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Herb Williams, the Nashville artist known for whimsical crayon sculptures, remembers the pandemic as a time of interacting with more trees than humans. “Searching for unseen, solitary spaces to observe and commune with nature became a mystery with endless solutions,” he says.

Williams unveils a collection of such solutions in his show, ColorSHADE, March 20 through May 9, at Haley Gallery inside the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum. 

Williams’s previous installations and exhibits — including shows in Washington, D.C., Shanghai, China, and the Atlanta airport, to name a few — have showcased crayon sculptures, as well as street-art-style graffiti. By contrast, ColorSHADE comprises photographs, which capture temporary crayon-based works made in nature. 

Take “Apricot Shore,” for example. The photograph portrays a tree stump beside a lake, where Williams filled voids in the bark with hundreds of crayons. In “Red-Blue Diptych,” Williams returns to a single tree in different seasons, temporarily filling a V between the branches with crayons of different colors in different weather. 

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Williams refers to the crayons-meet-tree moments as “pop-ups” and removes the traces of his work as soon as he has memorialized a project with a camera. “I’m not going to take a thing or leave anything,” says Williams, who lugs thousands of crayons into natural areas, such as Centennial Park or the Narrows of the Harpeth, to interact with wild spaces. 

If anything about the fleeting interplay between artist and nature sounds familiar, recalling experimental works of the mid-century Fluxus movement, site-specific land art of Andy Goldsworthy, or ephemeral environmental projects by Jeanne Claude and Christo, it’s no coincidence: Williams remembers driving over Christo’s “Surrounded Islands” in Miami in the early 1980s, and the experience shaped his perspective on the relationships between art and nature, as he now hopes to reframe the perspective of his audience. 

An opening reception for the exhibit will be held from 5–8 p.m., Thursday, March 20, and is free and open to the public. All artwork is available for purchase.