The Fly Arts Center: Where Shelbyville's Creative Life Has a Home

The Building Earned Its Name

The Fly Arts Center sits on Shelbyville's courthouse square, in a building that has been part of the city's commercial fabric for well over a century. The name comes from the theatrical term , the "fly" is the space above a stage where scenery is stored and rigged, the invisible machinery that makes the visible magic possible. It's an apt name for a place that operates the same way: doing the essential, unglamorous work of sustaining a cultural community so that the visible art has somewhere to live.

Nearly fifty years of that work. That's not a small thing in a city of 23,000 people.

The Bedford County Arts Council: 1977 to Now

The Bedford County Arts Council was founded in 1977 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization by Carol Price, with a mandate to support the arts in Bedford County, Tennessee. Price's founding vision was practical as much as idealistic , she understood that arts programming doesn't sustain itself, that without organizational infrastructure and community support, creative activity in a small city disperses and disappears.

The Arts Council has operated continuously since 1977, navigating the funding cycles, community politics, and economic pressures that test every small arts organization. It has survived because it has remained genuinely useful , because the programming it provides fills real needs in Bedford County's community life that no other institution covers.

The Fly Arts Center is the Arts Council's home and its primary program site. Gallery exhibitions. Community theater productions. Creative classes. The Bedford County History Museum, which the center houses and operates. Youth arts programs. Featured artist showcases. It is a genuinely multifunctional space, serving different community needs on different days, in the way that a well-run small-city arts center must.

The Bedford County History Museum

The Bedford County History Museum, housed within the Fly Arts Center, is one of the most valuable resources in Shelbyville for anyone trying to understand the city and county's past. The museum underwent renovation and was reopened with updated collections in November 2025 , a significant investment in the center's capacity to tell Bedford County's history to residents and visitors alike.

The collections include artifacts, documents, photographs, and interpretive materials covering Bedford County from its founding in 1807 through the present. The Civil War period, the railroad era, the development of the Tennessee Walking Horse industry, and the stories of the people , including the frequently underrepresented African American communities whose history Fredia Lusk and others have worked to document , are all represented.

For visitors to Shelbyville who want context before or after exploring the courthouse square, the depot, the historic neighborhoods, or any of the other physical sites of the city's history, the History Museum provides the narrative framework that makes those sites meaningful. Artifacts without context are curiosities. With context, they become evidence of a community's actual life.

Gallery and Featured Artist Program

The Fly Arts Center's gallery program hosts multiple exhibitions annually, including a Featured Artist series that gives individual artists , regional and local , solo exhibition space alongside a public lecture component. The gallery occupies the kind of institutional position in Shelbyville's arts ecosystem that a city of its size can rarely support: a proper exhibition space with curatorial programming, not just a wall to hang things on.

Featured artists not only receive the solo exhibition but are invited to speak about their work , an educational component that connects the exhibitions to the community in a way that passive display alone doesn't achieve. The gallery has over the years shown work across media: painting, photography, sculpture, textile arts, and the craft traditions , quilting, pottery, metalwork , that have deep roots in Middle Tennessee's artistic culture.

Theater and Youth Arts

Community theater at the Fly Arts Center has been a consistent part of Bedford County's cultural life. Productions range from classic American plays to more contemporary work, performed by local casts for local audiences , the grassroots theatrical tradition that gives communities a way to tell stories about themselves and see themselves reflected in performance.

The youth arts program is newer but growing. The center operates theater groups specifically designed for younger participants, providing structured creative experience that complements what the schools offer but goes further in terms of dedicated arts focus. In a county where extracurricular arts programming in the schools varies by school and funding cycle, the Fly Arts Center's youth programming fills a gap that matters for the families who use it.

Finding the Fly Arts Center

The Fly Arts Center is located on the courthouse square in downtown Shelbyville , walkable from Pope's Cafe, the Capri Theatre, Glass Hollow, and the other anchors of the historic commercial district. Hours vary by program; check flyartscenter.com for current gallery hours, upcoming exhibitions, performances, and class schedules before visiting.

It is, in the most straightforward sense, the place in Shelbyville where creative life has a home. Not the only place , the Nearest Green Distillery's visitor experience, the Walking Horse Heritage Center, the antique community of Bell Buckle all contribute to Bedford County's cultural landscape. But the Fly Arts Center is the institution specifically built to support creativity in all its forms, to give Shelbyville's artists and audiences a place to meet, and to make sure that the work of documenting and celebrating this community's history and imagination has somewhere to happen.

Nearly fifty years. Still at it. That's the measure of a real institution.