Frist Art Museum to Present Robin Vuchnich’s ‘In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season’ in Nashville

The Frist Art Museum will present ‘Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season’, an interactive, light-based installation addressing environmental stewardship and diminishing biodiversity, from September 25, 2026 through January 3, 2027. The museum organised the exhibition and will show it in its Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery.

The work departs from the herbarium of Henry David Thoreau, the nineteenth-century philosopher whose ‘Walden; or, Life in the Woods’ (1854) meditates on living in direct communion with nature. Thoreau collected plant species around Concord, Massachusetts, the site of Walden Pond, and much of his herbarium of dried and pressed specimens is now held at the Harvard University Herbaria. Drawing on that collection, Vuchnich composed a projected grid of pressed plants, colour-coded to carry research from scientists tracking species decline in Concord. The museum states that more than half the species Thoreau collected are now declining toward local extinction.

A second element of the installation covers three walls of the gallery with an immersive projection of floral species in decline around Walden Pond. A sensor registers visitors’ movement and instantly affects, disrupts or alters the fields of flowers; when a viewer stops moving, the flowers return to full glory. The museum sets out the metaphor plainly — human presence changes nature whether or not that change is visible. Soundscapes recorded at Walden Pond accompany the projected imagery.

Vuchnich, a new-media artist, developed the project with Dr Emily Meineke, assistant professor of landscape entomology and a Hellmann Fellow at the University of California, Davis, whose lab studies the effects of climate change on plants and plant-eating insects. Meineke was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria from 2016 to 2019. The two will discuss the collaboration at the museum on Friday, October 16, 2026, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m., in a conversation moderated by Frist chief curator Mark Scala; registration opens September 14. A Member Morning is scheduled for Sunday, November 15, 2026, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The exhibition is supported by Jeannie and Clay Blevins and by the Gordon CAP Gallery Fund.

The presentation follows a season in which the Frist has also shown ‘An Indigenous Present’, a thematic exhibition spanning one hundred years of modern and contemporary Indigenous art with works by fifteen artists, co-organised by the artist Jeffrey Gibson and the independent curator Jenelle Porter and running in the Upper-Level Galleries through September 27, 2026; ‘International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams’ and ‘Anila Quayyum Agha: Interwoven’, both closing August 30, 2026; and ‘A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum’, which closed on August 23, 2026 and documented the transformation of the former US post office through architectural drawings, historical images and news clippings as part of the museum’s 25th anniversary commemoration.

The Frist Art Museum is located at 919 Broadway in Nashville, in an art deco building repurposed from a former US post office. Its website describes the institution as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported in part by public contributions, with a mission of serving the community through the arts and art access in particular.