Build Better Tables, Metro Arts’ inaugural temporary public art exhibition, focused on food issues to examine urban development and understand the effects of gentrification on community health and wellness.

Breaking away from our typical site-based artworks commissioned in conjunction with the city’s capital projects, Metro Arts invited curators to submit concept proposals. A panel of community members and arts professionals selected Nicole Caruth to curate an exhibition of nine connected projects that would run through spring and summer 2018 at multiple locations across Nashville. Under Caruth’s direction, nine eclectic projects by local and national artists were created and installed at publicly accessibly sites such as bus stops, community centers, church lawns and the public health department, advancing the aim of Metro Arts that every Nashvillian experience a creative city.

The artists’ projects included an outdoor bread oven and neighborhood hearth, a bicycle rickshaw for fresh-produce delivery and food education, seed libraries promoting community action for food sovereignty, brass-and-sugar sculptures concerning Black maternal mortality, and community dinner and discussion events addressing the role of food in discriminatory development. Together, Nashvillians broke bread and broke down barriers to understanding one another while examining the social and economic forces that influence food access and culture.
Metro Arts’ decision to present a citywide, temporary public art exhibition stemmed from our Public Art Community Investment Plan, released in 2017, where we positioned temporary art as a tool for reimagining and expanding the city’s work with in public art. With Build Better Tables, we encouraged Nashville to rethink what public art is, and in doing so, we convened important, difficult conversations about the effects our city’s rapid development is having on its diverse population.