Exhibitions
ROBIN VUCHNICH: IN SEARCH OF THOREAU’S FLOWERS— THE MEMORY OF A SEASON
Frist Art Museum / 919 Broadway September 25, 2026 - January 3, 2027
Robin Vuchnich
The Frist Art Museum presents Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season, an interactive, light-based exhibition that addresses global issues of environmental stewardship and diminishing biodiversity. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist’s Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery.
Through projection mapping, video art, and creative coding without the use of artificial intelligence, the Clarksville-based new-media artist Robin Vuchnich brings scientific data about the changing world to beautiful and vivid life. Inspired by the experiences and writings of nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, Vuchnich has created an engaging visual metaphor with a clear message about how human activity affects the natural world. Thoreau has long been celebrated for his profound essays on subjects ranging from natural history to social justice. His most prominent work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), is a meditation on the transcendent experience of living in direct communion with nature. Throughout his life, Thoreau collected many species of plants from the region around Walden Pond. Today, much of that collection of dried and pressed specimens is housed at the Harvard University Herbaria.
To create the first part of her installation, titled This is and No Mistake after a quote from Walden, Vuchnich drew from the Harvard collection and collaborated with scientists tracking species decline in Concord to create a large-scale visualization of environmental change based on Thoreau’s collection of pressed plants. “If Thoreau walked those woods today, he would encounter a profoundly altered landscape,” writes Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala. “Of Thoreau’s 648 plant specimens preserved at Harvard, over half are now extinct or endangered in the Concord region because of climate change, pollution, overdevelopment, and other human causes.”
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Supported in part by Jeannie and Clay Blevins and Gordon CAP Gallery Fund
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.
Image: Robin Vuchnich. In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season (installation view), 2025. Courtesy of the artist. © Robin Vuchnich
