Building Upon Their Our Town Nashville Public Art Project, McCloud and His Isle of Printing Team Will Again Capture a Portrait of the City, This Time Using Oversize Stamps to Make Large-Scale Tapestries

NASHVILLE, TENN., Dec. 1, 2015 – For three years, Nashville artist Bryce McCloud’s public art project Our Town Nashville (OTN) traversed the city, facilitating the stamping and trading self-portraits with Nashvillians from all walks of life. The initiative will culminate in Our Town Together Heroic: The World’s Largest Stamp Portrait Project,which OZ Arts Nashville will present December 7-10 as part of its TNT (Thursday Night Things) local spotlight series.

McCloud and the Isle of Printing crew will transform the contemporary arts center’s vast warehouse into a massive workspace where they will swing, heave, and stomp out giant—heroic—stamp portraits for four days and nights. Audiences will not only experience the tapestries being made, but also be engaged to help. Once complete, the canvases will be displayed throughout the interior of the venue, located at 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle in Nashville, Tenn.

McCloud and his team will be creating and installing the portraits at the venue throughout the day Monday–Thursday, December 7–10. Audiences are welcome to visit 11am – 5pm, free of charge.

Audiences can participate in the large-scale creations by way of  “themed interactions” that will take place on the evenings of Tuesday-Thursday, December 8-10.

• On Tuesday, December 8, 6:30 – 9:30pm, “The Giant All Stamp” visitors will be invited onto the canvas to help the OT team stamp away to the sweet melodies of Paul Burch and the WPA Ballclub (90% chance it’ll be in the form of stamp shoes you can wear!) Admission is free.

• Wednesday, December 9, 6:30 – 9:30pm,  “Game Night” is 12 teams of 6 will go head to head in a right brain vs left brain blow out creative art relay race.  Racing against the clock and each other the teams will strive to complete 5 different tasks based on the Our Town Nashville Project.  Each team will quest to see who can help stamp their side of the Giant Portrait fastest.  Prizes awarded!  No cost to enter. Check ozartsnashville.org for sign ups!  Admission is free.

• On Thursday, December 10, 6:30 – 10pm—the official TNT evening— The Our Town Finale Dance Party! – This is it folks! The grand finale of three awesome years of stamping with the city wraps up in one large party! Help us finish our last giant portrait by hitting the floor and dancing on the stamps with us.  DJ Handsome Panther of Sparkle City will be there to help us pump out the jams!  Tickets are $15 and can be purchased atwww.ozartsnashville.org.

In Our Town Nashville, McCloud and his team encouraged a broad diversity of Nashville residents to come to the OTN mobile bike cart—at homeless shelters, police stations, cafes and concert venues, among other locations—and create a portrait using small, simple-shaped rubber stamps. The team collected these images, transformed them into letterpress prints, and shared them with the next round of portrait-makers—creating, in the process, a conversation in print.

In Our Town Together Heroic: The World’s Largest Stamp Portrait Project, Phase II of the undertaking, McCloud and company are taking what they have learned and distilling it into a grand, unified visual celebration of Nashville and the act of collaborative creation. Equipped with specially designed stamps twenty times larger than those used to make Phase I’s self-portraits, the OTN crew is now transforming the personal act of making art into a public performance of the creative process and highlighting the importance of “working together” to create great things. The OZ Arts engagement is one of three Together Heroic events this fall and winter; it follows iterations at Cumberland Park on September 18 & 19, and Main Branch Public Library on October 16 & 17. At OZ Arts, beneath massive canvases created this fall at other OTN events, the artists will each day create a new portrait of the city that will then be installed in the warehouse.

A series of Our Town portraits will be on view in the lounge and warehouse at OZ Arts Nashville, Monday – Thursday, December 7 – 10. A special collection of Our Town portraits will be added to the permanent archives of the Nashville Public Library and digitally on the Our Town website. www.ourtownnashville.org.

Our Town Nashville and Our Town Together Heroic are made possible with support from the Nashville Metro Arts Commission’s Percent for Art Program.

About OZ Arts Nashville

As the newest 501(c)3 contemporary arts institution in the Midsouth Region, OZ Arts’ particular style of programming has begun to transform the cultural landscape of Nashville. Utilizing the venue’s flexibility, OZ Arts presents the work of leading artists from around the world, offering an intimate context for performing and visual art programs that challenge and inspire a diverse range of curious audiences.

OZ Arts also serves as a catalyst for local creativity through a program called TNT (Thursday Night Things).  TNT is a quarterly series of unexpected collaborations with Nashville-based artists from varying creative disciplines.  OZ Arts’ “blank slate” provides a platform onto which these artists can create, develop and present a one-time-only event that would traditionally not be seen in a visual art gallery or theatre.

OZ Arts is located in the former C.A.O. cigar warehouse owned by Nashville’s Ozgener family.  Their generosity provided the seed money that breathed new life into the column-free, 10,000 square-foot space nestled amidst artfully landscaped grounds.

Since it opened in February 2014, OZ Arts Nashville “has fundamentally changed the creative landscape of Music City” (ArtsNash). Under the artistic leadership of Lauren Snelling, its first two-seasons have brought to the city luminaries such as Philip Glass and Tim Fain, Tim Robbins’ The Actors’ Gang, Peter Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Vijay Iyer, Laurie Anderson, Wayne McGregor’s company Random Dance, ETHEL, BANDALOOP, SITI Company, Bang On A Can All-Stars and Kyle Abraham. These programs have consistently played to sold-out audiences and local and national acclaim.

http://www.ozartsnashville.org

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OZ Arts Nashville Media Contact

Nashville press, please contact Amy Atkinson at Amy Atkinson Communications, 615-305-8118, www.Twitter.com/AmyAComm oramy@amyacommunications.com.