Roll Call IV: Ten Voices on Where Serious Painting Gets Made
Last updated: September 28, 2026
In short: Less than it used to. For most of the last century a painter who wanted to be taken seriously moved to New York, London or Paris; this October the director of Frieze London describes her fair as giving serious attention to artists "wherever they are based." The address still shapes who sees the work first. It no longer decides whether the work is good — and it never did decide that. What a collector can check instead is the work, the years behind it, and the maker.
Why does a painter's address still come up at all?
Because for a long time it was a reasonable shortcut. The galleries, the critics, the collectors and the institutions sat in a handful of cities, and a painter who stayed away from them was usually a painter nobody downstream would hear about. A buyer asking "where is this artist based?" was really asking "has anyone I trust seen this yet?"
Nashville has lived on both sides of that shortcut. Robert Ryman was born here in 1930 and moved to New York in 1952; the Barbican in London opens a major retrospective of his work on 8 October, the first significant UK exhibition of it in over thirty years. William Edmondson never left. He carved limestone in his backyard in the Edgehill neighbourhood, and in 1937 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a one-person show — the first it had given an African-American artist. Nashville's Cheekwood now holds the largest collection of his sculpture. One career needed the move. The other needed the work to travel without him.
What changed in how the art world talks about geography?
The language at the top of the market, for a start. Announcing this year's fair, Eva Langret, director of Frieze London, described the range of galleries on view as "an argument for greater equity: for giving space, visibility and serious attention to artists and galleries whose work is advancing contemporary practice, wherever they are based." Her counterpart at Frieze Masters, Emanuela Tarizzo, put the historical version of the same idea in one sentence: "Frieze Masters has always resisted the idea of a single art history."
Museums are doing the same work in the other direction — looking back at painters the centre overlooked. Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas, is currently showing Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work, drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Its co-curator Josie Johnson notes that Moses' career "was grounded in a deep love for her craft, but it was often polarizing even during her lifetime," and Larissa Randall says the museum wants to introduce the work to younger audiences "by foregrounding her artistic skill and entrepreneurial prowess." Neither sentence mentions a city.
And artists who sell outside the capitals describe the exchange in terms of people, not postcodes. Reian Williams, who won the People's Choice award at the Crystal Bridges Art Fair last year, said the conversations with collectors there "have been just as rewarding as the sales, often leading to lasting relationships that continue well beyond the event itself."
What did painters and writers far from the centre say about it?
The sharpest version belongs to a poet. Patrick Kavanagh, writing from rural Ireland in 1952, drew a distinction most people blur: "Parochialism and provincialism are opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own, he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the great metropolis towards which his eyes are ever turned has to say on any subject." The parochial mind, he went on, "is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his own parish."
That is the useful line for a buyer, because it relocates the question. The risk was never that a painter lived somewhere small. The risk was a painter — or a collector — who waited to be told what they were looking at.
Grant Wood said it with a farmer's economy: "All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." James Joyce, who left Dublin and then wrote about nothing else, told a younger writer: "You are an Irishman and you must write in your own tradition. Borrowed styles are not good." The essayist Scott Russell Sanders gave the reason it matters: "If you are not yourself placed, then you wander the world like a sightseer with no gauge for measuring what you see."
And Grandma Moses — who began painting in earnest in her late seventies and had her first solo exhibition at eighty — described the whole of her long life, farm and paintings together, simply as "a good day's work."
What should a collector weigh instead of a zip code?
Four things, none of them geographic.
The work in the room. Stand in front of it, or ask for video of it moving through real light. The years behind it — how long the painter has been at it and whether you can see the practice develop. Consistency — whether many paintings by the same hand read as one body of work. The maker's reachability — whether the person who made it will still answer a question about framing, installing or moving it years from now.
A painter in a capital can offer all four. So can a painter anywhere else. The address tells you who has already seen the work; it tells you nothing about the work itself.
Where this studio sits
I paint in Nashville, and have for over twenty years — oil and mixed media, built in layers until the surface settles. I sell directly, to collectors and to the design trade, with no gallery in between. The paintings have gone into rooms across the country, including a commission for a New York residence that was published in Architectural Digest, and they are made in exactly the same place as the ones that hang a few miles from the studio.
Kavanagh would have called that a parish. It is the only honest place I know to paint from.
Frequently asked questions
Does it matter where an artist is based when buying original art?
Less than it used to. Location shapes who sees a painter's work first, but it does not decide the quality of the work. Judge the painting itself, the years of practice behind it, the consistency of the body of work, and whether the artist will still be reachable after the sale.
Do serious collectors buy from artists outside New York or London?
Yes. Major fairs now describe their programmes as giving serious attention to artists wherever they are based, and museums such as Crystal Bridges are re-examining artists who worked far from the traditional centres.
Is buying directly from an artist in another city safe?
It can be, if the studio is transparent. Ask for video of the finished work in natural light, clear payment and shipping terms, and a direct line to the artist for questions after delivery.
What Nashville artists have been recognised nationally?
William Edmondson, the Nashville sculptor, received a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937. Robert Ryman, born in Nashville in 1930, is the subject of a major Barbican retrospective opening in London in October 2026.
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