Soundwaves Gallery

Aaron Grayum received his BFA from Middle Tennessee State University in 1999 and has been painting professionally since 2005. His work has been published in The New England Review and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as featured regularly on the hit television show Nashville. He has been commissioned by Nashville Children’s Theatre, Vanderbilt Hospital, Nashville Soccer Club, 5th + Broadway, BCycle, African Leadership, Breakthrough T1D, and more. In 2020 he was named one of the top three Art Creators of the Year by Nashville Lifestyles magazine, and three years later won Whimsical Artist of the Year in the National Art Comes Alive competition. Aaron and his wife Michelle own The Gray Umbrella, a freelance art & design company operating out of their home studio in Fairview, Tennessee.

Aidan Sullivan is a Nashville native and mixed-media artist sharing his lino-cut prints with art enjoyers of all ages. He has been featured in Nashville Arts Magazine and the Frist Community Partner Art Show, at St. Bartholomew’s annual Arts and Crafts fair for four years in a row. He enjoys using his art to explore his passion for comics, cartoons, and icons. When not drawing, Aidan enjoys biking, watching films and trivia with good company.

AL Knutson, is an artist based in East Nashville, Tennessee, where she creates out of her home. Her practice centers on large-scale acrylic and soft pastel paintings, though she frequently explores a range of mediums. AL is driven by a passion for experimentation, constantly developing new patterns, techniques, and tools tailored to each project. While her work is typically themeless, it gravitates toward the creation of imaginary places and their inhabitants, emphasizing color, and a sense of vast, immersive space.

Alison Fullerton is a contemporary artist specializing in painting with encaustic wax. Fullerton’s work has been exhibited at galleries and museums in the US and Europe. Her work is in public collections at Vanderbilt University, Texas Women’s University, and the National Museum of the US Air Force. Alison has had solo exhibitions at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville (2024) and at Arts in the Airport in Nashville (2023). Her work has been featured in publications and media including Number Inc, Wax Fusion, and Nashville’s News Channel 5- WTVF. Alison lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Anna Wallace is a Nashville based watercolor artist whose work centers on the expressive language of hands. Growing up with a brother with cerebral palsy made her deeply aware of how hands reveal individuality, strength, and the many ways people move through the world. This early awareness grew into a heightened curiosity and appreciation for the quiet stories held in every gesture. Today, Anna paints hands as a form of portraiture and communication, exploring how they express intimacy, struggle, care, and resilience beyond spoken words. You can connect with Anna Wallace through her Youtube Channel, awalla Studio, or visit her website awallastudio.com

IMGRNT serves as the conceptual and creative framework of Arash Shoushtari (b. 1987), an Iranian-born American artist whose practice is rooted in a transdisciplinary approach encompassing the spectrum of two to four-dimensional media. Shoushtari’s work interrogates themes inherent to the immigrant experience, refracting complex socio-cultural narratives through multifaceted media. His visual works, often studies in perception and optical distortion, employ modernized pattern language that evokes the symbolic lexicon of Persian textiles. These pieces serve as a semiotic exploration of diasporic identity, grounded in the storytelling traditions embedded within Persian rug-making. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 2010), Shoushtari’s work has been exhibited on both national and international stages.

Ashleigh York currently creates abstract art in Nashville, TN. Bright colors and how colors and shapes create abstraction are the driving creative forces behind her work. With a unique artistic voice and a playful and evocative exploration of planet Earth’s color palette, Ashleigh strives to inspire through inventive and experimental work using layers to create texture. She also incorporates recycled materials into her practice as much as possible and partner with local organizations to help promote sustainable practices and reuse.

Bethany Primrose is a contemporary surrealist artist. A native of Nashville, TN, she received her BFA from Belmont University and has worked in institutions such as the First Museum and Hatch Show Print. She’s been creating art in one form or another all her life, exploring the mediums of photography, printmaking, graphic design and all things paint. She currently works in oils with the human figure as her primary subject. She is currently exploring the idea of duality in her works, which will be the theme of her upcoming solo show at the Janice Mason Art Museum in Kentucky. The exploration is not only a thematic pursuit, but also a formal one. She plays with contrasts in her compositions—dark against light, strong against subtle, clarity against the surreal. Bethany has recently shown at Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and The Tomato Art Fest, where she won the ‘You’re So Nashville’ award.

Bradley M’s work unfolds on canvas, where layers for paint converge to form intricate depictions of segmented buildings, machines, trees, cityscapes, and superheroes. Each piece is meticulously divided by lines, dashes, crosses, and vibrant pools of color, creating a mechanized landscape rich with emotion. With boundless enthusiasm, Bradley employs color to express a tapestry of emotion. He crafts immersive worlds, where landscapes and figures emerge from a dynamic interplay of lines and vivid hues. This not only reflects Bradley’s artistic vision but also resonates with his own inner power, peace, and resilience as both an artist and an individual. The artist is part of the visual arts program at Friends Life Community (FLC), an organization that provides opportunities for individuals with developmental disabilities to grow, develop, and be active members of the community. Through FLC’s person-driven program, the artists are encouraged to explore their creativity and share their work with others.

Born and raised in Nashville, DaShawn Lewis is a self-taught photographer whose passion for photography traces back to his childhood. He focuses his work—images for which he coined the term “Life Photography”—on life happenings and promoting youth arts. Alongside his creative peers, Lewis collaborates on workshops and exhibitions with the Edgehill Brighter Days Program in South Nashville under the leadership of Nancy Crutcher. Through his community outreach, DaShawn connects and collaborates with local artists to strive together towards building a stronger arts community in Nashville.

David Greaves is an artist and civil engineer based in East Nashville. Throughout his education and professional life, he has maintained a consistent practice of visual art across several mediums. He has been working in Nashville since 2014 and is continually inspired by Tennessee’s natural environment, the city’s urban and architectural forms, and the personal resonate details of life.

Currently living in the middle Tennessee area, Donna is living her best life as a contemporary abstract artist. After a 27-year corporate career in Information Technology and during a period as a real estate investor, she discovered her true passion through a watercolor workshop, thus beginning her artistic journey. While she goes back from time to time to her first love of watercolor, she primarily creates layered, experimental contemporary artwork with acrylics and various mediums, inks, wax crayons, oil, pastels, colored pencils, graphite, charcoal and/or collage paper. Drawing inspiration primarily from nature, music and life experiences, she allows her inner voice and emotions to guide her painting process. Each painting is intended to bring about emotion and connection. Her art may be found in shops and galleries in TN and AL, as well as private and corporate collections across the U.S.

Emily Taubman is an artist, mother, and a proud NSC season ticket holder since the earliest days of Nashville SC. Emily fell in love with art when she was very young always inspired by her mother’s creativity with turning every day and foraged items into art. While watercolor is her preferred technique, she has demonstrated proficiency in many art forms, often using nature to craft her works. A fondness for nature and its peaceful moments, Emily’s art often displays a serene, simple calm but with a powerful statement. Emily’s work was featured in the 2025 Soundwaves Gallery and in several local coffee shops around middle TN.

Erin Anderson maintains an active studio practice in her home studio in Franklin, TN focused on mixed media and collage-based work.Working with layered materials, texture, and vintage ephemera to explore memory, time, and personal narrative. Her process combines intuitive mark-making, charcoal, paint, and dimensional surfaces to create work that balances abstraction with storytelling. The resulting pieces invite close viewing and reflect an interest in history, materiality, and emotional resonance. Erin’s work has been featured in arts exhibitions and pop ups across Tennessee as well as in Georgia and Alabama, and she creates original and commissioned works for private collectors.

Esther Hill lives in southeast Nashville, Tennessee and has Midwestern roots. She exhibits most recently across Wisconsin including Madison, Mineral Point, Sturgeon Bay and Wausau. She has artworks in private collections as far as Texas and is a founding member of Proper Maid Women’s Art Collective in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Esther works primarily in oil paint often on metal leaf and occasionally works in fiber and printmaking. Her subject matter fluctuates with her surroundings and ranges from nature to agriculture to urban spaces. Esther studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in Florence, Italy and received an undergraduate degree in studio art from Trinity Christian College in 2006. She is a brain tumor survivor since 2021 and now travels extensively with her husband and beagle mix Hally.

Heather Hillhouse’s experiences owning her own photography business have been incredibly varied. From pro wrestling, to lawyer cons, aluminum conferences, and countless others. If you asked her as a kid what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said a Disney animator. She wanted to create things that she loved and that others would love. She does that now with her photography, and she is in love with the work. Every gig or outing with her camera (the paid gigs and the ones she does on her own time) are just another opportunity of observing people, lights, moments, emotions that have the potential to change her, and to capture a decent photo. After 30+ years of shooting and 14 years in business, it still feels like magic.

Javier Hill has always been a creative person but he didn’t get into painting until his late 20s. Music has always been what he loved from producing to doing music for short films (which is what he really wanted to do). He lost the love for it but still wanted to create, so one random day he decided to go to an art store to buy the basic item to paint a picture. The picture didn’t come out as well as he had hoped but he knew that as a creative person he would figure it out eventually. As time went on he found various ways that shaped his process and he is still learning. Fast forward to the present he is in a space where he fully loves to create and just wants the world to see the ideas that come from his mind.

Jon Crisp carves portraits into wood from the lumberyard where he works. He takes unremarkable commonplace woods and creates works of art just as his subjects have taken the raw elements of the circumstances into which they were born and rendered the art of their lives. Jon began his journey as a working artist at the farmer’s market in Nashville. He has since been honored to have his work displayed alongside that of some of our greatest artists and accepted into some highly selective juried exhibitions.

If you begin to study works of Joshua Lewis, whether it be a sculpture, assemblage, or a copper repoussé, you will discover a full array of materials and techniques used in the processes of creating his work. The art for Joshua Lewis starts and ends entirely with the process of selecting materials, cutting and sanding, molding and shaping, even the assembling of those materials becomes actual art as Joshua describes. The focus on the creative process fuels the inspiration behind his work. He suggests the final outcome is the byproduct of exploring and utilizing the imagination to create. Joshua’s artistic background is comprised of abstract wood sculptures along mixed media collages and copper repoussé. Joshua studied at Tennessee State University obtaining a BFA in Studio Art concentrating in sculpture. He remains a full time artist and instructor in his studio in Gallatin, TN and participates in local art shows.

Kate Ferrell is a mixed media artist who creates mindful, intuitive paintings that capture the movement & emotion of the natural world. Her love for creating landscapes and botanicals was shaped by carefree childhood summers in the Great Smoky Mountains and by her mother’s garden. Her connection to the outdoors and her part time social work practice offer glimpses of both the beauty in nature and the quiet dignity of every person. Her art provides space to process what feels heavy, give voice to emotions beyond words, and share the sense of awe she discovers in the world with others. Originally from Knoxville, Kate is now based in Nashville, TN where she lives with her family. She has exhibited and sold paintings across Nashville and the Southeast, sharing her belief in art’s ability to inspire and bring people together.

Keith Josia’s art is his own self-expression. He uses art as a way to personify figurative language and concepts and depict the conversations that he has with himself. He uses shapes and colors to reflect the different perceptions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and opinions that he has and how they look within his own imagination. He is influenced by the sights and sounds of the world around him. Growing up Keith was always inspired by music and language. Hip-hop, rock N roll, jazz, gospel, country and blues were all a huge part of his upbringing in Memphis. Along with music he was always fascinated with words. He loves words and how they sound and the way you can say something in a different language.

LeAndra Crystal is a Nashville-based multidisciplinary artist, muralist, and certified Therapeutic Art Life Coach whose work centers connection, community, and shared humanity. Working across painting, glass, mixed media, and large-scale public art, her practice explores themes of belonging, growth, and the ways people are shaped by place and one another. LeAndra’s visual language blends expressive linework, layered color, and organic forms, often drawing inspiration from nature and human relationships as metaphors for resilience and interdependence. Her work has been featured in public art projects, community activations, and exhibitions throughout Nashville and beyond, with a strong focus on art as a tool for reflection and collective healing. Through both her creative and coaching practices, LeAndra is committed to creating work that is approachable, emotionally resonant, and rooted in the lived experiences of diverse communities.

Lyn Stevens is a self-taught photographer based in Nashville whose work is inspired by the evolving visual identity of Music City. Before turning to photography, she worked in country radio as a music director and on-air personality. Her interviews with legendary country artists are permanently in the digital archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Her work has been featured on multiple musical albums, in Billboard Magazine, and on the live telecast of the CMA Awards. In addition, her work has been exhibited in the Soundwaves Gallery at GEODIS Park and has received Honorable Mentions in juried art exhibitions, and she is a 2025 graduate of the Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Program through the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville. Blending fine art and documentary style, Stevens creates images that serve as both documentation and memory, preserving the heart of music as it unfolds.

Melodie Provenzano lives in the countryside of Nashville, Tennessee, painting objects from direct observation. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1996 and has exhibited in group shows at institutions including the Brattleboro Museum, Vermont; the Chelsea Art Museum, New York City; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Long Island, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Lyons Wier Gallery and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York City; Goya Contemporary, Baltimore; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago; and the University School of Nashville. In 2022, she was honored to present a retrospective exhibition, Greatest Hits, at Willow Oak Center for Arts and Learning in Springfield, Tennessee. Her continually expanding traveling exhibition, Seeing Oneself in Others, was shown at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 2025. Provenzano also shares her creative practice globally on YouTube and releases music under the pseudonym Connie Acher.

Michael Ray Nott began his art career in Austin, Texas as a graphic artist. His work appears in a number of poster retrospectives from that era, including the books, The Art of Rock (1987, Abbeville Press) and Homegrown (2015,Texas Monthly Press). During that same time Michael was privileged to study photography under the legendary Garry Winogrand who made a profound impression on him through his philosophy of photography. Michael’s early work in music and street art has come full circle and found its place in his current work in street photography, capturing the zeitgeist of this remarkable time and place in Nashville.

Nadine Shillingford is a Nashville-based artist who works primarily with charcoal on paper but also enjoys creating mixed media pieces using mediums such as acrylic and reused materials. She was born on the island of Dominica but has considered Nashville her home since 2013. Nadine has a doctoral degree in computer science and is a cybersecurity data analytics engineer. Her work can be seen in exhibits around the Nashville area and beyond. She is an author and teaches art classes on demand. She is the proud mom to Hailey who is a student at Yale University. When she’s not working and creating, she hangs out with her brown dog named Lola and her friends from @bluehousecreatives. Her work can be seen in @charcoalattebynadine on Instagram.

Nancy VanReece is an accomplished abstract painter, printmaker, and photographer whose work reflects a lifelong commitment to creativity, observation, and community. Her paintings and prints have been collected by institutions including Vanderbilt University and Arizona State University, as well as private collections across North America. Known for dynamic energy, layered textures, and nuanced color, her abstract work found a long-term home on Nashville’s Music Row, where it resonated with artists, executives, and collectors alike. In 2015, VanReece’s studio became the headquarters for her successful campaign to the Nashville Metro Council, where she served for eight years. During this period, she expanded her artistic practice into photography, developing a distinctive eye for street and landscape imagery through mobile camera technology. Her photographs, like her paintings, reveal beauty in subtle details and fleeting moments. Today, she offers her work to clients nationwide while remaining deeply rooted in Nashville’s creative community.

Born and raised in Guatemala, Nicole began painting at age twelve, developing a lifelong fascination with the tactile dimensions of mixed media. Soccer has always been a primary rhythm in her life, from playing goalkeeper in her youth to dedicatedly following the World Cup. After a period of mourning following the loss of her mother—the greatest champion of her creative pursuits—Nicole rediscovered her passion for the sport upon moving to Nashville in 2024. Now a season ticket member and proud “Brigada de Oro” supporter, she translates her artistic skills into the large-scale tifos that ignite GEODIS Park. Her current work is a full-circle tribute to this journey; both submission pieces were painted using the very brushes used to create the supporter tifos. Nicole’s art serves as a bridge between her international roots and her new home, celebrating the beautiful game as a catalyst for healing and Nashville’s global spirit.

Omari Booker is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN and Los Angeles, CA. Omari studied Mathematics and other more traditional curricula before earning his B.S. in Graphic Design from Tennessee State University with a focus in studio art. Oil paintings are Omari’s predominant medium. Public art is a consistent part of his creative practice as well. Storytelling in the form of poetry, prose, and children’s books are also creative outlets. Omari takes a process-oriented approach to art making. The philosophy that undergirds Omari’s work is FREEDOM THROUGH ART and he aspires to create work that communicates to his audience their unique and intrinsic ability to be free.

Sarah Arace is an expressionistic artist working across drawing, painting, and live chalk art. Raised in Huntington, West Virginia, her creative path was shaped by early independence and a commitment to self-acceptance. Her work explores vulnerability, strength, and shared humanity through personal storytelling and a reverence for imperfection. Now based in Nashville, TN, Sarah leads adult classes and workshops emphasizing process, presence, and play while creating commissioned work that sustains her practice. She views artmaking as essential—a way to clear her head, solve problems, and build connection. Sarah has exhibited locally, including a solo show at the Franklin Enrichment Center in 2022. In 2025, she received a Metro Arts grant to lead Seeing HER in Strangers, a workshop offering full scholarships to 21 women and inviting participants to recognize beauty in themselves and others. She lives in Nashville with her husband and their bloodhound, Etta James.

Sarah Clinton is a Nashville-based painter whose work explores memory, connection, and the haptic experience of everyday life. Her sensitivity and perspective, shaped in part by her years as a caregiver, draws her to figures, portraits, and landscapes that hold quiet emotional weight. Working from life and in the studio, she creates dynamic compositions of paint, fabric, and paper, reimagining familiar scenes from a fresh perspective. She regularly showcases her work in exhibitions, with pieces featured in GEODIS Park’s Soundwaves Gallery and most recently at the 2024 Flying Solo Exhibition at Nashville International Airport. She serves on the board of The Chestnut Group, is a member of the Nashville Painters Salon, and was one of 12 artists selected for the inaugural Arcade Arts Residency program (October 2024–June 2025) in the historic Arcade building in Nashville, TN.

Trisha Peña is an original abstract artist based in Nashville, Tennessee. She came to the visual art world later in life by way of music, performing, and writing. She is a self-taught artist who fell in love with the medium by literally painting the walls of her house with invigorating and sensual treatments. Known for saying that she cannot draw a straight line, abstract work with acrylics is her most common medium, with an affinity for markedly textured canvases. A subset of work called “Team Spirit Reimaged” is comprised of abstract works using the official colors of sports teams, giving fans an alternative to logos and primary colors, displaying their favorite team colors in a more subtle and unique way. Her paintings have been displayed in the Geodis Park Soundwaves Gallery and on exhibition at the world-class Frist Art Museum.