Letters to the Mayor: Nashville

The upcoming exhibition Letters to the Mayor: Nashville  – organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture in partnership with the Nashville Civic Design Center (NCDC) will open on November 30th, 2017 in the Community Space at NCDC with a reception from 5:00 - 7:30pm. The project was initiated in 2014 by Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and has now been replicated in more than 15 cities around the world with Nashville being the first US city outside of New York to participate. Letters to the Mayor: Nashville invites a selected group of local and international architects to write a letter to the Honorable Mayor Megan Barry. The letters will also be delivered to Mayor Megan Barry. The letters will articulate from an architect’s perspective some of the pressing questions and desires that play an important role in the physical and political dimensions and decisions that drive the making of cities. Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political, and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. In their pursuit to design the next economically driven cultural-iconic-touristic object, an increasing number of architects, as well as political leaders, have neglected to recognize the potential of design to participate in the advancement of public life. Letters to the Mayor: Nashville questions this dynamic, and invites local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of city officials, and simultaneously into the public consciousness.

The exhibition will be at the Nashville Civic Design Center from Dec 1st to Feb 3rd and a featured stop on the Downtown Art Crawl circuit for the duration of the exhibit with the closing night falling on the February Art Crawl. All letters submitted will become part of the ongoing international archive of Letters to the Mayor and upcoming publication, edited by Storefront for Art and Architecture.