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Housed in Nashville's beautifully restored 1934 Art Deco main post office, the Frist Art Museum has no permanent collection of its own and instead hosts a rotating program of major traveling exhibitions spanning classical, modern, and contemporary art. The building's exterior is faced in white Georgia marble with gray-pink Minnesota granite, and inside, cast aluminum doors and grillwork and colored marble and stone follow the Art Deco style. Its Martin ArtQuest Gallery adds a hands-on, interactive wing aimed at younger visitors.
Visitor guide
The Frist Art Museum occupies Nashville's former main post office, a white marble Art Deco-era landmark in the downtown core. It is a non-collecting museum, so its galleries rotate through exhibitions from collections around the world and shows it organizes itself. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Marr & Holman, a Nashville firm, directed construction of the post office in 1933-34 under guidelines from the Office of the Supervising Architect for public buildings; the museum says Congress appropriated the funds during the Hoover administration. The building combines the two defining styles of the period: a spare, "starved" classicism outside, faced in white Georgia marble and gray-pink Minnesota granite, and Art Deco inside, with cast aluminum doors and grillwork and colored marble and stone on floors and walls. Wikipedia also gives a cost of $1.5 million and notes the site was chosen partly for its proximity to Union Station, when most mail traveled by train.
The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 15, 1984, as part of the Marr and Holman Buildings in Downtown Nashville group. A new main postal facility opened near the airport in 1986, leaving the Broadway building as a downtown branch. The central sorting rooms, with their high ceilings, became the galleries, and a central skylight that had been closed and built over in the 1950s was restored as clerestory windows lighting the foyer and grand staircases.
In the early 1990s, Thomas F. Frist Jr. and the Frist Foundation identified the building as a site for a downtown art museum. The building passed into the ownership of the City of Nashville in 1998 or 1999 (the museum gives 1998), through a public/private partnership led by the Frist Foundation. The city put $15 million toward renovation, and the Frist Foundation and family gave $25 million for renovation and endowment. The city owns the building and granted the museum a 99-year lease. The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opened in April 2001 with about 24,000 square feet of gallery space, and was renamed the Frist Art Museum in 2018.
The museum says it presents about 12 to 15 exhibitions a year, and the building covers 124,400 square feet, with more than 45,000 square feet of exhibition and public space. Martin ArtQuest is a permanent interactive gallery, with stations for drawing, painting, printmaking, zoetrope, shadow theater, stop-motion animation and digital painting, plus collaborative weaving on an Art Deco-inspired grid. It is run by the museum's education department and is aimed at visitors of all ages.
Because exhibitions change, check the operator for the current schedule, hours and admission. The Frist is a natural stop on a Voyzo private tour of downtown Nashville, where a private vehicle and driver with door-to-door pickup lets you pair it with other city sights.
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