NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Frist Art Museum is excited to announce its 2026 schedule of exhibitions, marking the museum’s 25th anniversary. In the Ingram Gallery, the year begins with In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century, an exhibition featuring paintings, sculptures, textiles, and installations made by an intergenerational group of 28 celebrated Nashville-based women. Building on recent research, The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams investigates the transnational appeal of surrealism and how it has widely permeated many areas of culture and society over the last century through the work of artists including Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Dorothea Tanning. Working with analog and emergent technologies, the 16 contemporary artists in Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman explore the fantastic intersections of dreams and reality, the physical and the virtual, and human creativity and nonhuman intelligences.
In the Upper-Level Galleries, The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art tells the enthralling story of impressionism from its rebellious origins in 1874 to its legacy in the early 20th century through paintings and sculptures by Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and many others. An Indigenous Present spans 100 years of modern and contemporary Indigenous art and includes new commissions and significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives. Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from The Jewish Museum, New York displays the diversity of Jewish cultures through more than 130 ceremonial objects (Judaica) from antiquity to the present, including books, silver, and textiles originating in multiple continents.
In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist presents provocative narrative paintings by the late Nashville-based artist Barbara Bullock in conjunction with In Her Place. In the summer, the gallery will feature lyrical installations, works on paper, paintings, and sculptures by Pakistani American artist Anila Quayyum Agha that address some of the most urgent issues of our time.
In the always-free Conte Community Arts Gallery, an updated installation of A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum documents the story of Nashville’s former main post office that the Frist Art Museum now occupies.
The Frist Art Museum’s 2026 Schedule of Exhibitions
Titles and dates are subject to change.
A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum
December 19, 2025–August 2026
Conte Community Arts Gallery
Commemorating the Frist Art Museum’s 25th anniversary, this exhibition highlights the landmark building’s role as a civic institution, from its creation as Nashville’s main post office in 1934 to its reopening as a museum on April 8, 2001. Through photos, video, and interviews, guests will learn about the building’s distinctive architectural styles—“starved” or “stripped” classicism and art deco—as well as how historical events affected the construction and function of the post office. Previously reimagined for our 20th anniversary, this newly updated exhibition highlights recent initiatives focused on the care of our historic building. Specific efficiency improvements focus on structural components including insulation and reducing air leaks, as well as environmental upgrades. A 20th anniversary edition of the exhibition catalogue will be available in the Frist’s gift shop.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century
January 29–April 26, 2026
Ingram Gallery
Women artists have long been at the center of Nashville’s vibrant visual arts community. Especially during the recent period of remarkable growth, they are showing their work across the country and globe and receiving prestigious grants, residencies, and critical acclaim. Many have also dedicated years, even decades, to teaching or building impactful community organizations.
In Her Place draws attention to the prominent position of women artists in our region and beyond through the presentation of nearly 100 paintings, sculptures, textiles, and installation works made by an intergenerational group of 28 celebrated Nashville-based women artists. Selected works relate broadly to concepts of place, whether that be the literal view of a garden outside a studio window, the more general influence of being raised in the American South, a place in time, or the evocation of an ancestral homeland outside of the United States. On view in the museum’s largest gallery space, In Her Place is part of the Frist’s 25th-anniversary celebration, underscoring its commitment to the local arts ecosphere. This project will be accompanied by a catalogue coedited by Katie Delmez and Laura Hutson Hunter and published by Vanderbilt University Press.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum and cocurated by Katie Delmez, Frist Art Museum senior curator, Shaun Giles, Frist Art Museum community engagement director, and Sai Clayton, independent curator and artist.
Sistah Griot: The Iconoclastic Art of Barbara Bullock
January 29–April 26, 2026
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
In 1969, Barbara Bullock arrived in Nashville from Buffalo, New York, to study art at George Peabody College for Teachers (now a part of Vanderbilt University). After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1984 at the age of 38, she returned to full-time art making as part of her physical recovery. At that time, Bullock’s style shifted considerably from precisely rendered graphite illustrations to boldly colored paintings that defy realistic spatial construction, in part because of double vision caused by the stroke and in part due to her interest in the work of M.C. Escher. Shaped by lived experiences, her work also critiqued systemic forms of racism, sexism, and classism, as seen in such paintings as At Least they Don’t Lynch us Anymore and The Hate that Hate Produced. Bullock offered satirical commentary on societal norms projected onto Black women born into upper-class families. While her art practice helped to heal her double vision and restore her fine motor skills, Bullock always maintained that the ultimate goal of her art was to help heal the world of social inequalities.
Bullock passed away from cancer in 1996, but the imprint she left on the Nashville art community lives on in her network of close friends and colleagues. This monographic exhibition exposes her incisive and still-timely work to a larger audience and seeks to place her more prominently in the American art canon.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum with guest curator Carlton Wilkinson
The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art
February 27–May 31, 2026
Upper-Level Galleries
The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art explores the fascinating story of impressionism from its birth in 1874 to its legacy in the early 20th century. Through nearly 50 paintings and sculptures, this exhibition reveals the rebellious origins of the independent artist collective known as the impressionists and the revolutionary course they charted for modern art. Breaking with tradition in both how and what they painted, the impressionists redefined what constituted cutting-edge contemporary art. The unique innovations of its core members, such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot, set the foundation for generations of avant-garde artists that followed, from Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh to Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse.
Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist exhibition, The Impressionist Revolution invites visitors to reconsider these now-beloved artists—once thought to be scandalous renegades—as well as the impact they had on 20th-century art.
The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art.
The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams
May 22–August 30, 2026
Ingram Gallery
Drawn from the Tate’s collection in England, The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams focuses on the long trajectory and broad international reach of surrealism as a state of mind through a captivating selection of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and other art objects, as well as publications and archival material.
The Surrealist International is presented a century after the first exhibition of surrealism, in Paris in November 1925, following the publication of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism and Louis Aragon’s A Wave of Dreams a year earlier. Featuring familiar artists such as Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Dorothea Tanning, the exhibition also includes others whose work deserves to be better known such as Kati Horna, Malangatana Ngwenya, Shiihara Osamu, and Lionel Wendt. As surrealism was made up of individual responses rather than a specific style, the key themes that united their various practices form the structure of the exhibition, which will include sections about the inspiration of dreams and of automatism, desire, mysterious energies of the natural world, and the politics of freedom.
Organized in collaboration with Tate
Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven
May 22–August 30, 2026
Gordon Contemporary Artist Project Gallery
Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven spans two decades of the Pakistani American artist’s multifaceted practice across media including immersive installations, works on paper, paintings, and sculptures.
Born in Lahore in 1965, Agha moved to the United States in 1999 and now resides in Indianapolis. Her experiences as a woman and an immigrant dealing with discrimination, invisibility, and oppression inform her art, as does environmental devastation and its disproportionate impact on the Global South. Her influences include the California Light and Space Movement, Indo-Islamic architecture, poetry, and the patterns and techniques of traditional crafts.
Interwoven encompasses Agha’s multifaceted practice of immersive installations, works on paper, paintings, and sculptures. Highlights of this exhibition include A Flood of Tears, a hanging sculpture made of hundreds of upholstery needles suspended by glistening glass-beaded strands, and one of her signature laser-cut steel light boxes that bathe viewers in light and shadow. These renowned installations are contextualized with the artist’s two-dimensional works that utilize a mix of patterns and words, printmaking techniques, dyes, beads, threads, Mylar, waxes, and even steel dust to make ornate forms. Through these lyrical, mesmerizing works of art, Agha wrestles with some of the most urgent issues of our time.
Organized by The Westmoreland Museum of Art, with generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Hillman Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Foundation
An Indigenous Present
June 26–September 27, 2026
Upper-Level Galleries
An Indigenous Present, a thematic exhibition spanning 100 years of modern and contemporary Indigenous art, includes new commissions and significant works by 15 artists who use strategies of abstraction to represent personal and collective narratives, describe specific and imagined places, and build upon cultural and aesthetic traditions. Co-organized by artist Jeffrey Gibson (member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent), whose work was presented at the Frist in 2023, and independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition offers an expansive consideration of Indigenous art practices highlighting a continuum of elders and emerging makers.
An Indigenous Present draws from Gibson and Porter’s 2023 landmark publication of the same title, which, through a collaborative process, brought together work by Native North American artists exploring diverse approaches to concept, form, and medium. Their engagement with artists during the making of the book inspired this exhibition—one that demonstrates the endless variability of abstraction and its capacity to hold multiple forms and histories.
An Indigenous Present is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. The exhibition is curated by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, Guest Curators
Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman
September 25, 2026–January 3, 2027
Ingram Gallery
Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman features 16 artists working with both analog and emergent technologies to visualize the interrelationship between humanity, other species, and the earth itself. Using mediums such as digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, artists Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josefa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite, Saya Woolfalk, and others challenge the view of human exceptionalism that prevents an ethics of care for the planet. Like the surrealists, these artists tap the transformative agency of the marvelous, the uncanny, and the unpredictable. In their fluid and floating creations, images morph, flicker, and dance, forming psychologically charged archetypes within a new collective unconscious.
While providing otherworldly moments of awe and enchantment, the exhibition is centered on real-world disciplines. The first section, taking a biological and ecological perspective, focuses on such subjects as extinction, evolution, and interspecies entanglement. The second, relating to psychology, offers visions of guiding avatars, “angels in the machine” who help distract, redirect, or open intellectual boundaries. The third relates to ontology—the philosophy of being. Bridging ancestral and present belief systems, particularly those outside modern Western traditions, artists in this section employ new technologies to reawaken humanity’s sense of interconnectedness with the earth.
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from The Jewish Museum, New York
October 30, 2026–February 7, 2027
Upper-Level Galleries
Drawn from the world-renowned collection of the Jewish Museum in New York City, this exhibition presents more than 130 Jewish ceremonial objects (Judaica) from antiquity to the present, including books, silver, and textiles. From Central Asia to North Africa and Western Europe, the works represent many parts of the world and display a diversity of Jewish cultures.
Exploring the artistic, cultural, and ritualistic significance of these objects, the exhibition illuminates how Jewish communities and artists have creatively adapted traditional forms of Judaica by utilizing a rich array of materials, styles, and techniques. The works are organized thematically in three sections: “The Art of the Synagogue: Adorning the Torah,” “A Day of Rest: The Radiance of the Sabath,” and “Beyond the Synagogue and the Home: The Light of the Hanukkah Menorah.” The Frist Art Museum’s presentation of this exhibition will coincide with Hanukkah, the eight-day festival of lights.
Beauty and Ritual provides a lens into the objects’ stories of precious ownership and often precarious survival against all odds, escaping near destruction and being salvaged under extraordinary circumstances. The exhibition invites people of all backgrounds and cultures to engage with the remarkable stories of exceptional pieces of Judaica.
Organized by The Jewish Museum, New York
The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by The Frist Foundation, the Tennessee Arts Commission, Metro Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Connect with us @FristArtMuseum #TheFrist
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Buddy Kite: 615.744.3351, [email protected]
Ellen Jones Pryor: 615.243.1311, [email protected]
###
