Photo: Angelina Castillo, Nashville Scene 2023

Christie Vergona - Block Party, Dec. 2023

Random Sample is a multi-disciplinary art space aimed at giving Nashville’s community an approachable meeting ground for people with diverse backgrounds, practices, and skill levels.

The gallery began in October 2021, just a small, white cube of cinderblocks off Charlotte Pike over on the West side of town. With neighbors like Headquarters Coffee, Global Education Center, Betty’s Grill, and Rhino Booksellers; founder/owner Linda Parrott, and assistant directors Ivy Welsh, and Andie Billheimer have found a home for their vision in this quiet, yet vibrantly eclectic village for a few years now. Since then there have been 20+ installations, two monthly book clubs, weekly music, film, and poetry events, and countless outdoor markets, festivals, and clothing swaps.

Over time, several seeds have begun to develop out of their infancy and take on a life of their own… A goal from the beginning was to create a space where some of this growth might be nurtured. While there has been a great variety of experience levels among the artists who display their work on the main floor, a large number have expressed it is either their first time solo or first time ever. There have also been group shows with a mixed crowed of novice explorers and lifetime creators. In December 2022, over 25 people submitted their own drawings to be framed and hung together in a household exhibit curated by Random Sample’s own Ivy Welsh…

…and again, exactly a year later in Christie Vergona’s community Block Party show featuring linocut prints from over 70 participants.

Events like these are likely to have regular appearances at Random Sample in the future. Each one has managed to draw people out of their ordinary lives and into a a room where worlds collide, contrast, and commingle in strange and exciting ways.

Ivy Welsh - Group Drawing Show, Dec. 2022

Ideally, this building, at its core, is an empty, blank box waiting to be filled with color and energy. For this reason, it has been important to stay as malleable as possible in order to adapt based on different necessities required to fully flesh out a vision. There are, of course, physical barriers that inevitably arise due to basic limitations of square footage; however, we are always trying to figure out different ways around these obstacles to keep it bubbling with all sorts of activity!