Enough to Go Around: Food and Community in Nashville @ Frist Art Museum, Nashville

Enough to Go Around 

Food and Community in Nashville

Frist Art Museum, Nashville

March 21 – June 29, 2025

Jocelyn Ni

Cut it For Me, 2024

Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 18 in.

Courtesy of the artist © Jocelyn Ni

Mariam Speyer

Tomato Harvest at Wonderful MicroFarm, 2024

Digital print, 16 x 20 in.

Courtesy of the artist © Mariam Speyer

Lee Colvin

Still Life in Need, 2024

Mixed media, 36 x 30 in.

Courtesy of the artist © Lee Colvin

EXHIBITION ARTISTS: Alayna Catacombs, Lee Colvin, Leroy Dawson, Stacy Dorris, Rocio Eckhoff, Asif ElAmri-Brantley, Annie Freeman, Kelly Ann Graff, Megan Jordan, DaShawn Lewis, Lulu Marin, Jocelyn Ni, Morgan Ogilvie, Jessica Peoples, Sandy Rochelle, Nadine Shillingford, Miriam Speyer, Sarah Spillers, Bryan Struble, Aurora Tower, Nathaniel Wheeler, Ashleigh York

The Frist Art Museum presents Enough to Go Around: Food and Community in Nashville, an exhibition that addresses topics of food production, food insecurity and food’s role in bringing people together. The juried exhibition of paintings, photography, and more serves as a companion exhibition to Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism and Tennessee Harvest, 1870s–1920s and will be on view in the Conte Community Arts Gallery.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum, Enough to Go Around features 25 works that focus on food systems and challenges around food security. The idea for the exhibition originated from conversations about these subjects between Frist Art Museum Community Engagement Director Shaun Giles and staff members of the nonprofit organizations Nashville Food Project and Tennessee Justice Center, whose missions are to support increased food access for people who are under-resourced in a variety of ways. To organize the exhibition, the Frist also partnered with Buchanan Arts and Unearthing Joy, nonprofits that also recognize the importance of the availability of nutritious, affordable food and offer educational gardening and farming programs for teachers, organizations, and people of all ages.

The open call for Nashville-based artists to submit artwork garnered 90 works from 45 artists. Jurors selected 25 works created by 22 artists, ranging from photographs and paintings to ceramics and textile works. The jury consisted of Buchanan Arts’ Executive Director Virginia Griswold, Frist Art Museum’s Chief Curator Mark Scala, the Nashville Food Project’s Director of Community Engagement Allison Thayer, Tennessee Justice Center’s Anti-Hunger Advocate Crys Riles, and Unearthing Joy’s founder Ashley Brailsford.

According to an estimate by the United States Department of Agriculture, 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s food supply goes to waste, while millions experience food insecurity across the country. 

“I want this exhibition to help people think about how much food is wasted and what they can do as individuals to change that, as well as think about how to decrease some of the barriers that keep food from certain communities and certain people,” says Giles.

Organized into five thematic sections, the exhibition seeks to share stories that together offer a well-rounded view of various food experiences and encourage viewers to consider ways they can enact change. The first section “Community Gardens” focuses on the practices of gardening and farming, exploring themes of self-sufficiency and stewardship of the earth’s resources. Home Grown (Napier Gardens), a black-and-white photograph by DaShawn Lewis, demonstrates the careful attention that is required to produce a crop from small seeds. Exploring the opposite end of the food production cycle, the section Food Waste examines the use of expiration dates and attitudes around shelf lives and waste, as seen in Leroy Dawson’s black-and-white painting Best if Viewed By.

Works in the grouping “Food Deserts and Food Swamps” highlight the lack of nutritional food sources available in lower-income communities. Sarah Spillers’ giclée print Gas Station Chips prompts reflection on the nature of mass-produced consumer goods by elevating the everyday packaging through the lens of her handmade artwork. “The term ‘food swamp’ refers to an area where there are only unhealthy options,” says Giles. “That might be a convenience store, gas station, or fast food—all of them less than ideal when you’re looking for nutritious options.”

Lulu Marin 

EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer), 2023 

High fire clay with underglaze, gloss glaze, 

and gold luster; 17 1/2 x 30 1/2 in.

Courtesy of the artist © Lulu Marin

The fourth section, “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance,” highlights the important work that SNAP does to ensure that food needs are met. Lulu Marin’s work EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) is an image of an American flag comprised of 42 ceramic replica electronic benefit transfer cards, which represents the 42 million Americans that rely on the system.

“Shared Dining Experiences,” the final section, celebrates how meals can bring people together and strengthen bonds. In her acrylic painting Injera and Ethiopian Hospitality, Nadine Shillingford celebrates the intimacy and ritual of Ethiopian culinary traditions. Injera, a flat bread made from tef grain and served with savory stews and curries is intended to be shared by a group or family. Nadine Shillingford explains in her artist statement: “The mother may feed the other members of the family by offering gosha, or a handful of food, to them.”

“The second part of this exhibition’s title, Food and Community in Nashville, should really be emphasized,” says Giles. “This show tells a story of Nashville and our experience around food, our experience around scarcity and abundance, and how artists see these issues in ways that are specific and personal to us.”

FRIST ART MUSEUM

Conte Community Arts Gallery

919 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203

fristartmuseum.org

Radcliffe Bailey @ KMA - Knoxville Museum of Art - "Radcliffe Bailey: Passages " Exhibition

Radcliffe Bailey: Passages 

KMA - Knoxville Museum of Art

August 12 - November 6, 2022

The Knoxville Museum of Art presents Radcliffe Bailey: Passages.

“We had to delay this ambitious exhibition for several years because of the pandemic,” says Executive Director David Butler, “and we’re proud that we can finally bring this broad sampling of Radcliffe Bailey’s visionary work to the Knoxville community.  He addresses ancestral memory, cultural identity, and his own personal history in ways that will profoundly move and engage you.” 

The selection featured in Passages reflects the broad scope of Radcliffe Bailey’s studio practice and the multiple levels on which the artist’s works convey meaning. His hybrid creations offer diverse points of entry into compelling narratives that are personal yet far-reaching. Evocative and physically complex, they appear like talismans, shrines, reliquaries, guideposts, and portals offering direction and prompting reflection. Open-ended and wide-ranging, they remain enigmatic despite the presence of layered imagery implying a variety of possible interpretations. Each stands as a testament to the persistence of identity and memory and as an enduring message whose affirmative spirit promises to transcend the painful legacy of cultural erasure.

RADCLIFFE BAILEY

Born 1968 in Bridgeton, New Jersey, Radcliffe Bailey was raised in Atlanta, where he lives and works today. Forthcoming public art installations include work commissioned by the City of Atlanta, as part of the Renew Atlanta Public Art Program; the Freedom Cornerstone, commissioned by the City of Greensboro, North Carolina; and a commission by Philadelphia Contemporary. Recent solo exhibitions include Ascents and Echoes and Travelogue at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Pensive, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, which traveled to the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston; Radcliffe Bailey: Recent Works, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; and Memory as Medicine at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Bailey’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Denver Art Museum; and the High Museum of Art, among many others.

KNOXVILLE MUSEUM OF ART

1050 World’s Fair Park Drive, Knoxville, TN 37916

knoxart.org

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism @ Frist Art Museum, Nashville

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection
Frist Art Museum, Nashville
May 24 – September 2, 2019

The Frist Art Museum presents Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection—an exhibition that captures the vitality and expressiveness of twentieth-century Mexican art with iconic works by Frida Kahlo, her husband Diego Rivera, and their contemporaries, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, María Izquierdo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Organized by the Vergel Foundation and MondoMostre in cavollaboration with the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL), the exhibition is on display in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery.

Among the more than 150 works on view are seven painted self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera’s Calla Lily Vendor, and numerous portraits of the Gelmans, plus more than fifty photographs that provide insight into Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s passionate love affair and how the couple lived, worked, and dressed.

Husband-and-wife collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman were glamorous and wealthy Eastern European refugees who married in Mexico in 1941, took part in Mexico City’s vibrant art scene, and acquired art mostly from their artist friends. In 1943, Jacques commissioned a full-length portrait of Natasha from Diego Rivera, Mexico’s most celebrated painter. “The Gelmans formed close friendships with many artists in this exhibition, often acting as patrons and promoters of their careers and assembling one of the finest collections of modern Mexican art in the world along the way,” says Frist Art Museum curator Trinita Kennedy.

Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, a suburb south of Mexico City, Frida Kahlo had a difficult childhood, facing a bout with polio at age six and a bus accident at the age of 18 that left her disabled and often bedridden. “It was during her recovery from the accident that Kahlo began to paint, in part because she was bored in bed. She spent hours alone with an easel and a mirror painting her own face,” says Trinita Kennedy. “She never attended art school, but as she considered a career as an artist, she sought out several of Mexico’s leading painters, including Rivera, whom she had met several years earlier.” Their friendship became a courtship, with the two marrying in 1929. Unfaithful to each other, the pair divorced in 1939, only to remarry in 1940.

In the early twentieth century, Mexico’s artistic avant-garde was closely tied to political and social revolution. Following Mexico’s civil war from 1910 to 1920, the government enlisted male painters to produce monumental murals in public buildings. Diego Rivera was a revered figure in this muralism movement and an avowed Communist. “Using art, which could be understood by the masses, Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and others helped Mexico fashion a new identity rooted in its own unique history,” says Trinita Kennedy.

Diego Rivera’s artistic works, as well as his vocal opinions on the role of art, would shape the development of Mexican culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century. “His depictions of Mexican traditions and everyday life soon came to epitomize Mexican culture at home and abroad, including the United States where he created murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York,” says Kennedy. Diego Rivera also created easel paintings representing poignant scenes of everyday life and labor in Mexico, such as Calla Lily Vendor, a luminous painting that celebrates the beauty and strength of Mexico and its people.

Like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo infused her work with mexicanidad, an identification with Mexico’s distinct national history, traditions, culture, and natural environment, but in a much more personal way. About a third of her paintings are self-portraits, the works for which she is now most celebrated. They accentuate her distinctive appearance, characterized by a v-shaped unibrow, deep brown eyes, mustache, carefully coiffed hair with braids, and indigenous Mexican clothing. In Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana), for example, she crowns herself with a festive indigenous Mexican headdress known as a resplandor.

Known primarily in artistic circles during her lifetime, Frida Kahlo’s paintings began to attract widespread international attention in the decades following her death. Her work and life story continued to resonate in pop culture with the success of Frida, a 1983 biography by Hayden Herrera, and the 2002 biopic Frida, starring Salma Hayek.

The exhibition includes more than fifty photographs of Frida Kahlo, most of which were taken by noted photographers, such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nickolas Muray, and Edward Weston. There is also a special gallery focused on Frida Kahlo’s unique personal style, which offers insight into her wardrobe, hairstyles, and jewelry. An interactive touchscreen allows visitors to explore elements of her clothing and to learn why she wore them. The exhibition concludes with haunting black-and-white photographs of Kahlo’s crutches, corset, and bed, taken recently at the Casa Azul, her former home in Coyoacán, by contemporary artists, including Patti Smith. “Directly associated with her pain, these objects are venerated as relics,” says Trinita Kennedy. “As the photos attest, Kahlo’s ability to create magical paintings despite the suffering caused by her broken body captivates and inspires many of us today.”

The works collected by the Gelmans offer an unrivaled opportunity to encounter the chaotic and creative Mexican art world of the first half of the twentieth century in all its complexity. Modern Mexican art exerted a key influence on modern art in the United States, and its impact continues to be felt throughout the world today.

FRIST ART MUSEUM
919 Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee, 37203
fristartmuseum.org

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked 
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville
January 21 – May 1, 2011 

WILLIAM EGGLESTON: ANOINTING THE OVERLOOKED is an exhibition bringing together recent works and iconic photographs by one of today’s most renowned photographers, William Eggleston. The exhibition, originated by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, includes 50 photographs by the Memphis, tennessee, resident who is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Included in the exhibition are selections from the permanent collection of the Memphis Brooks Museum, Cheim & Read Gallery, New York, with the assistance of the Eggleston Artistic Trust, and the David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, ephemera objects and the continuous screening of the renowned 2007 documentary By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston, directed by Vincent Gérard and Cédric Laty. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Frist Center will also present a film series, The Strangeness of the Ordinary, featuring films by David Lynch, Gus Van Sant and Sofia Coppola, directors who have been influenced by Eggleston’s aesthetic innovations. 

William Eggleston was a key figure in legitimizing color photography as an artistic medium. By not censoring, rarely editing, and photographing the seemingly forgettable, Eggleston reminds audiences of the inherent democratic uses of photography and our widespread access to it. 

“What distinguishes Eggleston as an artist is his uncanny ability to capture everyday scenes or objects without slipping into sentimentality or nostalgia,” says Dr. Susan Edwards, Executive Director and CEO of the Frist Center. “His photographs are familiar yet nonspecific, compelling in their simplicity and intriguing by virtue of their understatement.” 

WILLIAM EGGLESTON, BIOGRAPHY - Born in Memphis, Tenn., in 1939 at the end of the Great Depression, William Eggleston spent most of his formative years moving back and forth between Tennessee and Mississippi. As a child, Eggleston was interested in painting and audio technology. Since turning to photography, he has been a remarkable chronicler of a culture that was being transformed by racial integration, air conditioning, strip malls, shopping carts and fast-food chain restaurants. While rooted in a specific place and time, Eggleston’s depictions of these transformations have a universal resonance that continues today, when our realities continue to show themselves to be in a constant state of flux. 

Although he attended Vanderbilt University, Delta State College and the University of Mississippi, Eggleston never received a college degree. However, it was during this time that his interest in photography took root. William Eggleston was given a Leica camera by a friend at Vanderbilt. While studying art at Ole Miss, he was introduced to abstract expressionism by a visiting New York painter, Tom Young. 

In 1976, William Eggleston exhibited his works in the first solo exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art –MoMA– in New York. Color Photographs by William Eggleston, and its accompanying publication, William Eggleston’s Guide (after the Michelin Guide), caused something of a sensation among museum visitors and critics who found Eggleston’s use of color garish and his seemingly offhand approach antithetical to their expectations of art photography, which at the time was dominated by black and white images, printed in darkrooms as a sign of authorship and authenticity. 

Colors in William Eggleston’s early prints were intensified by the dye-transfer process, a printing technique developed by Kodak in the 1940s in which a succession of three color separations produces richly saturated and color-stable prints. Once prevalent in advertising and fashion photography, Kodak’s dye-transfer technique allowed the artist to not only paint or direct the intensity of color in his prints, but also to mingle art and commerce. 

William Eggleston has frequently produced groups of photographs as cohesive units, either as a series made at a specific site for a project or for a commission. Included in Anointing the Overlooked are seven photographs reproduced in William Eggleston’s Guide, among them the iconic Untilted Memphis Tricycle (ca. 1971). Selections from two series of the early 1980s, The Southern Suite and Troubled Waters, are also included in the exhibition. Finally, a large group of rarely seen photographs made after 2000 reveals Eggleston’s continued interest in showing the everyday in a new light. These later works amplify the sharp colors and limpid atmospheres of his earlier imagery, while showing Eggleston as an artist who continues to expand his startling vision. Accompanying the exhibition will be a selection of album and compact disk covers featuring Eggleston’s imagery. These were created for various musicians—Alex Chilton, Spoon, Big Star, Chuck Prophet, Silver Jews, Primal Scream, Christopher Idylls, Joanna Newsom, and The Derek Trucks Band. 

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked demonstrates that Eggleston, most celebrated for his photographs of the American South, is equally at ease across the country and around the world. Eggleston’s motivation for making color photography was simple and decidedly unpretentious. He wanted to see a lot of things in color because the world is in color. Unlike many photographers who take hundreds of photographs of a subject in order to achieve the “perfect” image, Eggleston is an artist with personal discipline who makes “one picture of one thing.” That picture may be a sign by the side of the road or just the side of the road. A person nicely dressed or just a dress. “Eggleston reminds us not to take anything for granted” Dr. Edwards concludes. “His photographs trigger connections, conjure memories and remind us always to check under the bed before going to sleep.”

William Eggleston: Anointing the Overlooked is organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and was made possible by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, which has lent generously from its permanent collection. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts also acknowledge the cooperation of the Eggleston Artistic Trust, Cheim and Read Gallery, New York, and the David Lusk Gallery, Memphis. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts is supported in part by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

FRIST CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS 

919 Broadway, Nashville, TN, 37203-3822

www.fristcenter.org