Frist Art Museum
The Frist Art Museum is a non-collecting institution featuring ever-changing exhibitions from local, regional, national, and international collections.
Located in downtown Nashville’s architecturally and historically significant former post office building, the Frist also offers a wide variety of programming, a gift shop, and the award-winning Martin ArtQuest interactive gallery.
SCHEDULE OF EXHIBITIONS
Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
June 3–September 4, 2022
This exhibition includes sculptures, paintings, and immersive and experiential installations by a loose-knit group of artists working in Southern California from the 1960s to the present. The renowned “Light and Space” and “Finish Fetish” artists are united by an interest in manipulating the medium of light, projected or reflected, to alter the perception of form, architectural space, and surface qualities.
Going beyond the tradition of representing light through paint or photography, artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler create installations in which the actual light takes a form that seems to exist between presence and absence, providing a means of entering a mysterious immaterial world. In works by these and other artists—including Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, Gisela Colón, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Ronald Davis, Guy Dill, Laddie John Dill, Fred Eversley, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Bruce Nauman, Helen Pashgian, Roland Reiss, Roy Thurston, De Wain Valentine, and Norman Zammitt—industrial materials such as cast resins, fiberglass, neon fixtures, and sprayed paint minimize the touch of the artist’s hand. They link art and technology in a cool aesthetic that echoes the emotional detachment of pop art and minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Their glossy surfaces and intense light are often thought of as characteristic of Southern California’s identity, with its car and surfboard culture and bright oceanside environment, though the artists in fact drew on many different experiences in developing their practices.
Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Knights in Armor
July 1–October 10, 2022
Knights in Armor showcases stunning examples of European arms and armor from the renowned collection of the Museo Stibbert in Florence, Italy. One hundred and thirty rare objects—including full suits of armor, mounted equestrian figures, helmets, swords, and other weaponry—tell the tale of the European knight from the Middle Ages and Renaissance through to the medieval revival of the nineteenth century. The exhibition explains the historical and functional contexts of arms and armor of this period while also highlighting the undeniable beauty and artistic appeal of these works.
Organized by Contemporanea Progetti in collaboration with the Museo Stibbert, Florence, Italy
Weaving Splendor: Treasures of Asian Textiles
October 7–December 31, 2022
Weaving Splendor: Treasures of Asian Textiles presents rarely seen Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Persian costumes and textiles drawn from the renowned collection of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Made with fine materials, exemplary techniques, and stunning artistry, Asian luxury textiles were central to global trade. The extraordinary stories of these treasures take guests on a journey along trade routes across continents, and through time, from the 1500s to today. Luxurious costumes of the court conveyed power, while striking theater robes brought stage characters to life. Sturdy wall hangings and furniture covers transformed palaces, temples, and homes, while shimmering tapestry-woven carpets were created as diplomatic gifts for foreign rulers.
Organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Virginia Overton
October 7–December 31, 2022
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
This exhibition of outdoor and indoor sculptures by Virginia Overton, a Nashville-born, Brooklyn-based artist, is co-presented by Cheekwood Estate & Gardens and the Frist Art Museum. Though she has worked in New York City since the early 2000s, Overton maintains strong connections with Middle Tennessee, where her family has owned a farm for more than a century. For her site-specific installations, Overton seeks out the creative potential in everyday materials. Through elements such as moving water, fragrant cedar, plants, pick-up trucks, and rusty pipes, Overton’s works appeal to the senses, and from disparate parts she creates balance and equilibrium. Overton has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern, Storm King Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 2018, she was the first woman artist to have a solo exhibition at the Socrates Sculpture Park. This will be her largest exhibition in Nashville to date.
Co-organized by Cheekwood Estate & Gardens and the Frist Art Museum
Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood
November 11, 2022–March 5, 2023
Upper-Level Galleries
Renowned transmedia artist Matthew Ritchie invites viewers to experience the richness and fragility of the world by connecting such fields as philosophy and mythology, epic poetry and science fiction, and history and physics. This exhibition’s interweaving of paradise and chaos offers a meditation on art’s capacity to help overcome our current social fragmentation—to be a connective tissue that is healing and beautiful. A Garden in the Flood will feature dramatic paintings, architectural structures and elaborate diagrams, a hallucinatory animation made through artificial intelligence, and a participatory augmented reality program. The most recent work in the exhibition will be a video with a specially commissioned soundtrack produced by acclaimed composer Hanna Benn in collaboration with the Grammy Award–winning Fisk Jubilee Singers. Intellectually and physically engaging, Ritchie’s work is simultaneously rife with ideas and visually alluring—and now appropriately presented in Nashville, an expanding city where interdisciplinary collaborations are ever increasing.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
