







Artist Rocky Horton calls the infamous statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest next to I-65 north of Old Hickory Boulevard “an unredeemable object.” It’s ugly. It’s racist. It was sculpted by Jack Kershaw, attorney for Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin James Earl Ray. But that’s what makes Horton’s first project as a Nashville artist in residence so radical: With “Nashville Bedford Forrest,” Horton is doing the unimaginable — he’s making an unredeemable object great.

“This is a monument that’s been forced on Nashville as a kind of cultural symbol,” Horton says, “and my idea, quite simply, was just to say that if this is going to belong to the people of Nashville, I want it to really belong to the people of Nashville. They should be able to use it as material.”

That’s the concept behind “Nashville Bedford Forrest,” Horton’s interactive art project. Nashvillians can reimagine the despised, poorly designed statue, turning it into something new and different. With help from web designer Kyle Jones, Horton has created a site (nashvillebedfordforrest.com) that contains a photo of the statue along with an interface allowing users to click and drag the statue’s pieces — you can enlarge them, rearrange them or discard them completely. The resulting images are then saved in an online gallery, which Horton says is the real heart of the project.

“When you look at the gallery archive, you start to see that it’s not that any single re-creation of it functions as a picture of Nashville,” says Horton. “But I think that when you look at the whole body — all of these things taken together — you start to see what the public really would do with the image.”

The website is designed to be almost anachronistic, like it was plucked straight out of Geocities in 1998. There are GIFs of flapping Tennessean and American flags and a sparkly background that somehow feels both earnest and irreverent — it’s charming. Horton is a longtime Nashvillian and professor at Lipscomb, and he has an exhibit of Baroque-inspired flower paintings on deck for March at The Arts Company on Fifth Avenue. But the “Nashville Bedford Forrest” project is part of something that’s largely separate from his work in galleries and as an educator. It’s the first part of a series of works Horton is creating as a Nashville artist-in-residency.

“The fact of my life is that I have four kids, a wife and a job,” he says. “What that means, pragmatically, is that I’m not really able to take a traditional artist residency — leaving my family for a summer isn’t an option for me. But I really like what happens in a residency, where there’s this dedicated, plugged-in space to do your work.”

Horton decided that he is indeed an artist-in-residence — and his residence is Nashville. He made it official in November, taking out an ad in the pages of the Scene. The copy read like a straightforward press release: “Rocky Horton is pleased to announce his inaugural Nashville Artist-in-Residence. During this self-declared artist residency, Rocky will create a variety of projects both in and for the city of Nashville and its inhabitants.”

“For this year, I was going to not just be an artist who lives in Nashville, but be an artist in residence in Nashville, to really think about this particular community and my association in this community,” says Horton. “Part of being in residence is being actively engaged in the community. I had these ideas for projects that were very Nashville-specific, and were not really part of the thrust of my main work. They were more community-based projects. So by creating this residency for myself, I was able to create a context for these one-off community-based projects and have them make sense.

“A lot of being an artist,” he continues, “is about giving yourself permission to do stuff. It’s harder than you think.”

At press time, the “Nashville Bedford Forrest” gallery had amassed 141 images, which Horton affectionately calls “Nathans.” Several Nathans have been decapitated, or are riding decapitated horses. There’s an upside-down Nathan. One Nathan is an almost-unrecognizable ball of body parts, both human and horse. Another places sections of the statue inside a large boot, looking something like the cutout animations Terry Gilliam designed for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They’re funny. Somewhere along the way, the power of the statue as a symbol has been diminished. It’s more like a digital Mr. Potato Head than racist iconography.

Horton says he was inspired by Michelangelo’s “David,” and the way that fame has made that piece of art relatively ordinary through familiarity and overexposure.

“It’s become so manipulated that it’s impossible to really appreciate it anymore. It’s become statues and magnets and T-shirts, and chef’s aprons and funny boxer shorts. It’s become completely dissolved as its own artwork. It’s become a newly shaped public phenomenon, like a pop icon.”

And so what would happen, Horton wondered, if Nashvillians took the power away from their own famous statue? What if the I-65 Nathan Bedford Forrest became fodder for funny boxer shorts?

“Instead of trying to get rid of this monument,” Horton says, “what happens if we really publicize this monument and you let us reshape it in the way that we want to see it?

“It becomes part of the public vernacular.”