Frist Center Announces Upcoming Exhibitions: Bill Traylor and More

This summer, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tennessee, presents two exhibitions devoted to folk and self-taught artists of the American South. Creation Story: Gee's Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial and Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will provide a rich view of the diversity and power of African American vernacular art. Both exhibitions may be seen at the Frist from May 25 through September 23, 2012.

Creation Story includes twenty of the stunning, visually complex quilts made by the acclaimed quilters of Gee's Bend, a small rural area near Selma, Alabama, along with twenty-four masterful paintings and assemblages by Mr. Dial. Together, these will demonstrate the variety of ways in which both the quilters and Dial use cast-off materials to create works of profound beauty, achieved despite the backdrop of poverty and racism against which they worked. The art in the exhibition is drawn primarily from Atlanta's Souls Grown Deep Foundation's distinguished collection of Southern African American art.

Bill Traylor presents sixty-five drawings and paintings on cardboard by the late Traylor. Drawn from two of the largest collections of his work, the exhibition will reveal the powerful imagination and inventiveness that made him one of the most important self-taught American artists of the twentieth century.