NASHVILLE, Tenn. (August 14, 2019)—The Frist Art Museum is proud to announce its 2020 schedule of exhibitions. In the Ingram Gallery, the year begins with J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime, an exhibition of works by one of the greatest landscape painters of all time. Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style highlights Mackintosh’s artistic production and locates it within the unique context of late-nineteenth-century Glasgow. African Art from the New Orleans Museum of Art features ancestral figures, masks, and ceremonial costumes from one of the most important collections of traditional Sub-Saharan African art in the United States.
In the Upper-Level Galleries, an exhibition of works by Jitish Kallat features the dramatic interactive installation Covering Letter. Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange invites consideration of worn and weathered American flags as symbols of our country’s identity, history, and future. Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World is the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work and includes installations, sculptures, and paintings that explore themes of multiple identities. Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City focuses on illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and sculptures made in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages.
In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist presents 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; and the text-based works of Bethany Collins, who examines the historic intersection of language and racism in her multimedia practice.
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; We Count: FirstTime Voters, which honors the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment with visual representations of diverse group of Nashvillians’ first voting experiences; and 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.
The Frist Art Museum’s 2020 Schedule of Exhibitions
(Titles and dates subject to change)
The Nashville Flood: Ten Years Later
January 10–May 17, 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
J.M.W. Turner: Quest for the Sublime
February 20–May 31, 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–May 31, 2020
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
March 13–June 28, 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 features his 2012 work Covering Letter, 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. In a darkened gallery, visitors will walk through the mist screen on which the letter is projected, breaking the words apart. Covering Letter was one of the works selected for India’s pavilion at this year’s 58th Venice Biennale.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Mel Ziegler: Flag Exchange
March 13–June 28, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries
Mel Ziegler (b. 1956), the Paul E. Schwab 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
We Count: First-Time Voters
May 23–October 4, 2020
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
Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style
June 26–September 27, 2020
Ingram Gallery
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Glasgow Style emerged as the major manifestation of Art Nouveau in Britain and established Glasgow as the Second City of the Empire. This exhibition showcases Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928)—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 (1864–1933); Margaret’s sister, Frances Macdonald (1873–1921); and Frances’ husband, James Herbert McNair (1868–1955). 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
June 26–September 27, 2020
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins (b. 1984) explores the historic intersection of language and racism in her multimedia practice. She often manipulates and reprints existing written documents—such as the leading daily newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s or the U.S. Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson, Missouri, police department—to critique the accuracy and completeness of official records. Collins’s artist book America: A Hymnal (2017) features 100 different versions of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” written since Rev. Samuel F. Smith published the original lyrics in 1831. The multiple reinterpretations of this patriotic anthem—most in support of a particular political or social cause—offer opportunities for reflection on what it means to be an American, a particularly resonant topic during a presidential election year.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World
July 24–October 25, 2020
Upper-Level Galleries
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.
African Art from the New Orleans Museum of Art
October 23, 2020–January 17, 2021
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
Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City
November 20, 2020–February 14, 2021
Upper-Level Galleries
This is the first museum exhibition in the United States to focus on medieval art made in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Home to the oldest university in Europe, Bologna fostered a unique artistic culture at the end of the Middle Ages. With its large population of sophisticated readers, the city 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. University 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. Lenders include the Cleveland Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Lilly Library, New York Public Library, and University of Chicago Library.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog with seven essays, and, while it is 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
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, bkite@fristartmuseum.org
Ellen Jones Pryor: 615.243.1311, epryor@fristartmuseum.org
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. College students are admitted free Thursday and Friday evenings (with the exception of Frist Fridays), 5:00–9:00 p.m. Groups of 10 or more can receive discounts 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. For additional information, call 615.244.3340 or visit FristArtMuseum.org.