“Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman” Opens Today in Nashville: 17 Artists on Humanity and the Planet at the Frist Art Museum

The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee opens today, September 25, 2026, the exhibition “Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman,” bringing together 17 contemporary artists who use analog and new technologies to explore the connections between humanity, other species and planet Earth. The exhibition runs through January 3, 2027.

Participating artists include Ian Cheng, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Marguerite Humeau, Josèfa Ntjam, Jacolby Satterwhite and Saya Woolfalk. They question what philosophers call “human exceptionalism” — the idea that humans stand above and apart from the rest of the world and may ignore the needs of species and ecosystems beyond themselves. Instead of a human–nature hierarchy, their works propose a coexistence in which humans are part of a wider web of life.

The artists’ tools include digital animation, augmented and virtual reality, motion capture and generative software. Like the surrealists a century earlier, they deploy the marvelous, the strange and the unpredictable: images float, tremble and dance through space, forming psychologically charged archetypes that speak to our collective dreams, fears and desires.

The exhibition is divided into three sections. The first takes a biological and ecological perspective, addressing species extinction, evolution and the interweaving of species. The second is psychological, built on stories of metamorphosis: humans turn into microbes and mucus, dreams become poetry, robots become furious dancers. The third is ontological — it deals with the philosophy of being and joins ancestral beliefs with contemporary ones, especially outside modern Western traditions.

The exhibition is curated by Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala, and comes as an invitation to see the future not as an escape from the world, but as a shared dream with it.

Source: USA Art News / Hyperallergic