Thirty-Six Tennesseans Are Sitting in Storage, Waiting on a Motor and a Roof
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.
Then it stopped. The carousel came down in 2003 and went into storage, where it has stayed for more than twenty years.
A number, at last
This week the Tennessee State Museum, which owns the carousel, put a figure on what it would take to get it turning again: between roughly $870,000 and $1.07 million.
The interesting part is where that money would go. The artwork itself has aged well. The colors are still vivid, the carved-looking figures still intact. What is expensive is the unglamorous machinery underneath and the shelter overhead — a replacement merry-go-round mechanism, and a pavilion to put over the whole assembly so it is not weathering in the open.
That is the quiet reason a beloved object can sit in a warehouse for two decades. A painting needs a wall. A carousel needs a roof, a footprint, a motor, an operator, staff, ticketing, insurance and a maintenance budget. Bringing it back is not an acquisition. It is starting a small business.
Wanted: a site, an operator, and a partner
The state and the museum have been working the problem from that angle. In late 2025 they went out publicly looking for a public-private partnership — a request for information aimed at finding someone willing to help restore the carousel, house it, and run it. Several parties have expressed interest since.
What is still missing is the combination. Interest is not the same as a site. A site is not the same as an operator. And none of the three is the same as the money.
The argument for solving it is straightforward, and the artist's gallery representative has made it plainly: Nashville has an interactive, educational, world-class work by one of its own, and it was built to be ridden, studied and admired rather than stored. Every year it spends indoors is a year of children who do not get the chance.
The city it would come back to
There is one more wrinkle worth naming. The downtown the carousel left in 2003 is not the downtown it would return to. The riverfront has been rebuilt, the East Bank is being rebuilt again, and public space that did not exist a decade ago now anchors whole neighborhoods — the new greenway on the East Bank among them, and Centennial Park's first new building since 1963.
In other words, there are more plausible homes for a carousel now than there were when it was packed away. That is not nothing. It is also not a signed agreement.
For the moment, thirty-six Tennesseans remain in the dark, in good condition, waiting on a motor and a roof.
