The Frist Art Museum has announced its 2024 schedule of exhibitions. In the Ingram Gallery, the year begins with Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century, the first comprehensive survey of paintings and works on paper by artists such as Carroll Cloar, Aaron Douglas, Caroline Durieux, Will Henry Stevens, and Alma Thomas created in the American South between 1913 and 1955. The exhibition of fashion and photography Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous explores the creative partnership between the visionary British designer and his trusted French photographer. Centering on Yoruba-derived Santería symbolism of Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Beholdfeatures photography, installation, painting, and performance drawing on the Cuban-born artist’s memories and experiences and her family’s story to examine the histories of enslavement, indentured labor, motherhood, migration, and race.

In the Upper-Level Galleries, Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French traces the intersecting careers of the most prominent American sculptors of the Gilded Age. ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now presents historical civil rights-era prints by Chicano artists alongside works by graphic artists working from the 1980s to today. Journey through Japan: Myths to Manga shows how imagination, playfulness, and the environment have inspired Japan’s folklore, design, and technology.

In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist presents recent prints and mixed media works by LaToya M. Hobbs, who explores Black womanhood, identity, and the rich traditions of printmaking while pushing the medium’s boundaries. Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan confronts and critiques political power through a poetic visual vocabulary of architecture.

The Frist Art Museum’s 2024 Schedule of Exhibitions
Titles and dates are subject to change.

Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century
January 25–April 21, 2024
Ingram Gallery

The first comprehensive survey of paintings and works on paper created in the American South from 1913 to 1955, Southern/Modern features more than one hundred works drawn from public and private collections across the country. The exhibition focuses on artists such as Carroll Cloar, Aaron Douglas, Caroline Durieux, Will Henry Stevens, Alma Thomas, and others who worked in states below the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as those bordering the Mississippi River. It also includes artists from outside the South, such as Josef Albers and Elaine de Kooning, who were instructors at North Carolina’s experimental Black Mountain College, as well as Thomas Hart Benton, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and others whose works reflect on Southern experiences from a distance. Throughout the exhibition, thematic groupings weave together the region’s rich cultures, telling stories of agriculture and industry, class division and racial injustice, natural beauty, and stylistic innovation. Full of vibrant, emotionally charged works, Southern/Modern treats a subject long neglected by art historians and museums outside the region. It shows how in the South as elsewhere, modern artists linked social and aesthetic progress, hoping to change the way people saw their world.

Southern/Modern is organized by the Mint Museum in collaboration with the Georgia Museum of Art.

Carving a New Tradition: The Art of LaToya M. Hobbs
January 25–April 21, 2024
Gordon Contemporary Artist Project Gallery

Carving a New Tradition, guest curated by Dr. Rebecca VanDiver, showcases a selection of woodblock prints and mixed-media artwork from the Arkansas-born, Baltimore-based painter and printmaker LaToya M. Hobbs. Her monumental five-panel woodcarving Carving Out Time (2020–21) anchors the exhibition and exemplifies Hobbs’ explorations of Black womanhood, cultural identity, and artistic legacy. While honoring the rich traditions of woodblock printmaking and her Black artistic foremothers, Hobbs pushes the medium’s boundaries and incorporates mixed media elements. Hobbs is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a founding member of Black Women of Print, an artistic collective that seeks to make the past, present, and future work of Black women printmakers more visible.

Carving a New Tradition: The Art of LaToya M. Hobbs is organized by the Frist Art Museum with Dr. Rebecca VanDiver, associate professor of African American art at Vanderbilt University.

Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French
March 1–May 27, 2024
Upper-Level Galleries

Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) were the preeminent American sculptors of the Gilded Age. As friendly rivals, they transformed sculpture in the United States, producing dozens of the nation’s most recognizable public artworks—from Saint-Gaudens’s Diana atop New York City’s Madison Square Garden to French’s Seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC. Drawing upon the collections of the two artists’ historic homes, Chesterwood and the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, Monuments and Myths is the first exhibition to explore the artists’ intersecting careers and features approximately seventy sculptures, models, maquettes, and more. While learning about the lives and careers of both artists, guests will be offered an expansive narrative that reflects the multifaceted stories embedded in the art. Amid massive industrial growth and developing sociopolitical structures, the sculptors produced aesthetically graceful and socially potent artworks that shaped and reflected America’s complicated negotiation of national identity in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

This exhibition is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts, Chesterwood, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Saint-Gaudens Memorial in partnership with the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park.

Black Joy, In Spite Of
April 5–September 2, 2024
Conte Community Arts Gallery

Through a selection of historical imagery paired with art of the present day, guest curator Brigette Janea Jones, a historian, non-profit executive, and speaker, offers a more three-dimensional picture of the Black American experience by focusing on moments of joy despite a history of pain and struggle. “This pain has sustained Black people, in some ways, by making us resilient or seem even ‘superhuman’ in the face of injustices. However, these ‘superhuman’ people were and still are worthy of being humanized in our collective memory,” said Jones.

This exhibition showcases photographs of enslaved people and their descendants taken throughout the three geographical regions of Tennessee during various periods, including enslavement, Reconstruction, the civil rights era, the crack era, and more. Jones will invite students at Tennessee’s HBCUs and public universities to submit responses to these images with their own interpretations of Black people resisting harm and embarking upon the eternal journey to Black joy. Working with a community jury, Jones will select ten of the students’ works for the exhibition. Black Joy, In Spite Of will show Black Tennesseans having the audacity to be happy amid and in the aftermath of an institution that was designed to break them.

Black Joy, In Spite Of is organized by the Frist Art Museum with guest curator Brigette Janea Jones.

Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous
May 24–August 25, 2024
Ingram Gallery

Lee Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) redefined contemporary fashion with his extraordinary ability to blend exquisite craftsmanship with intimate and imaginative storytelling. Mythologized in his own lifetime, he was characterized as a troubled genius and one of the twentieth century’s most visionary designers. Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous offers a rare glimpse into the life and mind of McQueen and introduces one of the twentieth century’s great, but lesser-known, fashion photographers, Ann Ray (b. 1969). With exclusive, unfettered access to McQueen’s world, Ray captured everything from contemplative moments in the design studio to the organized chaos backstage at runway shows. In total, she shot forty-three collections over the course of thirteen years, creating a massive body of work and an indelible record of McQueen’s process.

The exhibition features 65 photographs hand-selected by Ray from her archive of over 32,000 negatives, more than 50 dress objects spanning the entirety of McQueen’s career, 10 gifted garments from Ray’s wardrobe, and various pieces of fashion ephemera, all of which are sourced from one of the world’s largest private collections of McQueen’s works. Both thorough and emotional, the exhibition offers the unique opportunity to reevaluate the life and legacy of a beloved but widely misunderstood figure, and to disentangle the person from the persona.

Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous is organized and produced by Barrett Barrera Projects.

Shahpour Pouyan: Winter in Paradise
May 24–August 25, 2024
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery

In works of art astonishing for their beauty, sophistication, and virtuosity, Shahpour Pouyan (b. 1979) expresses a poetic melancholy about the human condition. Winter in Paradise will be this internationally renowned Iranian artist’s largest solo museum exhibition to date. Three major projects from the past decade will show Pouyan’s extraordinary mastery of a range of traditional and new media and his engagement with history and contemporary events.

Conceived as a triptych in three galleries, the exhibition explores the architecture of power, its fragmentation and destruction, and feelings of nostalgia for a lost presence. Works on view will include examples of the drawings and ceramic sculptures of architecture for which Pouyan is well known, plus his first virtual reality installation, which is making its debut at the Frist. Accompanied by a haunting musical score set in a chilled room, the VR installation is an immersive multisensory experience that allows guests to explore the interior of an uncharacteristically gloomy Persian mosque in which snow mysteriously falls.

This project is supported by an Ellsworth Kelly Award. Granted by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, it is given to one American museum each year toward the realization of a pivotal exhibition in an artist’s career.

Shahpour Pouyan: Winter in Paradise is organized by the Frist Art Museum.

¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now
June 28–September 29, 2024
Upper-Level Galleries

¡Printing the Revolution! examines how graphic arts have been utilized to build community, engage the public around social concerns, and wrestle with shifting notions of the term “Chicano,” which Mexican Americans defiantly adopted in the 1960s and 1970s as a sign of a new political and cultural identity. During this period, Chicano activist artists forged a remarkable movement of politically engaged printmaking rooted in cultural expression and social justice movements that remains vital today. This exhibition, for the first time, pairs historical civil rights-era prints alongside works from the 1980s to the present.

The exhibition includes 119 works ranging from traditional screen prints to digital graphics and augmented reality works, to site-specific installations by more than 74 artists of Mexican descent and their cross-cultural collaborators. Through the decades, inexpensive and easily distributed posters, often marked by vibrant colors and striking images, have communicated the prevailing social causes of their day—labor strikes, immigrant rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, cultural events—and, most significantly, have challenged the invisibility of Chicanos in US society. By highlighting previously marginalized voices from Chicano art, including women and LGBTQ+ individuals, the exhibition offers an expanded view of American art and the history of graphic arts.

¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold
September 27, 2024–January 5, 2025
Ingram Gallery

An exhibition of photography, installation, painting, and performance, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold spans the nearly four-decade career of the artist, who was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1959. The first survey of Campos-Pons’s work since 2007, Behold highlights the artist’s exploration of connections between historical and present-day challenges. Her work draws from her own memories and her family’s story to examine the histories of enslavement, indentured labor, motherhood, migration, and race in imagery of profound beauty and emotional depth. Centering on Yoruba-derived Santería symbolism of her native Cuba, her work also reflects her experiences living in Boston, Cuba, Italy, and Nashville, her current city of residence, where she is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University.

In addition to her practice as an artist, Campos-Pons has made a significant contribution to the larger art world and to Tennessee through her ongoing program Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, which brings scholars, critics, and artists from around the world together in virtual seminars and physical artist interventions. Campos-Pons was also the consulting curator for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial, a statewide series of exhibitions addressing the theme of “RE-PAIR”—art as a means of healing a broken society.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Journey through Japan: Myths to Manga
October 25, 2024–February 16, 2025
Upper-Level Galleries

Drawn from the rich collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Journey through Japan: Myths to Manga reveals how much-loved folktales continue to be woven into Japanese culture, technology, and design. From sky to sea, and into the forest and the city, the exhibition will offer visitors an exciting and atmospheric journey through Japan and across centuries. The exhibition explores a wealth of playful and powerful artistic expression with more than 100 objects ranging from Hokusai’s celebrated woodblock print Under the Wave off Kanagawa to the equally iconic manga Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka. Guests can also enjoy clips from animated films such as Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, contemporary design including Noritaka Tatehana’s dizzyingly high heel-less shoes and Rumi Rock’s space-age fabric, and the ever-popular Pokémon!

The exhibition also features a series of engaging interactives designed especially for children, including an origami activity that accompanies a moving installation of 1,000 paper cranes—a symbol of remembrance from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan.

Created by the V&A – touring the world

The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by The Frist Foundation, Metro Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts