Frist Art Museum Presents BETHANY COLLINS: EVENSONG

The Frist Art Museum will present Bethany Collins: Evensong, an exhibition of multimedia works-including paintings, drawings, prints, an artist's book, and wallpaper-that explore the historic intersection of language and race. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist's Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery from June 11 through September 12, 2021.

In her conceptually driven practice, Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins (b. 1984) mines official publications-from dictionaries to newspapers to government reports-to find words or phrases that reflect a cultural ethos, particularly those related to racial and national identities. "The Frist is pleased to be presenting a selection of this increasingly in-demand artist's timely work. After the 2016 presidential election, Collins deepened her study of past texts in an effort to better understand the present great divide," says Frist Art Museum senior curator Katie Delmez. "This exhibition explores the complicated relationship of a person with their homeland."

To create many of the works on view at the Frist, Collins painstakingly reproduced selected texts through various means, such as blind-embossed printing, laser cutting, or tedious handwriting, and then manipulated the final form in some way. "By altering existing documents, Collins critiques the accuracy of the historical record and highlights the suggestive power of words," says Delmez. "Often intentionally hard to read, Collins's creations also offer commentary on the insidious nature of systemic inequities."

A focal point of one gallery at the Frist will be a newly produced artist's book containing 100 iterations of "The Star Spangled Banner," originally written by Francis Scott Key in 1814. Different versions have been written over time to support various political or social causes-from abolition and the Confederacy to temperance and suffrage. The lyrics of each remain visible, but the artist used a laser to cut out the musical notes-the unifying melody across all versions of the song. The many reinterpretations of the national anthem suggest that there are multiple and dissenting ways to express patriotism, as well as dissatisfaction with the status quo.

Thursday, June 10
Artist's Perspective
5:30 p.m.
presented on Zoom
Free. Registration required. Sign up at FristArtMuseum.org/events.

To post a comment, you must register and login.