The Frist Art Museum’s 2027 exhibition season brings Mughal opulence, French modernism, American pop, Black craft traditions, Escher’s impossible worlds, Basquiat’s experiments in reproduction, and the lyrical humanity of Jerry Pinkney to Nashville.

In 2027, the Frist Art Museum will offer Nashville a season shaped by movement across continents, centuries, materials, and ideas. The year’s exhibitions range from the imperial refinement of the Mughal court to the intimate interiors of French modernism, from the optical puzzles of M.C. Escher to the charged visual language of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Together, they form less a calendar of shows than a cultural itinerary—one that invites visitors to consider how beauty, power, identity, and memory have been made visible across time.

The museum’s 2027 schedule is notable for its breadth. In the Ingram Gallery, audiences will encounter art born of empire, private collecting, American reinvention, and French decorative luxury. Upstairs, the season turns toward the mind’s geometry, modernist abstraction, and illustration’s power to carry music, history, and feeling. In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, contemporary artists rooted in Black craft traditions appear alongside a focused look at Basquiat’s printmaking practice, expanding familiar narratives about who makes art history and how it is preserved.

The World Arrives in the Galleries

The season opens with The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture, and Opulence, a major exhibition devoted to the golden age of the Mughal court, roughly 1560 to 1660. Under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan, the empire’s artists and architects produced a visual culture of dazzling sophistication: paintings alive with courtly detail, jewelry set with precious stones, ornamental carpets, glittering metalwork, mother-of-pearl vessels, and the architectural legacy embodied most famously by the Taj Mahal.

What makes the exhibition especially resonant for a contemporary audience is its cosmopolitanism. Mughal artists absorbed and transformed influences from South Asia, Iran, China, and Europe, creating a style that was at once imperial and porous, rooted and global. Floral designs evoked paradise; portraits rendered authority and personality; images of animals and architecture carried a courtly imagination far beyond the borders of any single tradition.

Nashville’s Legendary Hays Collection Comes Home

Opening alongside the Mughal exhibition is French Impressionism and the Nabis: Works from the Collection of Marlene and Spencer Hays, a selection of 30 works from one of Nashville’s most storied private collections. Built over more than four decades by Marlene and Spencer Hays, the collection reflects a passion for French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially the Nabis, the symbolist group that included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard.

The exhibition offers a rare public view in the United States of works by artists including Edgar Degas, Eva Gonzalès, Henri Matisse, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Vuillard. Its focus on private encounters, depictions of women, and the spirituality of nature gives the presentation an intimate mood—less a survey than an invitation into rooms of attention, tenderness, and reflection.

Black Craft, Contemporary Form

In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, Through These Hands: Crafting Material Visions centers four Tennessee-based artists—Brittney Boyd Bullock, Samuel Dunson, Desmond Lewis, and Althea Murphy-Price—whose practices are rooted in Black craft traditions while moving fluently through contemporary forms. Sculptures, textile assemblages, 3D-printed works, repurposed furniture, and other objects become vessels for personal narrative, cultural memory, and material invention.

Presented as part of the Crafting Blackness research initiative, the exhibition expands how craft and Black creative labor are understood within American art history. It refuses any narrow separation between craft and fine art, positioning material knowledge as intellectual, ancestral, and contemporary at once.

Impossible Worlds and American Reinventions

Spring brings M.C. Escher: Infinite Variations, a comprehensive exhibition of more than 150 original drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints by the Dutch artist whose name has become synonymous with paradox. Escher’s stairways to nowhere, tessellated creatures, shifting perspectives, and recurring meditations on infinity reveal an artist fascinated by the limits of perception. The exhibition traces his journey from lesser-known book illustrations and commissions to the mesmerizing prints that made him one of the world’s most recognizable image-makers.

In summer, Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts turns to the United States from the 1940s to today. With works by figures ranging from Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to the Gee’s Bend quilters, Thornton Dial, Norman Lewis, Howardena Pindell, Alma Thomas, Titus Kaphar, and Kehinde Wiley, the exhibition charts a dynamic story of American art during decades of profound social change. Its strength lies in its refusal of a single narrative: abstraction, pop, identity, social justice, and self-taught traditions share space as part of a larger national conversation.

Basquiat in Reproduction, Delaney in Light

Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction brings attention to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s rarely studied printmaking practice. Rather than treating reproduction as secondary to painting, the exhibition frames it as central to Basquiat’s engagement with appropriation, identity, collaboration, and postmodern visual culture. Through nearly 50 works, the show connects Basquiat to artists across generations, including Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Rauschenberg, and pioneering Black printmakers such as Bob Blackburn.

Later in the year, Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty situates the Knoxville-born artist within the great currents of twentieth-century modernism. Moving from New York during and after the Harlem Renaissance to Paris in the 1960s, the exhibition explores Delaney’s radiant abstractions, early street scenes, and portraiture, while also emphasizing the friendships and artistic relationships that sustained his work. The result is a portrait of abstraction not as isolation, but as community, influence, and luminous exchange.

Luxury, Line, and the Music of Illustration

Autumn brings a different kind of spectacle with Splendor and Luxury: French Art Nouveau and Art Deco, drawn from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ renowned collection of French decorative arts. Jewelry, furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, works on paper, and stained glass reveal a period when design became a language for modern life. Art nouveau’s sinuous natural forms give way to art deco’s streamlined geometry and luxurious materials, tracing a shift from organic reverie to the speed and confidence of the modern age.

The season closes with Soul, Sound, & Voice: The Art of Jerry Pinkney, a tribute to the internationally renowned watercolorist and illustrator whose books brought Black histories, folklore, fables, and biographies to generations of readers. Organized around spirituality, music, nature, and voice, the exhibition underscores Pinkney’s belief in art as a bridge—between past and present, child and adult, private imagination and shared history.

The 2027 Exhibition Season at a Glance

The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture, and Opulence
February 5–May 9, 2027 · Ingram Gallery

French Impressionism and the Nabis: Works from the Collection of Marlene and Spencer Hays
February 5–May 9, 2027 · Ingram Gallery

Through These Hands: Crafting Material Visions
February 5–May 9, 2027 · Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

M.C. Escher: Infinite Variations
March 5–June 13, 2027 · Upper-Level Galleries

Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
June 4–August 29, 2027 · Ingram Gallery

Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction
June 4–August 29, 2027 · Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty
July 9–October 3, 2027 · Upper-Level Galleries

Splendor and Luxury: French Art Nouveau and Art Deco
October 1, 2027–January 2, 2028 · Ingram Gallery

Soul, Sound, & Voice: The Art of Jerry Pinkney
October 29, 2027–January 30, 2028 · Upper-Level Galleries

Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Frist Art Museum is a nonprofit art exhibition center located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville. Gallery admission is free for guests ages 18 and younger and for members, and $20 for adults. For current hours and additional information, visit FristArtMuseum.org or call 615.244.3340.