What's on View
Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from VUMA’s Collection
9.2.2025 - 12.7.2025
This fall, the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art invites the public to look at works on paper in unexpected ways through the exhibition Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art Collection, on view from September 2 through December 7, 2025. Paper Backs highlights physical aspects of works on paper that are often hidden in exhibition settings, including stamped collectors’ marks, offhand doodles, and improvised mounts. Focusing on both the fronts and backs of prints, the exhibition traces their movement between artists and collectors, demonstrating the changing value of paper images over time and introducing visitors to key aspects of art historical detective work. The exhibition is generously supported by a grant from the IFPDA Foundation.
On October 16 at 12:00pm CST, the museum will stage a virtual symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Paper Backs: Hidden Stories of European Prints from the VUMA Collection, bringing together curators who oversee collections of European prints at museums spread across the South.
Each curator will give a lightning-style, 10-minute presentation about their museum’s pre-1915 European print holdings, with the goal of making these collections better-known amongst local, regional, and global audiences of both amateurs and professionals.
The symposium also seeks to initiate a collective discussion about how and why European prints often served as catalysts for the formation of institutional art collections in a region with limited public art infrastructure before the turn of the twentieth century.
How did old master and early modernist European prints in particular support various progressive and post-World War I- era agendas? What challenges and opportunities face the study and promotion of such objects in the South today?
RSVP to http://vu.edu/paperbackstories
Upcoming Exhibitions
Scent: Connection, Confrontation, Memory
Scent is everywhere; almost everyone can smell. But how cultures and individuals use and depict scent is a testament to shared experience. In spring 2026, the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art explores art that captures the olfactory in Scent: Connection, Confrontation, Memory, an exhibition of the ways smell becomes seen and supported, and how artists from a wide range of cultures have represented its ephemeral but ever-present quality. Bringing together interactive installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and a new performance commission from Ainu artist Kanako Uzawa, Scent revels in the meanings and infinite possibilities of a very human sense, physically contained and artistically represented.
Exhibition Archive
Molecular Muse
Molecular Muse
August 7-November 17, 2024
This exhibit showcases the work of undergraduate artists in the VI4 AiR Program, which draws from their scientific research in the School of Medicine Basic Science.
Fall Salon
A salon style exhibition of work from the permanent collection to support Vanderbilt classes.
The Art of Healing
Corvidae by Sarah Bogdal
Organized by a medical student collective, The Art of Healing was a juried exhibition to form an art lending program for patients of Vanderbilt University Medical Center based on research of the role of art in recovery and wellness.
... no footprints, even.
January 30, 2025 - May 11, 2025
The history of arctic exploration and polar art abounds with images of sublime wonder, colonial appropriation, and heroic masculinity. Over many centuries, European and North American imagemakers have imagined our planet’s polar regions as timeless zones awaiting bold human deeds in search of meaning and life. Inhospitable and full of hazards, polar landscapes according to this tradition have either served as mere backdrops to individual gestures of bravery and endurance or showcased the folly and fragility of any human endeavor.
The work of Montreal-based artist Jessica Houston unsettles such imagery and asks us to develop new aesthetic approaches to engage with the poles’ icy landscapes. Shown for the first time in this constellation, … no footprints, even. gathers four distinct, yet intricately related bodies of work Houston has produced over the last decade. Though different in scope, medium, and process, Houston’s projects share an impulse to read dominant polar representations and travel narratives against the grain. They ask viewers to consider the deep time of geological processes; to decolonize the visual language of dominant polar art; to imagine alternate modes of polar travel that respect the entangled nature of the human and the non-human; and to investigate momentous resonances between art, science, and spiritualism. Troubled by the impact of human-induced climate change on Earth’s polar regions, Houston’s paintings, collages, photographs, and audio works offer glimpses of what it might take to walk more lightly on this planet.
Follow this link to watch Jessica's Studio VU artist talk.
Essay
Follow this link to read/download co-curator Lutz Koepnick's essay about Jessica Houston's work.
Gallery Guide
Follow this link to download the detailed list of featured works and upcoming programs for ... no footprints, even.
Gloss: A Measured Response to New Video Art
8.27.24-12.8.24
Gloss: A Measured Response to New Video Art is an exhibition of artists’ films from 2010 to now that demonstrate how the establishment and proliferation of social video and video-sharing platforms has produced a new quality of moving image artworks that departs from the modern and postmodern uses of the form from the 1960s onward. The most delicious recent video art is vibes: careful filmmaking renders not just striking aesthetics, but a totalizing affect. Featuring ten works from the US, UK, and South America, the exhibition brings multiple cutting-edge artworks and artists to Nashville, the region, and/or the US for the first time. Relying on big images and soundtracks to produce big feelings by tackling big ideas, these new videos are the product of culture as we experience it now: desperate and hopeful, and forever online.
An Installation by Amie Esslinger
Holding Impact
1.15.23-5.10.24
Imagine two neutron stars captured in each other’s gravitational force—orbiting each other, the tension building as their tentacles of energy begin to reach out and become entangled. Finally, they collide in a massive explosion of gravitational waves that spew radioactive waste and heavy metals such as gold and platinum. This moment of destruction creates spectacular beauty but is challenging to comprehend and unsettling. Likewise, Holding Impact captures an irreversible moment in which a series of eight distinctive multimedia installations by Atlanta-based artist Amie Esslinger have collided into one, creating a force that fills the space, conforms to the space, and breaks free from the confines of the space.
VU Salon
1.21.24-4.19.24
This year the Gallery is working to support faculty by curating salon style exhibitions of works used frequently by classes for lectures, exercises, assignments, or culminating projects. By making visual material available for study students' understanding of the work develops over the course of the semester.