Ghost Ballet for East Bank Machineworks

Installed on the East Bank Greenway of the Cumberland River in 2007, Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks stands one-hundred feet tall, one hundred feet wide, and sixty feet deep as the Metro Nashville Arts Commission’s inaugural public art piece. Major sculptor and conceptual artist Alice Aycock was selected by a nine-member citizen committee from an initial one-hundred-and-five artists to create a piece to focus attention on the river, attract pedestrians both day and night, and foster a collective memory based on place.

Aycock’s Ghost Ballet rests on a gantry crane, used to build and launch barges, once owned by the Nashville Bridge Company. Red-painted trusses twist upward from the base to form a disconnected sphere, representing the transformation of the bank area from an industrial past into its recreational present. Aycock describes her work as static animation, seeming to change and suggest a sort of dance as you move around the sculpture. The work perceptually extends Broadway, drawing the viewer in, across the river, and then visually pushing them back to see the greater environment.

Aycock, known for her site-specific sculptures that relate the art and environment, gained national attention for Ghost Ballet when Art in America’s Annual Guide selected it as one of the top pieces of public art in the nation. In 2010, Americans for the Arts named Ghost Ballet one of the best fifty public projects of the last fifty years in their Public Art network’s Year in Review Retrospective.

If you take a short walk further down First Avenue, keeping the river on your left, you will find another public artwork commissioned by the Metro Nashville Art Commission. Laura Haddard and Tom Drugan’s Light Meander, installed in 2015, is a forty-five foot tall sculpture of stainless steel and color-changing LED strip lights, which create a ribbon of light. Its curved form is based on the bends of the Cumberland River as it passes through Davidson County. Located at the end of Demonbreun Street, the sculpture takes advantage of the dynamic views from many nearby vantage points, and its reflectivity and color make it interactive and always changing throughout the day and night.

The very top of the sculpture features a stainless steel fabric of reflective metal guitar picks. On the top portion of the city-facing side of the sculpture, color changing LED strip lights illuminate a series of horizontally inset acrylic rods, creating a textured ribbon of electric light at night. At the lowest bend, there is a seating area of durable hardwood allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the undulating form, reflections, and colored light.

Congratulations, you’ve finished the Downtown Public Art and Murals Tour! We hope you enjoyed learning about Nashville’s dynamic art scene. For more tours, please visit Nashville Sites. If you have not already walked down toward Light Meander, continue down First Avenue. Turn RIGHT on Demonbreun to return to your vehicle.