At Matney Gallery, we highlight artists whose work transforms Southern narratives into living conversations between art, place, and spirit.

Dana Jo Cooley: Between Smoke, Salt, and Sanctuary

There is a quiet tension in the work of Dana Jo Cooley—between the sacred and the mundane, between place and presence, between memory and the present moment. Her art lives where the Appalachian hollows meet gospel song, where mineral pigments crystallize into allegory, and where a church becomes a stage for ritual. In Nashville today, Cooley is not simply making art—she is conjuring spaces of wonder, communion, and reckoning.

Rooted in Appalachian Breath

Dana Jo Cooley’s origin story lies in the coal-scarred hollers of Whitwell, Tennessee, where generations of miners laid their bodies into the earth. From that landscape of labor and silence, she draws not heaviness but light. The low light of dusk, the echo of hymnals in worn pews, the slow accruing of dust: these are the elements she gathers into her work.

She carried those echoes southward to Athens, Georgia, where she absorbed the fearless inventiveness of a music-inflected art community. Cooley soaked in Athens’ countercultural currents and translated them into her own visual lexicon—salt-encrusted canvases, dioramas, miniature reliquaries, public sculptures that function as both joke and invocation. In Athens, she erected The Love Shack Bus Stop, a whimsical, heart-warped bus shelter born from the playful spirit of B-52s lore and the earnest impulse of public art. It was there she learned the secrets of embedding narrative into space.

Yet she would not stay only in that southern time capsule. Her ambition carried her to New York, where the marketplace of ideas demanded new rigor and spaciousness. Her work—books, assemblages, sculptures—found a place among experimental artists, urging viewers to pause, to listen, to touch. But always, like a moth, she turned her heart southward again, bringing lessons from New York into conversation with Appalachian pulse.

Matney Gallery and the Art of Place

It was in the hands of Linda Matney Gallery that Cooley’s work entered a wider circle of collectors, institutions, and curators. Matney’s curatorial ethos—rooted in local storytelling, painterly risk, and sense of place—became a kind of shelter and amplifier for Cooley’s voice. Under its banner, she joined exhibitions that placed her among a new generation of artists pushing Southern art into global resonance.

But even as gallery walls framed her pieces, Cooley resisted confinement. She treats representation not as enclosure but as extension—letting her sculptures, her salt-colored surfaces, her incantatory texts slip outward into public life, inviting community to enter.

“Butterfly Release,” Multimedia Performance Art, 2025, The Donna Mansion, Madison, Tennessee

Nashville: Art as Ritual

In recent years, Cooley has found in Nashville fertile ground for her increasingly immersive gestures. As an artist-in-residence at the downtown Presbyterian church, she did not display objects as much as she awakened space.

In 2024 she staged Homiletical Artifacts, a two-part exhibition that felt like a sermon told in pigment and object. The first act, Art Is a Miracle, gathered her gallery works—assemblages, found objects, delicate reliquary pieces—in quiet conversation. During opening night, she invited gospel historian Tim Dillinger to speak, weaving the histories of Black sacred music into her visual lexicon. Later, she turned the church into a ritual field: Lydia, a night performance, spread sound, light, and motion like incense through the nave.

The next summer, on June 21, 2025, Cooley ascended to a sublime coup: REVIVAL. The entire building—its columns, balconies, altar—became a constellation of artwork, movement, and sound. Performers traced trajectories across pews; lights swooped and lingered; sculptures glowed like altars. The event felt like a contemporary tent revival, but instead of fire-and-brimstone preaching, it offered poetic rupture. Through collaboration with local musicians, dancers, clergy, and fellow artists, Cooley reanimated the church as a living chamber of possibility. REVIVAL was free, open, inclusive—a declaration that art and faith need not be separated.

Inside that space, time folded. The Egyptians motifs of the sanctuary fused with Appalachia’s hollers; the otherworldly merged with the local. Visitors entered not as spectators but as passengers in a shared ritual.

“Part 107,” Multimedia Performance Art, 2025, Presented at Creative Mornings Nashville for the theme, Revival, 615 Studio B, Nashville, TN

Monumentality Amid Mountains

Cooley’s vision stretches beyond walls. In 2025 she co-leads a monumental public art project in Pound, Virginia, as part of Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia. In Labor in Motion, she and collaborator Johnny Hagerman will create a sculptural amphitheater and retaining wall that honors the labor history of coalfields, crafted in dialogue with residents. This is no static monument to be admired from afar, but a gathering place animated by memory, participation, and hope.

She dips her hands into the soil of her heritage—mining history, community loss, resilience—and molds it into art that is both monument and invitation.

Between Collector and Witness

To gather a piece by Dana Jo Cooley is not merely to own an artwork—it is to become a custodian of narrative, place, and spirit. Her surfaces are layered with materials both humble and charged—salt, pigment, found wood—and her imagery blends icon, metaphor, and provocation. A collector’s room holding a Cooley is not a gallery: it is a threshold.

Institutions, too, find her presence compelling. Grants like Nashville’s Metro Arts Thrive and the Mellon Foundation’s support of her Virginia project reflect confidence in her capacity to inhabit public and sacred realms. Her trajectory suggests a deepening influence in regional and national circuits—an artist who moves effortlessly between gallery, altar, and landscape.

For the art world insider or discerning collector, Cooley offers more than technique. She offers resonance. She reminds us that to root art in land, history, and faith is not backward-looking—it is forward-reaching. Dana Jo Cooley’s work is a geography of the soul: the holler, the hymn, the salt-crusted altar, opened wide for us to enter.