The Frist Art Museum presents Matthew Ritchie: A Garden in the Flood, a thematic survey of the artist’s work since 2000, comprising paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video. This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Paul T. Kwami, the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ music director and the inspirational collaborator on this project. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Upper-Level Galleries from November 11, 2022 through March 5, 2023.
Renowned transmedia artist Matthew Ritchie invites viewers to experience the richness and complexity of the world by connecting such fields as philosophy and mythology, epic poetry and music, and history and physics. Interweaving dualities of harmony and chaos, the exhibition offers a meditation on art’s capacity to help overcome social fragmentation — 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 will be 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, Dr. Paul T. Kwami.
At once visually stunning and intellectually engaging, Ritchie’s work is appropriately presented in Nashville, a city where interdisciplinary collaborations are increasingly defining the creative community.
Matthew Ritchie was born in 1964 in London, England, and has been an artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, as well as a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ritchie’s work has been shown in numerous museums and exhibitions worldwide, including the Biennale of Sydney, Havana Biennial, São Paulo Art Biennial, Seville International Contemporary Art Biennial, Venice Biennale of Architecture, and Whitney Biennial. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Moody Center for the Arts, and Saint Louis Art Museum. His work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and other institutions worldwide.
Saved, by Virginia Overton, continues through Dec 31, 2022 in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery at the Frist. Though she has worked in New York City since the early 2000s, Nashville-born artist Virginia Overton maintains strong connections with Middle Tennessee, where her family has owned a farm for more than a century. For her site-specific installations, Overton salvages such elements as plywood, refrigerator parts, and farm utensils, then creates new meanings through surprising arrangements and unexpected juxtapositions. Overton earned her BFA and MFA from the University of Memphis.
Special NMAAM Art Note: Through November 30, 2022, the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) presents a major exhibition by funk music icon George Clinton on display in the Museum’s Feature Gallery. ‘Boundless: The Manifestation of Self Expression’ features 33 pieces of art with vibrant colors unique to the icon’s eclectic style.
