at David Lusk Gallery through November
Red Grooms and the Creation of the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel
In most of the country, when people think of Red Grooms, they think of New York—his sprawling cityscapes, bustling figures, witty cartoon-like environments, and his “sculpto-pictoramas” that hum with Manhattan energy. But to truly understand him, you have to return (like he has) to Middle Tennessee, where it all began. Born Charles Rogers Grooms in 1937, he grew up in Nashville, absorbing its humor, stories, and cast of characters. That storytelling spirit, more than anything else, animates a great proportion of his works, especially the most iconic work created for his hometown: the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel.
This fall, the David Lusk Gallery (Weho) will spotlight the carousel by presenting original artifacts from its creation—first-round drawings of its whimsical figures, mold forms, and even a new wall drawing. For those who know Grooms mostly as an installation artist, the carousel shows something more: a hometown artist who turned an entire city’s history into a rideable theater of memory.
Growing Up in Nashville
Nashville in the 1940s and 50s was a city in motion, and young Charles “Red” Grooms loved the city. “I saw Nashville as an urban place, ‘the Athens of the South,’ [….] I thought the country was anticultural, and Nashville a metropolis; I had lots of civic pride.” From an early age his creativity was supported here. At ten he enrolled in art classes at the Nashville Children’s Museum. Nashville offered him the stage he would later transform into carousel panels: a city alive with storytellers, musicians, politicians, and everyday folks. As Judith Stein points out, “Hollywood films, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circuses, and the Tennessee State Fair’s Cavalcade of Amusement were the major formative influences of his childhood.”
Unlike artists who fled their hometowns, Grooms always saw New York as an extension of Nashville. He told the New York Times in 1981, “As a kid, I always fantasized about Nashville being New York.” It is wonderous to imagine, in the mid-1950s, Red Grooms was on a $45 weekly retainer for a Thompson Lane frame shop.
He studied at the Arts Institute of Chicago, Nashville’s Peabody College and later at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, MA. While there, he connected with the scene at Yvonne Andersen’s Sun Gallery—her husband, poet Dominic Falcone, gave Grooms his colorful nickname. But even as he absorbed the ideas behind abstract techniques, figurative expressionism and the avant-garde, he carried with him a distinct Nashville sensibility: a love of storytelling, an appreciation for personality, and a touch of theatricality that would later define his paintings.
From the Happenings to the Carousel
In the late 1950s and early 60s, Grooms began to emerge as a unique figure in the art world. While Pop Art was making waves with cool detachment, Grooms’s works expressed warmth and humor. In New York he created a number of “Happenings” on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. These were more intellectual and cerebral than the chemical-infused “Happenings” on the West Coast, yet Grooms managed to fuse the performance with humor. Allan Kaprow, a student of John Cage who coined the term “happening” noted that Grooms was “…a Charlie Chaplin forever dreaming about fire.” (The reference here is connected both to Grooms’s humor and his early fascination with fire.)
After a period focused on film, where his depictions of urban life and humanity could be more animated and humourous, he turned to painting, constructions and scupture. His early site-specific sculptures and “sculpto-pictoramas,” including the famous City of Chicago (1967), are filled with bustling street scenes, storefronts and architecture in amazing detail, and exaggerated figures—less about ironic commentary and more about celebrating the everyday in all its chaos and charm.
In this period, Grooms found a way to merge the immediacy of drawing with the richness of color. He developed a style marked by bold outlines, vivid hues, and a cartoonish sensibility. The shapes and forms articulated action and energy, but the painting held so much theater. Every brushstroke seemed to dance, every figure seemed to be in media-res, somehow almost Baroque. His subjects were always urban and increasingly in New York—yellow taxis darting through traffic, pedestrians in constant motion, cultural icons rendered with affectionate caricature—quickly earned him acclaim. Yet those who know his roots could always see traces of Nashville: the humor of his characters, the warmth of his colors, and the sense that art should speak to everyone, not just the elite.
Tennessee-A complicated relationship
While Grooms spent much of his career in New York, he has never stopped returning to Nashville in spirit and in subject. He has painted the city’s landmarks, musicians, and characters with the same affection that he brings to New York. For an artist who thrives on the energy of place, Tennessee seems to have remained a muse, but not without complications. In 1981, as we have seen, he recognized his childhood naivete in fantisazing “about Nashville being New York.” In 1982, he spoke about the reaction to one of his controversial sculptures, The Shootout, which depicted a cowboy and Indian gunfight. In response to the protests and counterprotests over the installation slated for Denver, Grooms is known to have commented “Denver is beginning to rival Grumpsville, Tennessee as one of the great sourpuss towns.”
Nevertheless, in the 1990s, and at the height of his fame, Grooms created a monumental work titled Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel for Nashville’s Riverfront Park.
Fulfilling his early ambition to create an amusement park ride, the sculptural carousel is full-on Tennessee. Every panel is alive with Tennessee figures—Andrew Jackson, Lulu Clay Naff, Uncle Dave Macon, and Kitty Wells—rendered with humor and flair. His portraits of country music icons also reflect his Nashville identity. As is customary in his style, Grooms’s painted likenesses reveal the quirks and vitality of his subjects, from the twinkle in an eye to the swagger in a stance. These works do more than portray musicians; they celebrate their culture. As Joyce Henri Robinson has noted, while “…the mixture of parody and homage in Grooms’s portaits…charges all his depictions of American popular culture, […] Grooms approaches the world around him as a spectacle filled with novel forms of heroism.”
What distinguishes Red Grooms’s works is his ability to see the world as both spectacle and story. This perspective gives his works their democratic spirit inviting everyone to join in. His depictions are crowded, not exclusive; they are meant to be entered (or ridden), not observed from a distance — they capture not just a likeness but a spirit.
Back to Tennessee in the 2020s
After a long career in New York, Grooms has returned to Middle Tennessee (not Grumpsville mind you, but Beersheba Springs) and he has acquired representation from David Lusk. Recently, he has had an exhibition, It’s All about Flowers, which is made up of still-lives depicting florae on the porch of his Tennessee property during the pandemic. The exhibition offered a chance to see Grooms not only as a national and historical figure but also as a local artist whose career has always been loosely tied to his native Tennessee.
It was interesting and ironic to see the relish with which this city fellow paints nature and, if closely studied, one might also recognize the underlying impact of the pandemic. One of these paintings, Flowers in a Birch Vase, adorns the cover of this magazine. This can also be seen iin his Red Roses. Like a throughline, all the colors, the brightness, contrast and energy of his entire oeuvre are apparent, but you might also recognize the self-reflection, the drive to fill idle hands and his curiosity at the novel heroism in the perseverance of the beauty of things amidst a tragedy — something that puzzled all of us who survived those years.
Returning to the Carousel
By presenting this show, displaying the mold forms and first-round drawings of Red Grooms’s Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel, (one of which can be seen on the inside cover of this magazine) David Lusk Gallery is creating an exhibition that holds immense importance as an artistic and cultural event. Like a Beethoven sketch for a symphony, or an early draft of a Fitzgerald novel, these early materials reveal the creative process of a genius. The thinking behind one of Tennessee’s most celebrated public artworks, offering audiences rare insight into how Grooms transformed initial sketches and raw sculptural forms into the dynamic, full-scale carousel. By presenting the molds and preliminary drawings in a gallery context, viewers can witness the intersection of imagination, craftsmanship, and regional storytelling, tracing the evolution of characters and scenes from concept to finished work. Such an exhibition not only deepens appreciation for Grooms’s artistry but also preserves and shares a vital chapter in Tennessee’s cultural heritage. While the carousel itself has remained in storage at the Tennessee State Museum, from time-to-time interest in bringing it out bubbles up. Maybe this exhibit will push the idea over the top? If we can afford to build a new football stadium and a Tesla tunnel to the airport, surely we can build something for this!
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Joseph E. Morgan is a father of two, husband, teacher and recovering guitarist in Middle Tennessee.
