Frist Art Museum Announces 2025 Schedule Of Exhibitions

The Frist Art Museum has announced its 2025 schedule of exhibitions. In the Ingram Gallery, the year begins with Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, an exhibition featuring works by Rosa Bonheur, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and more that explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in late 19th-century France.

Its companion show, Tennessee Harvest: 1870s–1920s, has a local focus with painters taking both realist and impressionist approaches to the depiction of food and its cultivation. The cross-cultural exhibition Venice and the Ottoman Empire explores the relationship between two rival Mediterranean superpowers over four centuries (1400–1800) and in multiple civic spheres. Celebrating the ongoing vitality of the masquerade in African arts, New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations showcases the artworks and voices of four creators working today.

In the Upper-Level Galleries, David C. Driskell & Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship traces the artist's career and his relationships with contemporaries through works by 35 prominent Black artists. It will be shown concurrently with Kindred Spirits: Intergenerational Forms of Expression, 1966–1999, an exhibition that explores the legacy and influence of Fisk University's Art Department, which Driskell led from 1966 to 1976. Through 50 masterpiece quilts, Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories demonstrates how the evolution of the American quilt and the nation's very idea of itself remain deeply intertwined. Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm offers an unprecedented look at the extraordinary archive of recently discovered photographs taken by Paul McCartney at the start of Beatlemania.

In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist presents recent works by Haitian American artists M. Florine Démosthène and Didier William,exploring the imprint that the artists' cultural roots and immigrant or first-generation experiences have had on their practices. In the summer, the gallery will feature oil paintings of still lifes, landscapes, and the human body by American representational artist Ellen Altfest.

The Frist Art Museum's 2025 Schedule of Exhibitions
Titles and dates are subject to change.

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism
January 31–May 4, 2025
Ingram Gallery

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in late 19th-century France. Beginning with the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris and the resultant food crisis and continuing through the 1890s, Farm to Table showcases the work of artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, who captured the nation's unique relationship with food, from production to preparation and consumption. Featuring approximately 50 paintings and sculptures, the exhibition's portrayals of farmers in fields and gardens, bustling urban markets, and chefs and diners in the age of grand banquets and a burgeoning café scene underscores connections between urban and rural life while capturing changing notions of gender, labor, and class.

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia.

Tennessee Harvest: 1870s–1920s
January 31–May 4, 2025
Ingram Gallery

Tennessee Harvest focuses on 19th- and early 20th-century painters taking both realist and impressionist approaches to the depiction of food and its cultivation in the state. A companion show to Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, this exhibition shows how artists like Lloyd Branson, George Chambers, Gilbert Gaul, Cornelius Hankins, Willie Betty Newman, Catherine Wiley, and others absorbed and adapted European influences in both subject matter and style.

As with their French counterparts, these Tennessee artists often romanticized agricultural life. Showing strong, hard-working farmers and harvesters, they celebrate rural self-sufficiency and resiliency. Intentionally or not, this reinforced the perception of the turn-of-the-century South as a distinctly agricultural economy, even as manufacturing and other industries were on the rise. The paintings also warrant study for subjects they omit—Black farmers, markets, and cooks. To present a more complete view, the exhibition will include photographs showing the broader realities of food production across the state.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum and co-curated by Mark Scala, Chief Curator, Frist Art Museum, and Candice Candeto, Senior Curator of Fine and Decorative Art, Tennessee State Museum.

M. Florine Démosthène and Didier William: The Space Between Here and Home
January 31–May 4, 2025
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

This exhibition of Haitian American artists M. Florine Démosthène and Didier William—both featured in the Frist Art Museum's 2023 group show Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage—examines the capacity of immigrant bodies to recall a homeland while also reflecting a new, hybrid existence. Through a selection of figurative paintings, collages, and sculptures, Démosthène and William will offer insight into how they occupy spaces outside Haiti (Démosthène is based primarily in New York and Accra, Ghana; William works between Miami and Philadelphia) while still being informed by the country's cultural and spiritual traditions. Formal connections shared by the artists include an emphasis on eyes as a way to subvert an anti-immigrant gaze and the use of paired figures—a reference Vodou's divine twins, Marassa Jumeaux—to express the duality of their experiences growing up in both Haiti and the United States.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

David C. Driskell & Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship 
March 14–June 1, 2025
Upper-Level Galleries

David C. Driskell & Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship highlights the artistic legacy of David C. Driskell and the importance of his relationships with fellow artists—many of whom hold a significant place in the 20th-century art canon. In 1976, Driskell curated the groundbreaking exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750–1950, which has been foundational for the field of African American art history. Many of the artists featured in Two Centuries of Black American Art are included in David C. Driskell & Friends.

This exhibition explores the work of, and Driskell's relationships with, such figures as Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Keith Morrison, James Porter, Kara Walker, Hale Woodruff, and many others. It features more than 70 artworks by 35 prominent African American artists as well as ephemera from the Driskell Papers that exemplify the artists' unique friendships.

Originally conceived by Dr. Sheila Bergman (University of California, Riverside), Curlee Raven Holton (former director The David C. Driskell Center), and Heather Sincavage (Wilkes University), the exhibition's presentation at the Frist Art Museum was overseen by the Frist's associate curator, Michael Ewing. The collaborative effort behind this showcase mirrors the ethos it seeks to celebrate, emphasizing the interconnectedness that defined Driskell's artistic journey.

Organized by The Driskell Center, University of Maryland, with support from the Teiger Foundation

Kindred Spirits: Intergenerational Forms of Expression, 1966–1999
March 14–June 1, 2025
Upper-Level Galleries, Frist Art Museum
Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, Lower Level, Fisk University

1966 marked the centennial year of Fisk University, the oldest institution for higher learning in Nashville, Tennessee. It also represented a moment of transition after the retirement of Aaron Douglas, founder and chair of Fisk's Art Department and a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The appointment of David C. Driskell as Douglas's successor ushered in a broadening view of the African diasporic arts through instructional innovation and the expansion of the university's collections, artist residency programs, and exhibitions. This vision was shared and further realized by faculty members such as Robert Hall, Earl J. Hooks, Stephanie Pogue, and Greg Ridley, among others.

Kindred Spirits frames a critical timeline linking Driskell's tenure (1966–76) with the tenure of one of his preeminent colleagues, professor Earl J. Hooks (1969–99). Co-organized by Fisk University Galleries and the Frist Art Museum, this exhibition will feature more than 50 objects, including archival images and interview documentation, and will act as a companion exhibition to David C. Driskell and Friends: Creativity, Collaboration, and Friendship.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum and Fisk University Galleries and co-curated by Michael Ewing, Frist Art Museum associate curator, and Jamaal B. Sheats, Fisk University Galleries director and curator

Venice and the Ottoman Empire
May 29–September 1, 2025
Ingram Gallery

This ambitious cross-cultural exhibition explores the relationship between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, two rival superpowers in the Mediterranean, over four centuries (1400–1800) and in multiple spheres: artistic, culinary, diplomatic, economic, political, and technological. The exhibition comes to a spectacular conclusion with a gallery dedicated to Mariano Fortuny's Ottoman-inspired fashions and decorative arts created in his Venetian palazzo in the early 20th century.

Featuring more than 150 works of art in a broad range of media, including glass, paintings, prints, metalwork, and textiles, the exhibition draws from the vast collections of Venice's storied civic museums. The Venetian loans are joined by a trove of recently salvaged objects from a major Adriatic shipwreck, the large Venetian merchant ship Gagliana Grossa that sank while traveling from Venice to Istanbul in 1583. These fascinating items have never been exhibited outside Croatia, where the wreck occurred.

Organized by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the museum box

Ellen Altfest: Forever
May 29–September 1, 2025
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

American representational painter Ellen Altfest paints directly from observation, often working on a single painting over the course of months or years. In meticulously rendering the surface qualities of objects that she feels have been overlooked in art and life—from the rough textures of rocks and tree bark to expanses of men's skin and hair—her close looking and technical virtuosity yield a near hallucinatory clarity. But her images are also products of invention, as evidenced by curious cropping, juxtapositions of subject matter, and art historical allusions.

Featuring approximately 20 oil paintings created over the last two decades, Forever is inspired by Emily Dickinson's line “Forever – is composed of Nows,” an encouragement to live mindfully in the present. By connecting nature and the human figure, Altfest generates a distilled poetry in which each is suggestive of the other. In the spirit of Dickinson's warm and lucid verse, she is a witness to the ever-overlooked. 

Organized by the Frist Art Museum

Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories
June 27–October 12, 2025
Upper-Level Galleries

Seen by many as a timeless, democratic art form, the quilt has evolved throughout United States history and continues to develop today. Made by a broadly under-recognized diversity of artistic hands and minds, the medium offers an opportunity to tell a rich and complicated story of our shared and contested history.

Celebrating aesthetic and technical achievements while also exploring the lives of quilters, the exhibition features approximately 50 remarkable examples of quilts and coverlets made from the 18th century up to 2018, presented in groups devoted to themes such as “Unseen Hands,” “Modern Myths,” and “Making a Difference.” Quilts and coverlets made by Americans of European ancestry will be shown with those created by Black and Indigenous Americans. Comparative examples from Britain, France, Mexico, and India will invite a broader understanding of five centuries of global textile production and trade.

Distinct narratives embedded in each of the exhibition's quilts and coverlets provide insight into the lives enslaved and immigrant laborers, industrialization, and the nation's expansion and emergence as a world power. Contemporary examples show how artists have used quilts as an expressive medium from the countercultural period of the late 20th century to today, with works reflecting the perspectives of LGBTQIA+, Latinx, and Indigenous American artists responding to such issues as gun violence, racism, and Indigenous sovereignty. Visitors will also be able to access a visual database of the NAMES Project's AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations
October 10, 2025–January 4, 2026
Ingram Gallery

New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations highlights the stories of four contemporary masquerade artists, their motivations, artistic choices, and the patronage and economic networks with which they engage. Through the presentation of works of Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa (Nigeria), David Sanou (Burkina Faso), Sheku “Goldenfinger” Fofanah (Sierra Leone), and Hervé Youmbi (Cameroon), the exhibition offers fresh research models for contemporary masquerade, bringing to the fore issues relating to restitution, ownership, and research ethics.

A collaboration between an international team of scholars and artists, this is the first major exhibition on contemporary West African masquerade artists to focus on individual creators rather than the typical presentation of masquerades as products of entire cultures, which undermines the nuanced and layered stories that individual artists and masquerades tell.

Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art in partnership with Musée des Civilisations Noires (Museum of Black Civilizations), Dakar, Senegal

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm
November 7, 2025–January 26, 2026
Upper-Level Galleries

Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, this exhibition is an intimate and historic opportunity to see the extraordinary archive of recently discovered photographs taken by Paul McCartney between December 1963 and February 1964. Over the course of these three short months, the Beatles—Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr—were propelled from being the most popular band in Britain to an unprecedented international cultural phenomenon. The photographs in this exhibition, taken by McCartney with his own camera, provide a uniquely personal perspective on what it was like to be a Beatle at the start of Beatlemania—from gigs in Liverpool and London to performing on the Ed Sullivan show in New York for an unparalleled television audience of 73 million people.

Drawn from McCartney's own personal archive, the majority of these images have never been seen before. They allow us to experience the Beatles' extraordinarily rapid rise from a successful regional band to global stardom through McCartney's eyes. At a time when so many camera lenses were on them, this perspective—from the inside—brings fresh insight to the band, their experiences, the fans, and the early 1960s.

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm has been organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, England, in collaboration with Paul McCartney. It is curated by Sir Paul McCartney with Sarah Brown for MPL Communications and Rosie Broadley for the National Portrait Gallery.

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