Frist Art Museum Arts Fest Weekend

BY BRENDA BATEY PHOTOS COURTESY OF FRIST ART MUSEUM

The Frist Arts Museum will host an inaugural Arts Fest Weekend to celebrates contemporary art with artist talks and tours, art-making activities, and music on Saturday, February 4 and Sunday, Feb. 5.

The weekend offerings also will include food trucks, tabletop games in the lobby, a photo booth, and more.

The event marks the first time in the Frist’s history that the three primary galleries are featuring contemporary art.

“Jeffrey Gibson:The Body Electric” and “Otobong Nkanga: Gently Basking in Debris” open Friday, February 3. The exhibition “Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood” will be on view through March 5.

During the weekend, guests will have the opportunity to join Gibson, Nkanga, and Ritchie for a group conversation and take docent-led gallery tours. There also will be artmaking activities in the studios and the Martin Art Quest Gallery, a local artist market, a guided movement program with the Nashville Ballet, and a “Sip and Sketch” activity.

The Frist is partnering with WNXP 91.1 to provide music for the weekend, including DJ sets in the auditorium.

“We are thrilled to work with established and new partners to kick off these new incredible exhibitions in a fun, dynamic way,” says Interpretation Director Meagan Rust. “As we did with our old Frist Fridays and Family Festival events, we love connecting the creative dots in our community and hosting cross-discipline collaborations.”

“This new Frist Arts Fest series format will allow us to offer something for everyone and spread it out over a weekend, so guests can come and go as their schedule allows,” Rust said.

On Sat., Feb. 4 at 11 a.m. artists Gibson, Nkanga, and Ritchie will participate in a conversation moderated by Frist Art Museum Executive Director and

CEO Seth Feman.

“Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric” is a major exhibition devoted to one of today’s leading artists whose multidisciplinary practice combines aspects of traditional indigenous art and culture with a modernist visual vocabulary.

Born in Colorado in 1972, Gibson is of Cherokee heritage and a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw. His vibrant work, which is represented in more than 20 permanent collections across the United States, is a call for indigenous empowerment, as well as queer visibility and environmental sustainability. The exhibit includes Gibson’s recent paintings, sculpture, video, and installations, along with a large site-specific mural “The Land is Speaking - Are you Listening?”

The exhibition’s title is inspired by a song written for the 1980 musical “Fame,” which itself drew from Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” from his 1855 collection “Leaves of Grass. “

The lyrics reverently acknowledge everyone’s place in the natural world, while honoring the universality of endings and beginnings.

“Nkanga: Gently Basking in Debris” consists of Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga’s tapestries, drawings, videos, sculptures, and performances that feature narratives of wounding and healing, making metaphorical links between the landscape and the traumatized human body.

Nkanga’s work conveys the necessity of acknowledging the violence caused by exploiting natural and human resources if we are to overcome the damaging legacy of extraction under colonialism and global capitalism.

“Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood” invites viewers to experience the richness and complexity of the world by connecting such fields as philosophy and mythology, epic poetry and music, history, and physics.

Interweaving dualities of harmony and chaos, the exhibition offers a meditation on art’s capacity to help overcome social fragmentation and to be a connective tissue that is healing and beautiful.

“A Garden in the Flood” features dramatic paintings, an architectural structure, and hallucinatory animations, some made through artificial intelligence. At its heart is a new video work with a sound bed specially commissioned from renowned composer Hanna Benn in collaboration with the Grammy Award–winning Fisk Jubilee Singers and their late music director, Paul T. Kwami.

Admission to Frist Arts Fest will be free for Frist members and guests ages 18 and younger. For all other guests, the regular $15 adult admission will apply on Saturday; Saturday attendees can return on Sunday for only $5.

All normal discounts are suspended during the weekend. For a full schedule of events, visit FristArtMuseum.org/event/ frist-arts-fest/.