Arcade Arts Residency Showcased at Belmont

Works from inaugural residency — including pieces by Mandy Rogers Horton — explore how creativity flourishes in community

Over the course of nine months, the second floor of Nashville’s historic Arcade pulsed with creativity. Twelve artists — from photographers and painters to musicians and sculptors — worked side-by-side in temporary studios, forming the inaugural Artists in Residence program at Arcade Arts. Among them was Belmont faculty member and artist Mandy Rogers Horton, who found the experience to be both challenging and transformative. 

The residency pushed Rogers Horton’s practice in fresh directions. She continued her series of monochrome blue paintings of Nashville demolition sites — works that explore the fragile balance between construction, deconstruction and the patchwork of memory — but also branched into new territory. During the residency, she experimented with installations, sound and film collaborations and even dance performances in partnership with Belmont colleague Allison Hardee and student dancers. 

“I wanted to use the residency to try things that might not be ready for a professional gallery but deserved to be tested in public,” Rogers Horton explained. “It was liberating to create in that way.” 

This fall, the spirit of that residency came to Belmont’s campus through Neighbors | Artists in Residence at Arcade Arts, an exhibition hosted in Gallery 121 at the Leu Center for the Visual Arts. Featuring works from Rogers Horton and 10 fellow artists, the show aligned with Belmont’s Humanities Symposium theme of “Neighbors” and concluded with a closing reception, Sept. 26. 

For Rogers Horton, the connection between the residency and Belmont’s symposium theme was striking. “Artists can’t thrive in isolation. We need neighbors — people to share tools with, people who offer encouragement, people who give honest critique,” she said. “Those relationships, whether with fellow visual artists or with musicians, poets and dancers, are what sustain creative practice.” 

Rogers Horton also hopes students take something from that lesson. “It’s easy to underappreciate the importance of your classmates,” she reflected. “We know our friends matter, but we don’t always think about how important it is to have colleagues. One of the first things graduates come back and tell us is, ‘I miss critique. I miss people who will tell me what they really think and really care.’” 

The residency also underscored for Rogers Horton the value of process. “Sometimes we feel like, let artists do the messy stuff far away and just bring us the polished results,” she said. “But there’s something powerful about observing process — about being patient with uncertainty. That’s a value that applies across every discipline.” 

Her pieces in the Belmont exhibition included a painting drawn from her blue demolition series and a sculptural work of plaster-cast bricks wrapped in black mesh — pieces that, like the residency itself, reflect the balance between fragility, care and shelter. 

Though the exhibition has closed, Rogers Horton’s work and the collaborative spirit of the Arcade Arts program continue. For her, the residency modeled what it means to be a good neighbor: embracing diversity of background, approach and perspective, while learning from the “messy” process of building something together.