Don’t miss our current and upcoming exhibitions, as well as Martin ArtQuest , an interactive art experience where visitors can draw, animate, paint, create prints, and more! The Frist Art Museum is easily accessible in the heart of downtown Nashville on Upper Broadway, making it the perfect destination for art lovers and curious minds alike. Plan your visit today!

Rendez-Vous offers a rare glimpse into the life and mind of McQueen and introduces French photographer Ann Ray to audiences in the United States. With a partnership built on friendship and trust, Ray was provided unfettered access to McQueen’s world and captured everything from contemplative moments in the design studio to models posing backstage.

The exhibition features 65 captivating photographs hand-selected by Ray herself from her archive of over 32,000 negatives and more than 60 dress objects spanning the entirety of McQueen’s career.

Shahpour Pouyan: Winter in Paradise explores critiques of oppressive political powers and expresses a poetic melancholy about the human condition. This multimedia display, Pouyan’s largest solo exhibition to date, features architectural drawings, ceramic sculptures, and a debut virtual reality experience. Pouyan’s contemplative and personal works utilize astonishing beauty and sophistication to communicate his powerful perspective.

¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
June 28–September 29, 2024

¡Printing the Revolution! examines how graphic arts have been utilized to build community, engage the public around social concerns, and wrestle with shifting notions of the term Chicano, which Mexican Americans defiantly adopted in the 1960s and 1970s as a sign of a new political and cultural identity. During this period, Chicano activist artists forged a remarkable movement of politically engaged printmaking rooted in cultural expression and social justice movements that remains vital today. This exhibition, for the first time, pairs historical civil rights-era prints alongside works from the 1980s to the present.  

Black Joy, in Spite of . . .
Through September 2, 2024

Black Joy, in Spite of . . . offers a three-dimensional picture of the Black American experience by focusing on moments of joy despite a history of pain and struggle. Guest curator Brigette Janea Jones has selected photographs made throughout Tennessee that depict the enslaved and their descendants during various time periods, including enslavement, Reconstruction, the modern civil rights movement, the crack era, and more. The images capture scenes of family connection, friendship, pride, and resistance that highlight the humanity of each individual and counter the more common focus on trauma.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold includes over three decades of the artist’s work in photography, installation, video, painting, and performance. Hauntingly beautiful and emotionally charged, Behold shows how Campos-Pons’s layered identity as a Cuban woman with ancestral roots in the Yoruba culture of West Africa, as well as Spain and China has gifted her with compassion and empathy for a wide spectrum of humanity. Evoking the history of diaspora and present-day realities of cultural displacement, labor and race, and motherhood and spirituality, Behold invites us to join with the artist in the vital search for meaning and connectivity.

In this exhibition, New York–based multidisciplinary artist LaJuné McMillian combines extended reality software and mediums including movement and sound to provide an exuberant visual critique of oppressive systems that commodify bodies and otherwise limit free expressions. Working with motion capture (witnessing) software, their work often translates the movements of Black people, seen as both individual and cultural identifiers, into powerful rhythms and explosive patterns and sounds.

Designed with our younger audience in mind, yet fun and fascinating for all ages, Journey Through Japan goes on a colorful, atmospheric exploration through Japan to show how popular stories have shaped the country’s art, design, and technology across the centuries. Divided into four thematic sections—Sky, Sea, Forest, and City—it presents over one hundred historic and contemporary objects, ranging from animated movies, origami, and ukiyo-e woodblock prints to photography, robots, and youth fashion.