Save the Date:
Coming to the Frist in 2026
The Frist Art Museum has unveiled its highly anticipated 2026 exhibition schedule, featuring nine exhibitions that will commemorate the institution’s 25th anniversary and celebrate the museum’s mission to engage, educate, and inspire through the visual arts. Presenting nine diverse exhibitions, the lineup offers a vibrant mix of local creativity, international art movements, historical artistic movements, and forward-thinking contemporary work.
Opening the year at the Ingram Gallery is In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century, a major exhibition featuring works by 28 acclaimed women artists based in Nashville. The exhibition aims to draw attention to the essential roles and prominent positions of women artists through the presentation of nearly 100 paintings, sculptures, textiles, and installation works.
Also in the Ingram Gallery, The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams takes a look at surrealism’s global reach over the last century. It examines how the artistic movement infiltrated visual culture, literature, and social thought through works by iconic artists such as Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and Dorothea Tanning.
Afterwards, the Gallery will display the works of 16 contemporary artists in Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman beginning in May. The exhibition will showcase the artists’ reflections on what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world. Using mediums such as digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, the artists explore the blurred boundaries between the human and the virtual, as well as human and non-human intelligence.
Beginning in February in the Upper-Level Galleries, The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse traces the evolution of Impressionism from the movement’s beginnings in 1874 to its lasting influence on modern art. Amongst the 50 paintings and sculptures will be works by Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and others.
Following The Impressionist Revolution will be An Indigenous Present, which spans 100 years of modern and contemporary Indigenous art. The exhibit will feature new commissions and major works by 15 artists that emphasizes abstraction as a means of expressing personal and collective histories while honoring Indigenous cultural traditions and storytelling.
The last feature in the Upper-Level Galleries will be Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from The Jewish Museum, New York. It brings together over 130 Jewish ceremonial objects (Judaica), spanning from silver to textiles to sacred books. The Judaica will illustrate the rich diversity of Jewish life across centuries and continents.
From late January to April, the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery will display powerful narrative paintings by the late Nashville artist Barbara Bullock. Bullock’s works 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. Following this, the Gallery will exhibit the evocative work of Pakistani-American mixed-media artist Anila Quayyum Agha, whose works address themes of identity, migration, and global justice.
Finally, to commemorate the Frist Art Museum’s 25th anniversary, an updated installation of A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum will be exhibited in the always-free Conte Community Arts Gallery. Through photos, video, and interviews, guests will learn about the architectural and civic history of the Frist’s home— once Nashville’s main post office, now a hub for the arts.
The current schedule and location for the season’s exhibits is as follows:
The Ingram Gallery
- In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century January 29–April 26, 2026
- The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams May 22–August 30, 2026
- Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman September 25, 2026 – January 3, 2027
The Upper-Level Gallaries
- The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse from the Dallas Museum of Art February 27–May 31, 2026
- An Indigenous Present June 26–September 27, 2026
- Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from The Jewish Museum, New York October 30, 2026–February 7, 2027
Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery
- Sistah Griot: The Iconoclastic Art of Barbara Bullock January 29–April 26, 2026
- Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven May 22–August 30, 2026
Conte Community Arts Gallery
- A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum December 19, 2025–August 2026
For more information about the 2026 season schedule and details for each exhibit, visit the Frist Art Museum’s official website at www.fristartmuseum.org
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Nastassja is a Hong Kong native who called Boston home for 7 years. She graduated with a BS in Journalism from Emerson College and is currently located in Fort Smith, Arkansas. When she isn’t writing or reading, you can find her crocheting and spending time with her husband, dog, and two cats.
