Exhibitions
FARM TO TABLE: ART, FOOD, AND IDENTITY IN THE AGE OF IMPRESSIONISM
Frist Art Museum / 919 Broadway January 31, 2025 - May 4, 2025
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (December 5, 2024)—The Frist Art Museum presents Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism and Tennessee Harvest: 1870s–1920s, two companion exhibitions that explore the intersections of art, gastronomy, and identity. Both exhibitions will be on view in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery from January 31 through May 4, 2025.
Farm to Table, organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, focuses on late 19th-century France and showcases the work of artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, who captured the nation’s unique relationship with food, from production to preparation and consumption.
Featuring paintings and sculptures that span the age of impressionism, the nearly 60 works in Farm to Table depict a wide gamut of human relationships to food. Throughout the exhibition are portrayals of farmers in fields, chefs and diners in cafés, and scenes ranging from agrarian crises to bountiful harvests and humble fare to luxurious meals.
“France’s reputation as the world’s culinary capital became increasingly important as it grappled with war, political instability, imperialism, and industrialization,” writes exhibition curator Andrew Eschelbacher. “In this climate, France’s culinary traditions signaled notions of its refinement, fortitude, and ingenuity while also exposing fractures in French society.”
Tennessee Harvest: 1870s–1920s
Organized by the Frist Art Museum, Tennessee Harvest was co-curated by Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist, and Candice Candeto, senior curator of fine and decorative art, Tennessee State Museum. The exhibition shows connections between paintings made in Tennessee or by Tennesseans and artworks in Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism.
The exhibition features 16 works by 19th- and early 20th-century painters including Lloyd Branson, George W. Chambers, Gilbert Gaul, Cornelius Hankins, Willie Betty Newman, Catherine Wiley, and others who absorbed and adapted European influences in both subject matter and style, using realist and impressionist approaches to the depiction of food and its cultivation in the state.
As with their French counterparts, these Tennessee artists often romanticized agricultural life. Showing strong, hard-working farmers and harvesters, they celebrate rural self-sufficiency and resiliency. Intentionally or not, this reinforced the perception of the turn-of-the-century South as a distinctly agricultural economy, even as manufacturing and other industries were on the rise. The paintings also warrant study for subjects they omit—Black farmers, markets, and cooks. To present a more complete view, the exhibition will include photographs showing the broader realities of food production across the state.
“Although new schools, art societies, and galleries were opening in cities like Knoxville and Nashville, artists frequently left Tennessee for cities like Munich, New York, or Paris to study at professional academies and see examples of European art in museums, salons, and artists’ ateliers,” writes Scala.
An audio tour for both exhibitions will feature members of Nashville’s diverse food community reflecting on selected works in the exhibition, including representatives from Bloomsbury Farms, the Nashville Food Project, Second Harvest Food Bank, and several local restaurants.
Martin ArtQuest, the Frist’s award-winning art-making space, will feature new stations highlighting the techniques, materials, and inspirations associated with impressionism, including still life and oil pastel activities.
Image: Victor Gabriel Gilbert. Le Carreau des Halles, 1880. Oil on panel; 21 1/8 x 29 in. Musée d’art moderne André Malraux, Le Havre
