exhibiting an array of large-scale and interactive works for both interior and exterior spaces, June 21-25. Featuring sculpture, mural, photography, text-based billboard art, visual digital technology and more, this weeklong festival also reaches beyond the contemporary arts center’s 10,000-square-foot West Nashville warehouse venue with customized artworks created and displayed in the city’s diverse neighborhoods. OZ Arts plans to present OZ Art Fest, an expansion of OZ Arts’ already-robust program of performances and installations, every two years.

Highlights of the inaugural edition will include French artist JR’s global portrait project, Inside Out; Israeli-American street artist Addam Yekutieli’s new text-based billboard project, Vicariously Speaking; and the second edition of Tony Youngblood’s acclaimed Modular Art Pods installation, featuring more than 80 Nashville artists. OZ Arts will be open daily, 11am-8pm. Each day throughout the week, a lunchtime talk will take place with one of the festival’s featured artists, 1-2pm. On Friday and Saturday, families will be able to enjoy live music, food trucks and exhibited works from the rarely-accessible hillside at OZ Arts.

Lauren Snelling, Artistic Director of OZ Arts, said of the festival, “The ‘theme’ behind this festival developed organically, through the inspired creations of the participating artists. As always, we aim for OZ Arts to feel like a safe & welcoming place for artistic expression in Nashville, and we hope to broaden the reach of our invitation through this festival, which focuses specifically on inclusion.”

Upon winning the 2011 TED Prize, which asks winners to articulate—and then go about realizing—a wish to change the world, JR began his global participatory art project, Inside Out. In a truck-traveling photo booth, people get the opportunity to share their portraits and, by extension, their stories. To date, more than 130 countries worldwide have participated, with a unique theme in each setting, transforming messages of personal identity into works of public art.

The OZ Art Fest iteration of Inside Out, on the theme of “inclusion,” will visit three Nashville neighborhoods, on June 21, 22 and 23. The community will be invited to visit the truck at three distinct locations, to have their photographic portraits taken and instantly printed as giant posters. These posters will be combined to create a mural collage in that community, and participants can be emailed a file of their portrait. On June 24 and 25, the truck will park at OZ Arts, where new portraits will be taken, printed and combined with those re-printed from around the city in a massive mural mounted onto the roof and exterior of the building—a lasting portrait of Nashville.

Israeli-American street artist Addam Yekutieli (aka KNOW HOPE)’s Vicariously Speaking, commissioned by OZ Arts for OZ Art Fest, gives voice to a marginalized population, incorporating Yekutieli’s correspondences with inmates in Nashville prisons into text-based works extracted from letters, to be placed on eight billboards throughout the city. The billboard works, specifically chosen by the artist, will be photographed by Yekutieli in the juxtaposed context of their new urban surrounds. Once printed, these images will be paired in a diptych with the letter from which the featured text originated. The photos and letters will be exhibited in the entrance hallway gallery at OZ Arts throughout the festival and the month following. As part of phase two of the project, Yekutieli is also seeking volunteers in Nashville to have words or phrases from Vicariously Speaking tattooed on them by the artist himself (stick ‘n’ poke and free of charge).

OZ Art Fest will also feature the second edition of local artist Tony Youngblood’s sprawling Modular Art Pods installation, which will fill the 10,000 sf. warehouse venue with a maze of more than 50 cubed mini-galleries ranging in size from 4’x4’ to 10’x10’, each created by a different regional artist or collective. The artists, with materials provided in part by Home Depot, will use cardboard, foam board, canvas, conduit, PVC pipe, lattice and anything else they dream up to construct their pod. Audiences of all ages will be able to “choose their own adventure,” navigating a journey through and around the pods. Between every level will be open space, so attendees can enter and exit freely and choose a nonlinear path if they wish. Modular Art Pods is also part of OZ Arts’ local spotlight series, TNT. A sample of works from one pod in each of the ten, themed areas of the MAPs installation will be featured in OZ’s Escaparate, with accompanying documentary-style footage shown on the #GMPiWall, created by Nashville’s Hazelwood Laboratories.

Participating artists, whose art pods have been curated by Youngblood, include Ashley Adkins (with Leah Sawyer), Mika Agari (with Alexine Rioux & Kayla Saito), Matthew Batty, Tyler Blankenship (with Sarah McDonald), Chip Boles, Amanda Joy Brown (with Kyle Jones), Jason Brown and the Postal Provocateurs, Paul Cain, Ellie Caudill, Erica Ciccarone, Carla Ciuffo, Ben Clark (with Matt Fox), Alexis Colbert, Sarah Cozort, Rachel de Cuba, Jenn Deafenbaugh (with Monica Bolles), Jim DeVault, Zach Duensing, Patricia Earnhardt (with Elizabeth Sanford), Dylan Ethier (with Molly Lahym), The Full Scale Millennium Falcon Project, Osvaldo Gonzalez, Trey Gossett, Phillip Granke, Ben Green (with Rebecca Steinberg), Rhendi Greenwell, Brandon Greer, Briena Harmening (with Jaime Raybin), Emily Holt, Robbie Lynn Hunsinger, Beth Inglish, Travis Janssen (with Alex Lopez), Megan Kelley (with Stephen Zerne), Jennifer Knowles, Mia Krout (with Ben Marcantel, Ryan Norris & Christine Rogers), Emily Sue Laird (with Jake Wells), Clayton Landiss, Ariel Lavery (with Christopher Lavery), Sara Lederach, Jonathan Lisenby, Jovanni Luna, Becky Fox Matthews (with Dave Matthews), Jamie Meredith, Middle Tennessee Robotic Arts Society, George Miller (with Vivian Saxon), Mary Mooney, Joe Nolan (with Antonia Oakes), Jamin Orrall,  Beth Reitmeyer (with ELEL), Kit Reuther, Gordon Roque, Liz Clayton Scofield, Abbey Skojec, Brian Somerville (with Will Somerville) and Lain York. Pod performers include Rebekah Alexander, Andri Alexandrou, Big Guise, chatterbird, Aubrey Derryberry, Dig Deep Light Show, droneroom, Marlos E’van, MKAV (Mike Kluge Audio Visual), Lindsay Goranson, Dustin Hedrick (with Bethany Langford), Madeleine Hicks (with Paul Kintzing), Ashley Lawless, Ben Marcantel (with Ryan Norris), Colleen Phelps, Sideshow @ Actors Bridge and Brian Siskind.

The Modular Art Pods installation will also feature live performances by Rebekah Alexander. Andri Alexandrou, Big Guise, chatterbird, Aubrey Derryberry, Dig Deep Light Show, droneroom, Marlos E’van, MKAV (Mike Kluge Audio Visual), Lindsay Goranson, Dustin Hedrick and Bethany Langford, Madeleine Hicks and Paul Kintzing, Ashley Lawless, Ben Marcantel and Ryan Norris, Colleen Phelps, Sideshow @ Actors Bridge, and Brian Siskind.

Additional works displayed at OZ Arts during the festival focus on scale and depth with large-scale creations by Lauren Walker (thelaurenwalker.com) in OZ’s Grand Salon, and 3-D printed, mini-aerial city plans by Daren Strange (easttowerdesign.com) in OZ’s Lounge.

Music on the outdoor stages will be provided on Friday by Paul Burch who will debut his new album, Meridian Rising, an imagined musical autobiography of Jimmie Rodgers. Burch will perform the album in its entirety with his band, the WPA Ballclub featuring GRAMMY winners Fats Kaplin and Dennis Crouch, plus William Tyler, Chloe Feoranzo, and guest artists whose work has been inspired by the Blue Yodeler and Father of Country Music.  On Saturday, new music improvisers, The Great Aspirations of Sun Conductor, will take to the outdoor stage bringing together the talents of Brooke Waggoner, Eric Hillman (Foreign Fields), Hitoshi Yamaguchi, Daniel James (Canon Blue), and others for a musical fusion of classical and electronic sounds.

Addam Yekutieli (aka KNOW HOPE)’s work on Vicariously Speaking is supported in part by the Consulate General of Israel.

OZ Arts’ local spotlight series, TNT, is supported in part by the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Food trucks featured throughout the festival include Califarmia, New Hickory and Four & Twenty Blackbirds. Admission to OZ Art Fest is free Tuesday-Wednesday, and free everyday for kids under 12. Thursday, as per the local spotlight series, TNT, is ticketed at $15 per person with doors open at 6pm. Tickets for Friday and Saturday, are $20 per person (free for kids 12 and under) and can be purchased at www.ozartsnashville.org. OZ Arts is located at 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle in Nashville, Tenn.

About OZ Arts Nashville
Since opening in 2014, OZ Arts Nashville, a 501(c)(3) contemporary arts center, has changed the cultural landscape of the city. Housed in the former C.A.O. cigar warehouse owned by Nashville’s Ozgener family, OZ Arts brings world-class performances and art installations to the city, and gives ambitious local artists opportunities to work on a grand scale. The flexible 10,000 square-foot, column-free venue, nestled amidst five acres of artfully landscaped grounds, is continually reconfigured to serve artists’ imaginations, and to challenge and inspire a diverse range of curious audiences.

OZ Arts, under the artistic leadership of Lauren Snelling, has presented luminaries such as Philip Glass and Tim Fain, Tim Robbins’ The Actors’ Gang, Kyle Abraham and Abraham.In.Motion, Peter Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Trisha Brown Company, Vijay Iyer, Laurie Anderson, SITI Company, Bang On A Can All-Stars and Taylor Mac. OZ Arts serves as a catalyst for local creativity through its TNT (Thursday Night Things) program, which fosters collaborations between Nashville-based artists from varying creative disciplines; and its newest series the Artists’ Lounge, which gives artists opportunities to develop work before a live audience, including fellow artists, in the venue’s intimate lounge space.

For more information, please visit http://www.ozartsnashville.org/. 

OZ Arts Nashville Media Contacts

 Nashville press, please contact Amy Atkinson at Amy Atkinson Communications, 615.305.8118 or amy@amyacommunications.com.

 National press, please contact Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates, 718.643.9052 or blake@blakezidell.com.