March in Galleries: The work of John Guider, Peach McComb, Brenda Butka, and Marla Faith.

In March the Janet Levine March Gallery will feature the work of John Guider, an internationally recognized photographer and author living in Nashville. His work has been shown in museums throughout the country as well as being in the Art in the Embassies program for world-wide showings. Guider received an Emmy for his latest project retracting John Donelson’s thousand-mile journey to the founding of Nashville. A companion book, “The Voyage of the Adventure,” relating that journey in his handmade 14-foot non-motorized boat was just released by the Vanderbilt University Press.

Guider had been looking for a name for his hand-built motorless rowing boat when he came across a plaque by Nashville’s courthouse. The plaque described the founding of Nashville by John Donelson and mentioned Donelson’s boat – The Adventure. In the Fall of 2016, fascinated with Donelson’s story, and after naming his own boat “The Adventure II,” Guider set out on the journey. The exhibition includes, in chronological order, some of the many portraits of nature John Guider documented on his trip. He gives us a glimpse into the views beholden by a group of settlers atop a forty-foot flat boat in the winter of 1779.

The JLMG2 Gallery will feature the work of Peach McComb. McComb was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and after careers in the military and the corporate world, became a full-time artist and teacher in 2016. She is an impressionist, working in acrylic, watercolor, oil, and pastels. Although she has had no formal art education, McComb studied with several acclaimed artists who helped inform her career as an artist. Her gallery and studio reside in Old Hickory, Tennessee

The Sig Held Gallery will feature the work of Brenda Butka. Butka was born in Mexico to missionary parents and grew up in northern California.

In mid-life she took a drawing class at Watkins and has been drawing and painting ever since. Her work has won awards in TAL juried shows, and is in collections across the country, including Vanderbilt. She has had solo shows at Vanderbilt

Hospital and Converge, where her on-the-street drawings during the Poor People’s Campaign’s Nashville demonstrations were featured, along with her own poetry, in “Drawing the Resistance.” Butka also is a published poet, with two collections, “Little Marrowbone: Altered Geography” and “Drawing the Resistance.” She and her husband, Tom John, live in the Bells Bend area of Nashville, where they have raised three daughters and fostered an organic farm community.

The Senior Lounge Gallery features the work of Marla Faith. Faith grew up in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. She attended Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley, and The Kansas City Art Institute, before receiving her BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MS in Museum Leadership from Bank Street College in New York City. Faith has directed art education programs at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Guggenheim Museum, Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY, and Cheekwood in Nashville. Since moving from New York to Nashville in 1990, she has had long term positions teaching art and art history at Currey Ingram Academy, Eakin Elementary, and Harpeth Hall School. Shorter teaching assignments include USN, Templeton Academy, O’More College of Art, and currently the Waldorf Homeschool group, and private adult lessons. The title of her current exhibit is The Female Spirit: Figures, Real and Imaginary.

The House Gallery continues to feature the Under One Roof collaborative exhibit.

The Art Reception will be Wednesday, March 15th from 6 – 8pm.

The Exhibition Dates are March 2nd - 29th.

The exhibitions are free and open to the public. Attendees will need sign in at the front desk. For more information, contact the GJCC at 615.354-1699, Curator Carrie Mills at carrie@nashvillejcc.org, or go to www.nashvillejcc.org.