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 from September 25, 2026, through January 3, 2027.
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.”
This tragic loss of biodiversity inspired ecologist and entomologist Emily Meineke to convene artists and scientists to create an exhibition reflecting on this erasure of once abundant flora. In addition to Vuchnich, participants included artist and professor of photography Leah Sobsey, film studies professor Marsha Gordon, and professor of organismic and evolutionary biology Charles Davis.
The Memory of a Season is an immersive and responsive video projection of floral species in decline around Walden Pond. A field of colorful flowers covers three walls of the gallery, nearly surrounding the viewer with stunning beauty and sensory abundance, including an ambient soundscape recorded at the site. As a viewer moves across the gallery, a sensor picks up their movement, which instantly changes, disrupts, or alters the fields of flowers on the walls. When the viewer stops moving, the fields of flowers return to their full glory. Vuchnich thus invites viewers to reflect on the fragile relationship between memory, place, and the natural world.
In Martin ArtQuest, the Frist’s award-winning art-making space, several of the new interactive stations align thematically with this exhibition and with Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman, which will be on view concurrently in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery.
Program
Conversation: In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers
Friday, October 16, noon–1:00 p.m.
Auditorium
Free for members; $20 for not-yet members
Registration is required and opens September 14
After experiencing In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers—The Memory of a Season, join collaborators Robin Vuchnich, a new-media artist, and Emily Meineke, assistant professor of urban landscape entomology at the University of California, Davis, as they discuss the creative partnership behind the exhibition. Moderated by Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala, this conversation explores the intersection of art, ecology, and scientific research.
Exhibition Credit
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Supporter Acknowledgment
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.
Connect with us @FristArtMuseum
About the Frist Art Museum
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Frist Art Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit art exhibition center dedicated to presenting and originating high-quality exhibitions with related educational programs and community outreach activities. Located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, TN, the Frist Art Museum offers the finest visual art from local, regional, national, and international sources in exhibitions that inspire people through art to look at their world in new ways. Information on accessibility can be found at FristArtMuseum.org/accessibility. Gallery admission is free for guests ages 18 and younger and for members, and $20 for adults. For current hours and additional information, visit FristArtMuseum.org or call 615.244.3340.
