With all of the lovely weather that graced us this last week, Walker and I decided to head downtown and get our class on at the Frist Art Museum. With our luck, we planned our trip on the one cloudy and humid day of the entire week, but regardless, the museum was a sight to see. Located near the front of downtown, the Frist is about a 30-minute walk or a seven-minute drive, depending on how you want to get there (10/10 would recommend walking and hitting up McDonald’s for a $1 ice cream cone on the way). As Vandy students we get free admission — you’ll need your Commodore card as proof — and with your sick new wristbands (peep the photos) you’ll have access to the entire museum.
Now normally I’d recommend setting aside an hour or two to experience all of the beautiful art that the place has to offer, but due to an event that was starting soon, Walker and I only had 45 minutes to make it through everything. It was a hard task considering that everything is so regal and beautiful, but we did our best to document the hotspots of the trip (one of which was their insanely classy bathrooms … yes I did take a mirror selfie in it … I am only a little ashamed).
classy af 
whoops… 
The lower level exhibits of the museum are currently showcasing Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and Their Times: The Mellon Collection of French Art, which ended up being a glorified animal painting fest with lots of doggos and cattle painted onto canvases. The best part of the lower exhibits, however, was a multi-room gallery dedicated solely to nineteenth-century horses. I don’t know whether “horse” is the museum’s new theme at the moment, but there were so many of said animal that I felt like I was in a horse girl’s dream and couldn’t find my way out. That being said, I got some bomb.com photos with the paintings and was able to find my way out in a speedy five minutes without hating the overwhelming aura of “stallions” too much (this may be me being a bit dramatic, the paintings are nice, I swear).
so. many. good. boys. 
more horses? 
Next, we went up to the second level to walk through the Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing exhibit. This exhibit focused on the documentary photographer, Dorothea Lange, whose breathtaking black and white portraits worked to expose injustice and inequalities in the twentieth century.
After making our way through the photographs, we ended up at my personal favorite place in the museum: the interactive children’s exhibit. We ended up spending 35 minutes of the entire 45 minutes we had at the museum in this area, and I do not regret a single thing. From a stop motion station to light boards and a portrait drawing circle (surprise, surprise, where you could draw horses), this place truly has it all. Now I’ve been waiting to hit up this area of the Frist since I first heard about it, so it might have just been me, but I could have spent hours in there. There was this sick heat motion sensor wall that worked kind of like how an Xbox Kinect does when it detects your body moving and we attempted multiple still shots including spelling out YMCA (Walker forgot how to spell and ruined it) and anchoring down (an even bigger fail).
Walker’s favorite station was a soundwave board that moved sand into different patterns on the board as it changed frequencies, while mine was the stop-motion station where we created a short film. I tried to document it on video for the blog, but we accidentally hit delete instead of replay 🙁 (shoutout to the eight-year-old boy who tried to help us recover it even though we all knew it was too late).
we accidentally deleted it 
What I love about the art museum is that you can go to appreciate the details and effort behind the paintings and photographs, or you can go to have a fun time making up stories about why each piece was created. Either way, as long as you’re respectful of the people around you, the guards are extremely nice and enjoy seeing people interact with the art. So whether you end up checking out the Frist for the art galleries inside, or just for the architecture of the building itself (which is beautiful and 100% photo-worthy), the Frist Art Museum will not disappoint. If you have a free afternoon or weekend and you are looking for something fun to do downtown, I’d highly recommend checking it out.
Frist Art Museum Hours:https://fristartmuseum.org/visit/hours-directions
McDonald’s Hours: Open 24/7… SO GET THAT CONE!