NASHVILLE, TN – The Frist Art Museum presents A Landmark Repurposed: From Post Office to Art Museum, an exhibition celebrating the historic building the Frist is privileged to occupy—Nashville’s former main post office. The exhibition will be on view in the always-free Conte Community Arts Gallery from December 19, 2025, through August 1, 2026.
Commemorating the Frist Art Museum’s 25th anniversary, this exhibition with updated design and an expanded narrative highlights the building’s role as a civic institution, from its creation as the city’s main post office in 1933−34 to its reopening as an art museum on April 8, 2001. Through archival images, architectural drawings, “Then and Now” photographs, news clippings, and original planning documents, guests will learn about the building’s distinctive architectural styles, as well as how historical events affected the construction and function of the post office.
Constructed in 1933–34 under the direction of local firm Marr & Holman, the building was financed by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Construction. Following guidelines from the Office of the Supervising Architect, the building displays the two most distinctive architectural styles of the period: “starved” or “stripped” classicism and Art Deco.
During the Depression, architects working for the federal government were expected to express in their buildings the values of permanence, stability, and order—values that a classical style had traditionally embodied—but in forms streamlined to suggest progress and simplified to lower production costs. Inside the Frist’s building, cast aluminum doors and grillwork, as well as colored marble and stones on the floors and walls, follow the more decorative trend commonly known as Art Deco, which had developed in commercial interiors during the 1920s.
The building has long been central to the life of the city. During its construction, unemployed workers gathered by the hundreds at the building site, seeking jobs. World War II soldiers sent last letters to loved ones from the post office before boarding trains next door at Union Station on their way to the European front. Every April, long lines of last-minute tax filers formed here, with postal workers sometimes accepting the returns in the street.
In 1984, the post office building was officially added to the National Register of Historic Places. Two years later, however, a new main postal distribution center was constructed on Royal Parkway, near Nashville International Airport, and much of the old building was no longer needed. Opening an art museum downtown was originally inspired by Nashville’s Agenda, a 1993 community-wide visioning project. Dr. Thomas F. Frist envisioned a museum that would be “a place that will bring the power of great visual arts to the center of our city and the center of our lives.”
For current hours and additional information, visit FristArtMuseum.org or call 615.244.3340
Marr & Holman presentation drawing, The Tennessean archives. Graphite on paper;
13¾ × 24 in. Frist Art Museum. Photo: Bill LaFevor