Seasonal installation featuring Nashville‑based artists on display through Jan. 4, 2027
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Sept. 7, 2026) – Nashville International Airport®, also known as BNA®, has debuted its Fall/Winter installment of the acclaimed Flying Solo exhibition series, offering travelers an opportunity to experience new works by Nashville‑area artists. The exhibits will remain on display through Jan. 4, 2027, featuring works by Nashville artists including Sarah Kaufman and Jenny Petite.
Flying Solo is a longstanding rotating exhibition program that highlights the work of local artists and arts organizations each season. The series presents a diverse range of media—including mixed media, oil paintings, acrylics and collages—selected to reflect the depth and creativity of Nashville’s artistic community.
Since its establishment in 1988, BNA’s Arts at the Airport program has served as a dynamic platform for showcasing Tennessee’s cultural richness. The airport’s terminal and public spaces feature a blend of rotating exhibitions, permanent artworks and live performances, creating an engaging cultural experience for millions of travelers each year.
A brief biography of the featured artists and their work is as follows:
Sarah Kaufman
Untitled (Oil on Canvas)
Located on Concourse D near Gate D2 and Pre-security at the Concourse A/B Exit
Instagram: @sarahkaufmannashville
Sarah Kaufman brings more than 35 years of painting experience to a career centered on both artistic creation and teaching. She has devoted her professional life to making art and helping others develop their own creative practices, a commitment that shapes both her studio work and her approach to instruction.
Kaufman’s work centers on how light bounces and fractures through the architecture of a path in the forest. Her landscape paintings are impressionist interpretations of place, capturing light as it reflects off planes and surfaces, illuminating color and defining form through shadow. She allows the underlying rhythms of color and structure to surface, offering a new observation and impression of the natural world.
Working primarily in oil on canvas, Kaufman begins each painting with a walk in the woods and a series of phone photographs. In her studio, she displays these reference images on a large screen to recreate the sense of being outdoors while she experiments with color, light and geometric forms to build a prismatic interpretation of the landscape.
Her work is held in private and corporate collections around the world, and she has published two children’s books. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and a master’s degree in education. Kaufman lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, two children, two dogs and two guinea pigs.
Jenny Petite
“Venus of Suburbia: My Life is a Masterpiece” (Photography on Fine Art Paper)
“A Modern Renaissance: Revival of Self” (Photography on Fine Art Paper)
Located on Concourse D, near Gates D3 and D5
https://www.jennypetitephotography.com
Instagram: @jennypetitephotography
Jenny Petite is a postmodern, post-structural artist who uses self-portrait photography to spark conversation, introspection and analysis. The gold frames surrounding her images echo the installations of the great masters, signaling a similar sense of scale and suggesting that an individual’s lived experience can hold historical significance.
Drawing on Plato’s theory of mimicry, Petite places herself as the central figure within reimagined historical scenes, reshaping both past and future into a present-day interplay of fiction and reality. Familiar characters recurring throughout her tableaux serve as symbolic markers of personal record and evolution.
Her offbeat humor, often threaded through her otherwise serious compositions, softens the intensity of the psychological themes she explores. By pairing levity with complexity, she creates space for viewers to approach life’s challenges with both openness and grace.
Encountering Petite’s work becomes an exploration of one’s own flawed, beautiful and contradictory self — a reflection as layered as the artist’s images themselves.
Engaging with Petite’s work becomes an invitation to confront one’s own contradictions — the flawed and the beautiful, held together in the same frame — revealing the layered narratives that make up the self.
To observe Petite’s work is to meet your own contradictions, where the flawed and the beautiful exist together.
The Flying Solo series reflects BNA’s ongoing commitment to uplifting local artists and enhancing the traveler experience. In 2025, BNA was ranked #3 Best Airport for Art in the 2025 USA TODAY 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards, as voted on by the traveling public.
