For five years, the best way to understand Tennessee was to climb onto it and go around.
Between 1998 and 2003, a carousel stood in downtown Nashville carrying thirty-six figures, almost none of which were horses. Riders straddled Andrew Jackson. They took a turn behind the Everly Brothers, alongside the Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph, the guitarist Chet Atkins, the country singer Kitty Wells, the nineteenth-century Nashvillian Adelicia Acklen. It was a fiberglass parade of the people this state keeps claiming as its own, painted in the hot, cartoon-bright palette that made Red Grooms one of the most recognizable American artists of his generation.
Grooms is a Nashville native. The Tennessee Fox Trot Carousel is the piece of his work that his hometown actually got to climb onto — a rare thing in public art, which usually asks to be looked at and not touched…