Frist Art Museum Announces 2018 Schedule of Exhibitions

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (August 23, 2017)—The Frist Art Museum is proud to announce its 2018 schedule of exhibitions, featuring artwork from around the world and across time. In the Ingram Gallery, Rome: City and Empire explores how Rome grew from a cluster of villages into a mighty empire through hundreds of engaging and beautiful objects. Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century showcases paintings by an international array of artists, from Franz Ackermann to Sue Williams, that portray forces of staggering magnitude. Paris 1900: City of Entertainment, an exhibition of paintings, decorative art, costumes, posters, photographs, and more, revives the splendor of the French capital when the Paris Exposition Universelle was heralding the arrival of the 20th century.

In the Upper-Level Galleries, Nick Cave: Feat. continues through June 2018, and in conjunction with the exhibition, the artist will direct a free public performance on April 6, featuring live dance, music, and soundsuits at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Image Building: How Photography Transformed Architecture explores how works by photographers Iwan Baan, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and others transformed our vision and concept of architecture. Life, Love & Marriage Chests in Renaissance Italy focuses on domestic arts designed to celebrate love and matrimony in Florence, Siena, Venice, and other Italian cities.

The exhibitions in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery will be Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex: Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick and exhibitions of work by Afruz Amighi and Do Ho Suh.

In the Conte Community Arts Gallery, the Frist Art Museum presents We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957–1968, which documents Nashville’s important role in the national civil rights movement. The exhibition also provides opportunities to consider the role of images and the media in shaping public opinion.

The Frist Art Museum’ 2018 Exhibition Schedule
(Dates subject to change)

Nick Cave: Feat.
November 10, 2017–June 24, 2018
Upper-Level Galleries

Chicago-based artist Nick Cave (b. 1959) is best known for his elaborate “soundsuits,” human-shaped sculptural forms composed of a wide variety of found and repurposed commonplace materials. This dynamic exhibition will include a selection of soundsuits, as well as a projected video, several wall-mounted sculptures, and a large multimedia installation. The works are accessible to audiences of all ages and backgrounds, and on a deeper level speak to issues of racial and social justice and the need for more time and space in contemporary society to cultivate individual dreams and aspirations.

Nick Cave: Feat. Nashville
April 6, 2018
Schermerhorn Symphony Center

In conjunction with the exhibition Nick Cave: Feat., the artist will lead a months-long community engagement project that will culminate in a free public performance. This major event will feature live dance, music, soundsuits, spoken word and much more at a partnering institution, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Cave’s original composition will showcase local performers from performing arts organizations and universities and engage Middle Tennessee’s increasingly multicultural population. Cave’s wondrous and awe-inspiring performances explore timely themes of identity, social justice, and the power of art to transform our world.

Exhibition and program organized by the Frist Art Museum

Rome: City and Empire
February 23–May 28, 2018
Ingram Gallery

The stories of Rome and its vast empire continue to captivate and intrigue people almost three thousand years after its foundation. Rome: City and Empire brings to Nashville more than two hundred of the British Museum’s most engaging and beautiful Roman objects. They tell the dramatic story of how Rome grew from a cluster of small villages into a mighty empire.

The British Museum’s exceptionally broad collections have enabled the creation of a truly inspiring experience. Visitors will explore how the empire was won and held and learn about the rich diversity of her peoples. The exhibition is an accessible introduction to the Roman imperial period, yet also provides a range and depth of material for those with an existing interest in Roman history.

The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the British Museum and the Frist Art Museum. The Frist Art Museum is the exclusive North American venue.

Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex: Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick
February 23–May 28, 2018
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

New Orleans natives Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick have been documenting African American life in Louisiana for more than 30 years. Since 1980, they have made regular visits to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola to photograph life on the prison farm, which was founded on the consolidated land of several cotton and sugarcane plantations. Their poignant black-and-white images record the exploitation of the men incarcerated within the maximum-security prison farm while also showcasing the prisoners’ humanity and individual narratives. The husband-and-wife team’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Calhoun and McCormick use their cameras as tools for social engagement, reminding their audiences of persistent racial inequities, especially throughout the American criminal justice system.

The Frist Art Museum will produce a hardcover book titled Louisiana Medley about the couple’s work. Published by Lucia∣Marquand, the book will include 70 plates, a foreword by Dr. Deborah Willis, chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, a career overview by Frist Art Museum executive director and photography historian Dr. Susan H. Edwards, and an essay by Dr. Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, that places the images of Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex in the context of other prison photographs.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957–1968
March 30–October 14, 2018
Conte Community Arts Gallery

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and at a time when race relations and human rights are again at the forefront of our country’s political and social consciousness—the Frist Art Museum will present a selection of approximately 50 photographs that document an important period in Nashville’s struggle for racial equality. The images were taken between 1957, the year that desegregation began in public schools, and 1968, when Dr. King was killed in Memphis. Of central significance are photographs of lunch counter sit-ins led by a group of students—including John Lewis and Diane Nash—from local historically black colleges and universities, which took place in early 1960. The role that Nashville played in the national civil rights movement as a hub for training students in nonviolent protest and as the first southern city to integrate places of business peacefully is a story that warrants reexamination and introduction to younger generations and newcomers to the region. The exhibition also provides opportunities to consider the role of images and the media in shaping public opinion—a relevant subject in today’s news-saturated climate.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century
June 22–September 16, 2018
Ingram Gallery

Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century includes paintings by an international array of artists, including Franz Ackermann, Ahmed Alsoudani, Eddy Kamuanga, Wangechi Mutu, Sue Williams, and many more, that induce feelings of disturbance, mystery, and expansiveness through the portrayal of forces shaping and hastening social transformation in ways that are increasingly difficult to predict, such as globalism, ideological conflict, technology, science, and philosophy. These forces can make people feel frightened by their ungraspable breadth and powerful influence, or inspired by their promise of a previously unimaginable understanding of connectedness. These sensations are associated with the sublime, a word that has traditionally referred to the feeling of being awed or terrified by the unfathomable nature of God and the cosmos. Chaos and Awe equates the sublime with the depth and mystery of the human mind and its extension into the world.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

The Presence of Your Absence Is Everywhere: Afruz Amighi
June 22–September 16, 2018
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

This exhibition presents recent sculptures and drawings by the critically acclaimed artist Afruz Amighi, who was born in Iran in 1974 and has lived in the United States since 1977. Her work is in the permanent collection of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2009, she received the inaugural Jameel Prize, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s prestigious international award for contemporary art and design inspired by the Islamic tradition. Using light and dark as her primary medium and telling stories in shadows, she creates sculptures made of industrial materials commonly found on urban construction sites. When illuminated, the sculptures defy their humble origins and mimic the effect of more decadent luxury objects, such as chandeliers, jewelry, and Persian metalwork. Recently, art deco architecture, Native American headdresses, and nuclear missiles have entered her repertoire of sources, alongside the art of the Middle East, as the artist engages with her mixed Iranian American heritage and current political events. The exhibition will include the suspended sculpture My House, My Tomb, which explores myths about the Taj Mahal and has never been exhibited in the United States.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

Use of the line “The presence of your absence is everywhere,” adapted from a letter by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, courtesy of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, Millay Society, millay.org.

Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture
July 20–October 28, 2018
Upper-Level Galleries

Image Building examines the complex and dynamic interactions among spectators, images, buildings, and time through the lens of architectural photography in America and Europe from the 1920s to the present. Organized by guest curator Therese Lichtenstein, Image Building surveys the ways in which artists explore the relationship between architecture and identity, featuring work by contemporary photographers Iwan Baan, Lewis Baltz, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Stephen Shore, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and earlier modernist architectural photographers like Berenice Abbott, Samuel Gottscho, Julius Shulman, and Ezra Stoller. The works of these influential photographers transformed how we view architecture.

Organized by the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York

Paris 1900: City of Entertainment
October 12, 2018–January 6, 2019
Ingram Gallery

This exhibition will allow audiences to relive the splendor of the French capital at the time of the Paris Exposition Universelle, when it heralded the arrival of the 20th century. More than ever before, Paris was seen throughout the world as a sparkling city of luxury with a sophisticated way of life. More than 250 works—paintings, decorative art, costumes, posters, photographs, jewelry, and sculptures, mainly kept by the Paris city museums—will immerse visitors in the atmosphere of Belle Époque Paris. They will be presented in six groupings: Paris, Showcase of the World; Art Nouveau; Paris, Capital of the Arts; The Parisienne; A Walk in Paris; and Paris by Night. The Frist Art Museum is one of three venues in the United States to present this iteration of an exhibition that was on view at the Petit Palais in 2014.

Exhibition organized by the Petit Palais Museum of Fine Arts, with exceptional loans from the Musée Carnavalet – History of Paris and the Palais Galliera Museum of Fashion, Paris Musées

Do Ho Suh (title TBD)
October 12, 2018–January 6, 2019
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

Korean artist Do Ho Suh creates astonishingly detailed and lyrical sculptural installations that alter perceptions of built environments and how the body relates to space. The centerpiece of this exhibition will be his Specimen Series, which explores details of Suh’s domestic existence such as light switches, door handles, electric panels and appliances taken from his living spaces and recreated in fabric. By isolating these objects, Suh invites the viewer to reflect on their everyday interaction with the seemingly mundane.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

Life, Love & Marriage Chests in Renaissance Italy
November 16, 2018–February 18, 2019
Upper-Level Galleries

During the Italian Renaissance, cassoni—elaborately decorated wedding chests—were an important part of marriage rituals and among the most prestigious furnishings in the house or palace of the newlyweds. Usually commissioned in twos, the chests were an expression of the family’s wealth and position in society. They were often conspicuously paraded through the streets from the bride’s family home to her husband’s home—a clear statement of a new economic and political alliance between elite families. The tales and imagery represented on the lavish wood panels that decorated the chests offer insight into Renaissance life and society. Drawing on a core selection of outstanding panels and chests belonging to the Museo Stibbert in Florence that rarely travel together, this exhibition explores and illustrates life, love, and marriage in Renaissance Florence. The function, craftsmanship, decorative techniques, and the significance and sources of the imagery will also be discussed.

Organized by Contemporanea Progetti with the Museo Stibbert and the Polo Museale della Toscana

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.

MEDIA CONTACTS
Buddy Kite: 615.744.3351, ”
Ellen Jones Pryor: 615.243.1311, ”

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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 a program of changing 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 may be found at FristArtMuseum.org/accessibility. Gallery admission is free for visitors 18 and younger and to members; $12 for adults; $9 for seniors and college students with ID; and $7 for active military. College students are admitted free Thursday and Friday evenings (with the exception of Frist Fridays), 5:00–9:00 p.m. Discounts are offered for groups of 10 or more with advance reservations by calling 615.744.3247. The galleries, café, and gift shop are open seven days a week: Mondays through Wednesdays, and Saturdays, 10:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.; and Sundays, 1:00–5:30 p.m., with the café opening at noon. Additional information is available by calling 615.244.3340 or by visiting FristArtMuseum.org.

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