Frist Art Museum Announces 2027 Schedule of Exhibitions

Nashville, Aug. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Frist Art Museum is excited to announce its 2027 schedule of exhibitions. In the Ingram Gallery, the year begins with The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture, and Opulence, a major exhibition showcasing the dazzling art and vibrant culture of the Mughal court’s golden age, which brought together cultural elements from South Asia, Iran, China, and Europe. Concurrently on view, French Impressionism and the Nabis: Works from the Collection of Marlene and Spencer Hays features a cross section of works by artists such as Edgar Degas, Eva Gonzalès, Henri Matisse, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon, and Édouard Vuillard from the legendary Nashville collection. In the summer, Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts traces the diversity and creativity of artists working in the United States from the 1940s to the present through celebrated figures ranging from Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to the Gee’s Bend quilters and Thornton Dial. Drawn from the remarkable collection of French decorative arts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Splendor and Luxury: French Art Nouveau and Art Deco spotlights jewelry, furniture, ceramics, and sculpture along with stained-glass works by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

In the Upper-Level Galleries, M.C. Escher: Infinite Variations chronicles the Dutch artist’s pursuit of the impossible and the infinite through more than 150 original drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty places the artist and his work in relation to critical moments of modernist abstraction, from New York City during the Harlem Renaissance to 1960s Paris, and explores the meaningful relationships that nourished his career. Soul, Sound, and Voice: The Art of Jerry Pinkney features more than 75 works by the beloved illustrator and children’s book author and emphasizes the profound influence of music in the artist’s life and work.

In the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, the Frist presents Through These Hands: Crafting Material Visions, featuring works by Brittney Boyd Bullock, Samuel Dunson, Desmond Lewis, and Althea Murphy-Price whose innovative practices are rooted in Black craft traditions. In the summer, Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction focuses on the artist’s rarely studied printmaking practice through nearly 50 works.

The Frist Art Museum’s 2027 Schedule of Exhibitions 
Titles and dates are subject to change.

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

This major exhibition celebrates the breathtaking art and cosmopolitan culture of the Mughal court’s golden age (about 1560–1660) during the reigns of its most famous emperors: Akbar and his son Jahangir and grandson Shah Jahan. Known as the Great Mughals, the three men in turn ruled over a vast territory that extended from Afghanistan into much of the Indian subcontinent. They accumulated enormous wealth and power, and art and architecture flourished under their patronage. Best known for the Taj Mahal—the majestic and romantic white-domed mausoleum along the Yamuna River in Agra, India—the Mughal court also commissioned vast fortified palaces, brilliantly colored paintings, jewelry studded with rubies and emeralds, ornamental carpets, glittering metalwork, vessels made of mother-of-pearl, and more.

Bringing together cultural elements from South Asia, Iran, China, and Europe, the empire’s artists forged a distinctive new tradition that included naturalistic portraits of men and women, vibrant representations of exotic animals, and luxurious decorative arts. Floral designs proclaimed the empire a garden of paradise. The exhibition highlights all these aspects of Mughal art while also revealing how court artists used sophisticated skills and precious materials to wonderous effect. The exhibition concludes by showing the legacy of the Great Mughals in India, Pakistan, and beyond.

Created by the V&A – touring the world

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

With his wife Marlene, Nashville entrepreneur and philanthropist Spencer Hays began collecting art in the 1970s. The couple soon developed a passion for French art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and for more than 40 years, they built a collection that is today renowned for its extraordinary depth, beauty, and emotional resonance. Their greatest interest became the Nabis, a group of symbolist painters active from the 1890s into the early years of the 20th century that included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard. Along with the Nabis, the Hays’s acquired psychologically expressive figure paintings by impressionists Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, realists Henri Fantin-Latour and Eva Gonzalès, and modernists Henri Matisse, Paul Elie Ranson, and Odilon Redon.

Although the Hays collection has earned legendary status in Nashville, it has not been seen publicly anywhere in the United States. This exhibition features a selection of 30 works, representing a cross section of the larger collection, focusing on depictions of private encounters, portrayals of women, and paintings capturing the spirituality of nature.

This exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Marlene and Spencer Hays Foundation and The Fine Art Group, New York.

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

Through These Hands: Crafting Material Visions features the work of four Tennessee-based artists whose innovate creative practices engage with Black craft traditions: Brittney Boyd Bullock, Samuel Dunson, Desmond Lewis, and Althea Murphy-Price. Together, they formulate material languages that integrate personal narratives with cultural memory to express distinctive visions. The exhibition consists of more than 20 works, including sculptures, textile assemblages, 3D-printed forms, repurposed furniture, and more.

As part of the Crafting Blackness research initiative, led by Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, Through These Hands seeks to expand how craft and Black creative labor are understood within American art history. By foregrounding innovative craft practices and the artists who sustain them, this exhibition repositions craft as a vital and evolving field within contemporary art.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum and cocurated by Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, Cynthia Gadsden, and Michael J. Ewing

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

Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898–1972) spent his adult life pursuing the impossible and the infinite. This comprehensive exhibition, featuring more than 150 original drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, traces the imagery that made him one of the world’s most recognized artists. Included are examples of Escher’s explorations of perspective, repeating geometrical patterns, metamorphosis, and infinity—ideas that he returned to often over the course of nearly fifty years. The exhibition begins with Escher’s lesser-known book illustrations and commissions, then transitions into the mesmerizing prints for which he is best known, including his renderings of fantastical architecture with stairways to nowhere and repeated tiles of morphing animals. Together, the works reveal the ingenuity and technical skill of an artist who continually pushed the limits of what an image could be.

Single Source Traveling Exhibition provided by: PANART Connections

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

Including works by artists ranging from Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to the Gee’s Bend quilters and Thornton Dial, Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts celebrates the diversity and creativity of American art from the 1940s to the present. The exhibition opens with examples of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop art given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) by Richmond collectors Sydney and Frances Lewis in 1985. While these groundbreaking movements represent some of the most renowned trends in American art around the middle of the 20th century, the exhibition also weaves together diverse voices and themes by artists who, though often overlooked or excluded from the canon, have made extraordinary and lasting contributions to American culture.

The Lewis’s tremendous generosity inspired numerous subsequent donors to support the VMFA’s acquisition of works by lesser-known artists, artists of color, and women. Additional highlights include exuberant abstractions by a generation of artists including Norman Lewis, Howardena Pindell, and Alma Thomas as well as works by Philip Guston, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Titus Kaphar, and Kehinde Wiley who focus on such issues as identity and social justice. With its exceptional diversity and multilayered content, the exhibition tells a dynamic story of American art during a time of extraordinary social change.

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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

This exhibition brings to light Jean-Michel Basquiat’s rarely studied engagement with printmaking as central to his practice and as a site of innovation and collaboration. Conventional narratives around Basquiat (1960–1988) tend to emphasize his meteoric rise as a self-taught neo-expressionist prodigy, often placing him outside the art historical canon rather than in dialogue with postmodern ideas and artistic networks. In contrast, this exhibition reframes Basquiat’s legacy by centering his work in printmaking, a medium historically considered secondary to painting. It emphasizes his deep engagement with ideas around appropriation, identity, and reproduction, underscoring his intentional dialogue with postmodern strategies and repositioning him within a broader and more inclusive intellectual history. Through nearly 50 works of art, the project explores Basquiat’s relationship to generations of artists, from Leonardo da Vinci to Robert Rauschenberg, and with pioneering Black printmakers such as Bob Blackburn, revealing and celebrating a lineage of Black experimentation and intergenerational exchange in reproductive media.

Basquiat, the Blue Ribbons Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction is organized by the Princeton University Art Museum and curated by Jordana Moore Saggese, professor of modern and contemporary art and director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland. The exhibition at Princeton was made possible by leadership support from The Richard C. von Hess Foundation and other generous donors.

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

Born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) pioneered his signature abstract aesthetic and lyrical style to harness the power of color at the intersection of key mid-twentieth-century art movements. These include the rise of modernism in America, the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance, and the international influence of European expressionism and abstract expressionism. Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty situates the artist and his work in relation to critical moments of modernist abstraction, from 1940s New York City to 1960s Paris. It also explores the meaningful relationships that nourished his career. The exhibition features the artist’s early New York street scenes, insightful portraiture, and radiant abstractions. By including works by Delaney’s inspirations such as Stuart Davis and Claude Monet, as well as friends and contemporaries such as Lawrence Calcagno, Ed Clark, and Sam Francis this exhibition celebrates the interconnected nature of postwar abstraction.

This exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection and curated by Adrienne L. Childs, Senior Consulting Curator, The Phillips Collection.

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

Featuring more than 90 works by acclaimed artisans, Splendor and Luxury showcases the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ renowned collection of French art nouveau and art deco—one of the most significant of its kind. The exhibition features exceptional examples of jewelry, works on paper, metalwork, furniture, ceramics, and glass by leading artists such as René Lalique, Pierre Legrain, Louis Majorelle, Alphonse Mucha, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, and others. Together, these works demonstrate the remarkable craftsmanship and innovation that distinguished French decorative arts in the early 20th century. 

Emerging in the late 19th century, art nouveau was an international movement that sought a new artistic language for the modern age. While its forms varied across countries, the French style is distinguished by sinuous, flowing lines inspired by nature and other sources, including Japanese art. Art deco soon followed, developing before the First World War and flourishing into the 1930s. Drawing on European craft traditions as well as the arts of ancient Egypt, Mesoamerica, East Asia, and Africa, its designers embraced streamlined forms, geometric ornamentation, and luxurious materials to express the dynamism of the modern world.

Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

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

Internationally renowned watercolorist and illustrator Jerry Pinkney (1939-2021) inspired millions globally through his work and brought Black histories to children’s literature. This exhibition underscores the profound influence of music in his life and work and features more than 75 works organized in three thematic sections. Soul explores depictions of spirituality and Pinkney’s commitment to fostering empathy and connection; Sound features the artist’s books that explore the music of nature, lyrical poems, and fables; and Voice showcases his dedication to uplifting Black voices, from biographies to folklore and fairy tales. Interpreting American history and identity through his experiences growing up in Philadelphia, Pinkney shared an optimistic view that, through art and music, we can find common ground and heal the wounds of our shared past.

Sound, Soul, & Voice: The Art of Jerry Pinkney is organized by Woodmere and The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

Supporter Acknowledgment

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

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Buddy Kite: 615.744.3351, bkite@FristArtMuseum.org

Connect with us @FristArtMuseum

About the Frist Art Museum
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Frist Art Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit art exhibition center dedicated to presenting and originating high-quality exhibitions with related educational programs and community outreach activities. Located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, Tenn., the Frist Art Museum offers the finest visual art from local, regional, national, and international sources in exhibitions that inspire people through art to look at their world in new ways. Information on accessibility can be found at FristArtMuseum.org/accessibility. 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.  

Contact Info

Buddy Kite
bkite@fristartmuseum.org
+1 615-744-3351

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• Frist Art Museum 2027 Schedule of Exhibitions