2012 Frist Center Exhibition Schedule to Feature Art from the Phillips Collection, Oil Sketches by John Constable

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts' 2012 exhibition schedule offers a wide variety of exhibitions in the Center's Ingram Gallery. These include masterpieces of American art from the famed Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; an exhibition combining quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala., and the monumental assemblages of Alabama native Thornton Dial; works on paper from self- taught artist Bill Traylor, also from Alabama; and a major Frist-organized retrospective of the work of internationally acclaimed photographer, Carrie Mae Weems.

The Upper-Level Galleries will feature Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, organized by the Frist Center; Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and an exhibition of German Expressionist paintings, sculptures and graphic arts from the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist will present videos by the British duo John Wood and Paul Harrison; the eco-landscape photography of Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky; and videos and paintings of New York-based artist Brian Alfred.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video will travel to the Portland (Oregon) Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination will also be presented at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

The Frist Center's schedule of exhibitions for 2012 in order of opening:

To See As Artists See: American Art from the Phillips Collection
Feb. 3-May 6, 2012
Ingram Gallery

The first international exhibition organized by the Phillips Collection to feature an overview of the museum's renowned American collection, To See as Artists See incorporates nearly 100 works by 68 artists, including outstanding paintings by George Inness, Winslow Homer, Edward Hicks, Edward Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell and many others. Since opening in 1921, the Phillips has been an active champion of American art, singling out artists who followed their own vision independent of fashionable styles and schools. Its collection of American masterworks celebrates the best of American art from the late 19th through the 20th century.

Answers to Questions: John Wood and Paul Harrison
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
Feb. 3-May 6, 2012

Answers to Questions features nine videos by the British collaborators John Wood and Paul Harrison. With a deadpan delivery worthy of Buster Keaton, Wood and Harrison create intimate, formally structured mise-en-scènes in which they use their own bodies in restrained interactions with such commonplace items as tennis balls, chairs and strings. The artists delight in orchestrating the comic consequences of inertia, gravity and the law of falling bodies in these low-tech physics experiments. Their blend of elegant conceptualism and slapstick conveys a sense of inspired pranksterism.

Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination
Feb. 24-May 29, 2012
Upper-Level Galleries

Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination is an exhibition of works by contemporary artists who invent humanlike, animal or hybrid creatures to symbolize life's mysteries, desires and fears. Finding inspiration in sources ranging from Aesop's

Fables to the products of genetic experimentation, the artists in the exhibition examine interactions between nature and humanity in the context of oral and written lore, psychology, ethics and visions of the future in both science and science fiction. The exhibition will include approximately 60 contemporary paintings, photographs, sculptures and video works.

This exhibition is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and curated by Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala.

The exhibition will travel to Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba, Canada: June 15-Sept. 9, 2012, and to the Glenbow Art Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Sept. 28-Jan. 2, 2013.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Vanderbilt University Press.

Creation Story: Gee's Bend Quilts and the Art of Thornton Dial
May 25-Sept. 3, 2012
Ingram Gallery

This exhibition explores parallels and intersections in the works of the world-famous Gee's Bend quilters and the self-taught master of assemblage art, Thornton Dial. Quilts made by the women of Gee's Bend, a small rural community southwest of Selma, Ala., feature a sophisticated orchestration of color and eccentric quasi-geometric shapes composing what the New York Times has said are "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced."

The 82-year-old Thornton Dial has earned international recognition as one of the most compelling and original voices of our time. Rich in allusion and metaphor, Dial's dynamic assemblages weave together memories of his own life with reflections on universal experiences of struggle and triumph. He shares with the quiltmakers of Gee's Bend a debt to African American aesthetic traditions, most notably the cemetery constructions and yard art of the rural South, as well as an inventive approach to the reconstruction of found materials in the creation of an extraordinary visual poetry. The Wall Street Journal writes: "The works in Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, are tough, beautiful, disturbing, seductive, improvisatory, unignorable, fierce, exhilarating, ambiguous-and much more."

This exhibition has been organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta, Ga.

Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
May 25-Sept. 3, 2012
Ingram Gallery
Presented concurrently with the artists of Gee's Bend and Thornton Dial will be 63 drawings and paintings on cardboard by the self-taught Alabama artist Bill Traylor. Born into slavery in 1854 on a plantation near Montgomery, Traylor began making art at the age of 82. His works are notable for their flat and simply defined shapes and vibrant compositions, in which memories, folk legends and observations relating to African American life are merged. The power and originality of his art was recognized in 1940 by painter Charles Shannon, who arranged for a solo exhibition of his work at an art center in Montgomery. Over the years, Shannon purchased hundreds of works from Traylor and kept them in storage because of the lack of interest in the art world. In 1979, Shannon arranged for a show in a New York gallery and in 1982, Traylor's art was included in the Corcoran Gallery's Black Folk Art in America. Today, Traylor is recognized as one of the finest American artists of the 20th century.

Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery.

Edward Burtynsky: The Industrial Sublime
May 25-Sept. 3, 2012
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is fascinated by the subject of the topographical landscape as it has been irrevocably altered by industries that feed the world's appetite for material goods. Burtynsky finds both beauty and repulsiveness in his depictions of mining, manufacturing, consumption, waste disposal and recycling. Rather than simply decry the human scarring of the land, he acknowledges the conflict between the human need for economic growth and the value of protecting our fragile ecosystem. The 15 photographs in this exhibition show the beauty and ugliness of landscapes that have been altered by human industry.

Edward Burtynsky: The Industrial Sublime is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Weber State University, and the University of Wyoming Art Museum.

Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum
June 22-Sept. 30, 2012
Upper-Level Galleries

Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum centers on two major works by John Constable in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the full-size oil sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse. These paintings will be displayed with a group of the artist's small oil sketches and supplemented by an exquisite series of his watercolors and drawings, demonstrating progress from his early works to the pencil sketches which defined "Constable Country" of Suffolk and Essex. This exhibition offers insight into Constable's working process through a wide variety of objects drawn from the V&A's unparalleled Constable collection, placing the artist in the context of his historical and ongoing influence, and showcasing the enduring power of England's quintessential landscape painter.

Exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
Sept. 21, 2012-Jan. 13, 2013
Ingram Gallery

Carrie Mae Weems is a socially motivated artist whose works invite contemplation on issues surrounding race, gender and class. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice. This retrospective, which is composed of more than 150 objects-primarily photographs but also written texts, audio recordings, fabric banners and videos-will provide an opportunity to trace the evolution of Weems's career over the last 30 years. Although she employs a variety of means and addresses an array of issues, an overarching commitment to better understanding the present by closely examining history and identity is found throughout her work. A notion of universality is also present: while African-Americans are typically her primary subjects, Weems wants "people of color to stand for the human multitudes" and for her art to resonate with audiences of all races.

This exhibition is organized by the Frist Center and curated by Frist Center Curator Katie Delmez.

The exhibition will travel to the Portland (Oregon) Museum of Art: Feb-May 2013; to the Cleveland Museum of Art: June 30-Sept. 15, 2013; and to the Guggenheim Museum Oct. 18, 2013-Jan 19, 2014.

A full-color, illustrated catalog will be published by Yale University Press with essays by leading and emerging scholars.

Brian Alfred: It's Already the End of the World
Sept. 21, 2012-Jan. 13, 2013
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

A Brooklyn-based video artist and painter, Brian Alfred employs seductive colors, abstract shapes and coolly detached photo-based imagery to address such themes as revolution, vulnerability and government surveillance in contemporary life.

German Expressionism: Masterworks from the Detroit Institute of the Arts
Oct. 19, 2012 -Feb. 10, 2013
Upper Level Galleries

This exhibition features works from the Detroit Institute of the Arts' renowned collection of early twentieth-century German Expressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, by artists who belonged to the groups known as The Blue Rider (active in Munich) and The Bridge (active in Dresden and Berlin). The Detroit collection contains major works by Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

This exhibition was organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

 

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