All current exhibitions extended
Albrecht Dürer added
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (updated August 13, 2020)—The Frist Art Museum has announced its revised 2020 schedule of exhibitions, which will resume after more than a three-month closure because of COVID-19. In the Ingram Gallery, J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime, an exhibition of works by one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, will now remain open through Labor Day, September 7. Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, which will open October 2, is the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work and includes installations, sculptures, and paintings that explore themes of multiple identities.
In the Upper-Level Galleries, an exhibition of works by Jitish Kallat features the dramatic interactive installations Covering Letter and Covering Letter (terranum nuncius). Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange invites consideration of worn and weathered American flags as symbols of our country’s identity, history, and future. Albrecht Dürer: The Age of Reformation and Renaissance highlights the major themes of the German artist’s work, including portraiture and religious subjects and explores how the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation affected both the artist and his art.
In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist and Fisk University Galleries present Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar, a survey of the late artist’s multidisciplinary practices, which explores the intersection of music, art, and African American history through sculpture, prints, and video.
In the Conte Community Arts Gallery, the Frist presents The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later, commemorating the city’s historic natural disaster in photographs and oral histories. Online and in the Conte Gallery, the Frist presents We Count: First-Time Voters, which honors the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment with visual representations of diverse group of Nashvillians’ first voting experiences.
2020 Young Tennessee Artists: Selections from Advanced Studio Art Programs, the eighth biennial showcase of the finest two-dimensional artwork by high school students across the state will be presented online.
The Frist Art Museum’s Updated 2020 Schedule of Exhibitions
Given the uncertainty of the global pandemic, exhibition dates are
based on current expectations and are subject to change.
J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime
February 20–September 7, 2020
Ingram Gallery
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was a central figure in the Romantic movement and is considered to be among the greatest landscape painters in Western art. Long admired for his ingenuity, originality, and passion, Turner strove to convey the feeling of awe aroused by nature’s immensity and power—its palpable atmospheres, pulsating energy, the drama of storms and disasters, and the transcendent effect of pure light. On view in Quest for the Sublime are seminal oil paintings, luminous watercolors, and evocative sketches selected from Tate’s Turner Bequest. The exhibition conveys highlights of the artist’s career, from vertiginous mountain scenes and stormy seascapes to epic history paintings and mysterious views of Venice.
Organized in cooperation with Tate
Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar
February 20–September 7, 2020 and October 2, 2020–January 3, 2021
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery at the Frist Art Museum and the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery at Fisk University
Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar is a survey of the late artist’s multidisciplinary practice, which explored the intersection of music, art, and African American history through sculpture, prints, performance, and video. Co-organized and co-presented by the Frist Art Museum and Adkins’s alma mater Fisk University forty-five years after his graduation, the exhibition will feature works influenced by his time at Fisk, where he was mentored by Harlem Renaissance pioneer Aaron Douglas, and signature “recital” installations that pay tribute to musicians Bessie Smith and Jimi Hendrix, both of whom had ties to Tennessee.
Organized by Fisk University Galleries and the Frist Art Museum
Jitish Kallat: Return to Sender
March 13–October 12, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries
The internationally acclaimed Indian artist Jitish Kallat (b. 1974) is a Mumbai native who produces installations, paintings, photographs, and sculptures that often recall historic acts of speech. This exhibition presents two immersive installations inspired by historical messages that reveal the best and worst of humanity. The first, Covering Letter, is a haunting interactive digital projection of a 1939 letter from Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler that pleads for peace weeks before the outbreak of World War II. The installation was one of the works selected for India’s pavilion at this year’s 58th Venice Biennale. The second, Covering Letter (terranum nuncius), employs the sights and sounds of the Golden Record—the phonographic record launched into space by NASA in 1977 to communicate about life on our planet to extraterrestrials. In these installations, which engage both the mind and the body, the past will resonate with the present in different ways, depending upon the personal experiences of each visitor.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange
March 13–October 12, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries
Mel Ziegler (b. 1956), the Paul E. Shwab Chair of Fine Arts Professor at Vanderbilt University, is renowned as a social and community engagement artist whose work seeks to foster discourse and the sharing of ideas relating to history, politics, and society. Flag Exchange is an installation of fifty American flags—one from each state—suspended row after row from the ceiling and surrounding a stage where museum visitors and special guests are invited to speak or present performances relating to the meaning of the flag in their own lives. The flags themselves symbolize a nation that has survived tumult and stress. They were collected from 2011 to 2016, when Ziegler periodically drove across the United States with a supply of new American flags, offering a broad spectrum of society—from suburban residents to farmers and small business owners—an opportunity to receive new flags in exchange for their old torn and weathered ones. Displayed in a gallery, the symbolism of rows of tattered, irregular flags encourages reflection on America’s identity, history, and future.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum, in cooperation with Galerie Perrotin
The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later
January 10–July 26, 2020
Conte Community Arts Gallery
The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later will reflect on the historic 2010 flood in which a record-breaking rainfall caused the Cumberland River to crest almost twelve feet above flood stage. Thousands of homes and business were damaged or destroyed, and twenty-six people in the region died, eleven in Nashville. This exhibition will examine the event’s immediate and long-term impact on the city through photographs and excerpts of oral histories from the Nashville Public Library’s flood archive and The Tennessean newspaper with a focus on ten different zip codes, corresponding to Antioch, Belle Meade, Bellevue, Bordeaux, and other locations in addition to downtown Nashville. A section of “now and then” photos will illustrate the recovery, or lack of progress, in each area. Volunteerism, rescue efforts, inequities in disaster relief, and the rebuilding process will be addressed.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
We Count: First-Time Voters
May 1–January 3, 2020
Online exhibition at FristArtMuseum.org/WeCount
July 31, 2020–January 3, 2021
Conte Community Arts Gallery
On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee state legislature voted to ratify the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees and protects women’s right to vote. As the 36th state to approve the amendment, Tennessee completed the two-thirds majority needed to make it the law of the land. We Count: First-Time Voters honors the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting women’s constitutional right to vote by highlighting the history of voting in the United States and the first voting experiences of a diverse group of Nashvillians. Selected individuals will share their stories with local artists—including Beizar Aradini, Megan Kelley, Jerry Bedor Phillips, Thaxton Waters, and Donna Woodley—who will create visual representations of these voting experiences in a range of mediums.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World
October 9, 2020–January 10, 2021
Ingram Gallery
Indian-born artist Rina Banerjee (b. 1963) creates richly layered works made from materials sourced throughout the world to reflect the splintered experience of migration, identity, tradition, and culture often prevalent in diasporic communities. In a single sculpture, one can find African tribal jewelry, colorful feathers, light bulbs, Murano glass, and South Asian antiques. This is the first major survey of Banerjee’s work in the United States and includes large-scale installations, sculptures, and paintings produced over two decades. While the works can be enjoyed as vividly colored and sensuously layered sculptures, they also address themes of multiple identities, feminism, the impact of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and globalization.
Organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art.
Albrecht Dürer: The Age of Reformation and Renaissance
November 6, 2020–February 7, 2021
Upper-Level Galleries
The brilliant and versatile German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1474–1528) lived in the prosperous city of Nuremburg and is celebrated as one of the finest printmakers of all time. This exhibition of more than one hundred engravings, etchings, and woodcuts from the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection spans Dürer’s entire career, from his apprenticeship through his death, and highlights the major themes of his art, including portraiture and religious subjects such as the Passion and the Apocalypse. His lifetime coincides with the advent of the Protestant Reformation, and this exhibition explores how the religious turmoil affected both the artist and his art.
Organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum
Postponed Exhibitions
Liliana Porter: Man with Axe and Other Stories
February 5–May 2, 2021
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Argentina-born artist Liliana Porter’s provocative arrangements of objects and toys tell stories that are at once psychologically charged and slyly humorous. The centerpiece of the exhibition, Man with Axe, features a tiny plastic figure of an axe-wielding man who appears to have demolished an array of items, from dollhouse furniture to large vases, clocks, and even a full-size piano. This trail of destruction signals both the entropic effects of time and the collapse of historical progress that can be caused by a single agent of chaos. In Man with Axe, Porter asks big questions: Who are we? What do we do? What’s it about?
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style
June 18–September 12, 2021
Ingram Gallery
At the end of the 19th century, the Glasgow Style emerged as the major manifestation of Art Nouveau in Britain. This exhibition showcases Charles Rennie Mackintosh—the greatest exponent of the Glasgow Style—as an architect, designer, and artist, and contextualizes his production within a larger circle of designers and craftspeople in the major Scottish city. Mackintosh worked most closely with his wife, Margaret Macdonald; Margaret’s sister, Frances Macdonald; and Frances’ husband, James Herbert McNair. They met as students at the progressive Glasgow School of Art in 1892 and together were known as The Four.
Combining influences from the Arts and Crafts movement, Celtic Revival, and Japonism, Glasgow artists created their own modern design aesthetic, synonymous with sleek lines and emphatic geometries expressed in a wide range of materials. The exhibition presents 165 works of fine and decorative art, including architectural drawings, books, ceramics, furniture, posters, textiles, and watercolors, drawn from Glasgow’s most significant public and private collections.
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style is a touring exhibition co-organized by Glasgow Museums and the American Federation of Arts. Support for the US national tour is provided by the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation.
Bethany Collins: Evensong
June 18–September 12, 2021
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins (b. 1984) explores the intersection of language and race in her conceptually driven practice. She alters existing documents—such as the daily Birmingham News from 1963 or the U.S. Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson, Missouri, police department—to critique the truthfulness and completeness of the official record. Since 2016, Collins has also examined translations of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, an ancient text of exile and homecoming, and familiarity with and estrangement from one’s homeland.
At the Frist, a new artist book will feature 100 versions of “The Star Spangled Banner,” written from the 18th to the 21st centuries in support of specific political or social causes—from temperance and suffrage to abolition and even the Confederacy. The multiple reinterpretations of this song—composed in 1814 by Francis Scott Key and the U.S. national anthem since 1931—will offer opportunities for reflection on patriotism, belonging, and individual position within national identity.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City
November 5, 2021–January 30, 2022
Upper-Level Galleries
This is the first museum exhibition in the United States to focus on medieval art made in Bologna. Home to the oldest university in Europe, this northern Italian city fostered a unique artistic culture at the end of the Middle Ages. With its large population of sophisticated readers, Bologna became the preeminent center of manuscript production south of the Alps, and it helped bring about a revolution in the medieval book trade. Manuscripts circulated in a thriving market of scribes, illuminators, booksellers, and customers operating mostly outside traditional monastic scriptoria. The university initially specialized in law, and many law books were illuminated in Bologna with brightly colored scenes. Professors enjoyed high social status and were buried in impressive stone tombs carved with classroom scenes.
The approximately 65 objects in the exhibition span from 1250 to 1400, from the first great flowering of manuscript illumination in Bologna to the beginnings of the construction and decoration of the ambitious Basilica of San Petronio in the city’s Piazza Maggiore.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with seven essays and, while the artworks are on view, the Frist Art Museum will host the Andrew Ladis Trecento Conference, a biannual event that brings together historians of medieval and Renaissance art from around the world.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Summoning the Ancestors: African Art from the New Orleans Museum of Art
Fall 2022 (Dates TBA)
Ingram Gallery
The exhibition features more than eighty objects, including ancestral figures, masks, ceremonial costumes, headdresses, ritual objects and reliquary guardian figures, drawn from one of the most important collections of traditional sub-Saharan African art in the United States. Created by artists from Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Ghana, these works of art are made from wood, ivory, stone, terra cotta, beadwork and brass. Displayed thematically—with contextual and archival photographs and video—the exhibition illuminates the various ways in which objects facilitate ancestral veneration, as well as the transmission and interconnection of artistic style.
Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art
Sponsor Acknowledgment
The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Buddy Kite: 615.744.3351, ”
Ellen Jones Pryor: 615.243.1311, ”
About the Frist Art Museum
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Frist Art Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit art exhibition center dedicated to presenting and originating high-quality exhibitions with related educational programs and community outreach activities. Located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, Tenn., the Frist Art Museum offers the finest visual art from local, regional, national, and international sources in exhibitions that inspire people through art to look at their world in new ways. The Frist Art Museum’s Martin ArtQuest Gallery features interactive stations relating to Frist Art Museum exhibitions. Information on accessibility can be found at FristArtMuseum.org/accessibility. Gallery admission is free for visitors 18 and younger and for members; $15 for adults; $10 for seniors and college students with ID; and $8 for military. For current hours and additional information, visit FristArtMuseum.org or call 615.244.3340.
