Long celebrated as Music City, Nashville is now making noise for a different kind of creativity, one that’s painted, pasted, and splashed across its walls and galleries. From bold murals in The Gulch to intimate gallery shows in Wedgewood-Houston, the city’s art scene is growing louder, prouder, and more experimental. And this fall, a major new exhibit is amplifying that evolution.
On November 14, CASS Contemporary will debut Tristan Eaton: Lately, the world-renowned artist’s first-ever solo show in Nashville—and a defining moment for the city’s emerging identity as a contemporary art hub.
Tristan Eaton’s name carries serious weight in the art world. A Los Angeles native and former graffiti prodigy, Eaton has made a career out of blurring the lines between fine art and street culture. His massive freehand murals light up cities from Paris to Shanghai, and his work sits in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum.
For Nashville, landing an artist of his caliber feels symbolic. Eaton’s colorful, high-energy pieces have long embodied creativity without borders, a spirit that resonates with a city built on collaboration and reinvention.
“This collection is very personal,” Eaton says of Lately. “These works use gallows humor and spray paint to explore the impact of love, loss, and death on our daily lives.”
Each piece in Lately—many of them diptychs painted on wood and paper—feels like a visual conversation between chaos and calm, humor and heartbreak. It’s classic Eaton: layered, emotional, and impossible to ignore.
Artist Tristan Eaton
Bringing Eaton’s work to Nashville is the kind of move that defines CASS Contemporary’s mission. Founded by Cassie and Jake Greatens, CASS has spent years bridging the gap between global artistry and local accessibility.
“We’ve followed Tristan’s career and been close friends for years,” Cassie says. “We’re thrilled to bring his work to Nashville. His ability to balance raw energy with thoughtful storytelling makes this exhibit especially powerful.”
CASS isn’t just a gallery—it’s a creative connector. With roots in Tampa and a growing footprint in Tennessee, the gallery is known for showcasing artists who push boundaries while staying grounded in authenticity. They’ve worked on everything from acquisitions of works by iconic artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring to emerging voices who are shaping what contemporary art means today.
That approach fits Nashville’s evolving identity perfectly: confident, effortlessly real, and unapologetically original.
Eaton’s arrival marks more than just a new show; it’s a sign of what Nashville’s visual arts scene has become. Once overshadowed by its musical reputation, the city has quietly been cultivating a vibrant, inclusive, and intensely local arts ecosystem.
You can feel it in the curated chaos of Wedgewood-Houston’s monthly art crawl, where visitors move from warehouse galleries to pop-up installations. You can see it in the massive murals transforming 12South and Germantown into open-air galleries. And you can sense it in how local artists are merging traditional Southern storytelling with bold, urban experimentation.
It’s no longer about country music twang and cowboy boots—it’s about color, culture, and connection.
And while street art and Southern culture might seem worlds apart, they share something important: storytelling. Whether it’s a song or a spray-painted wall, it’s all about expressing lived experience.
Eaton’s career proves that artistic boundaries are made to be crossed. Before his museum acclaim, he designed the now-iconic Dunny and Munny vinyl toys for Kidrobot—a project that merged collectible design with pop art sensibility. Later, he founded Thunderdog Studios and collaborated with brands such as Nike, Hublot, SpaceX, and Universal Studios.
He’s also one of the few contemporary artists to hold official licensing partnerships with Marvel and Universal Studios, which is a testament to how his work resonates across audiences.
In Lately, Eaton brings that same sense of accessibility to Nashville: art that’s layered and conceptual, yet instantly relatable. It’s graffiti meets gallery, Los Angeles meets the Lower South, and it works.
Explore more about Eaton’s work at tristaneaton.com.
The timing feels right. Nashville’s population boom has brought not only new residents but new perspectives. With the city’s skyline changing by the month, its cultural infrastructure is catching up, and the appetite for modern art is real.
Public installations like the Frist Art Museum’s rotating exhibitions, the Nashville Walls Project, and local collectives like Eleven Eleven Studio are all pushing the city forward. While private galleries like CASS are giving residents and visitors alike the connection they crave, whether it’s a massive mural downtown or an intimate piece on their living room wall.
Eaton’s Lately might be the headline, but it’s also a mirror reflecting Nashville’s growing confidence as a cultural capital that’s more than music—a city embracing creative risk, where Southern charm meets global perspective.
As Eaton’s layered faces and fractured forms fill the walls of CASS Contemporary from November 14, 2025, through February 15, 2026, they’ll do more than decorate a gallery. They’ll invite Nashville to see itself—bold, complex, and in motion.
Tristan Eaton: Lately CASS Contemporary, Nashville November 14, 2025 – February 15, 2026 Opening Reception: November 14, 8–10 PM (Free and open to the public)
