Exhibitions
HERE WITH YOU: AWAKE AND DREAMING
Frist Art Museum / 919 Broadway May 7 - August 31st
Dylan Camp
The Frist Art Museum presents Here with You: Awake and Dreaming, an installation of work by Nashville-based artist Dylan Camp that explores family, individuality, fashion, and dreams. Here with You: Awake and Dreaming represents the fourth iteration of the Frist’s Art in the Elevator program.
Under the direction of Student Curator Sydney Nelson from Fisk University and Design Intern Autumn Cruse, a recent graduate of Tennessee State University, Here with You: Awake and Dreaming was created through an ongoing partnership with Fisk University and Tennessee State University that offers students or recent graduates opportunities to curate, design, market, and develop programs for installations at the Frist.
Installed in the Frist’s Grand Lobby Elevator, Here with You: Awake and Dreaming offers an immersive experience in a common, accessible space. The installation layout was designed by Cruse and features vinyl reproductions of eight of Camp’s acrylic paintings that were inspired by living in the South, the artist’s heritage, and her optimism for the future. Adorned in colorful clothes, the characters Camp depicts are unique individuals but stand together. “They live in a liminal space between waking and dreaming—an imaginative and optimistic place,” writes Nelson.
A large print of the painting Here With You serves as a guide to the elevator, and the two central figures of Water To Wine In Front Of My Homegirl installed on the elevator’s doors welcome guests inside. “The elevator itself, as a vessel, has been transformed into a space to welcome introspection about community,” says Nelson.
Seen together, the artworks explore the joy that can be found in dreams and the subconscious and suggest that dreaming can be a space of imagination and transformation—a fitting complement to this summer’s exhibition International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams.
The Art in the Elevator program (formerly titled Project Uplift) was conceived to distill the curatorial process into a short period of time so students can gain exposure to all aspects of exhibition planning. While typical museum exhibitions may take years to plan, the organization of each Art in the Elevator installation is condensed into three months.
Image: Dylan Camp. Going Up Yonder, 2026. Acrylic on canvas; 41 x 31 in.
Courtesy of the artist. © Dylan Camp. Photo: John Schweikert
