Five weeks ago, Frist Center for the Visual Arts announced the exhibition schedule for its opening year in 2001. Accompanying that announcement came something much less obvious but perhaps much more important: the center’s first steps toward promoting the visual arts as a means of invigorating the Middle Tennessee region. No longer should we think of art institutions simply as places that hold paintings and sculpture, but rather as centers of culture that can help bring a city together. The Frist Center’s executive director Chase Rynd clearly has this in mind. ”What we do here at the Frist Center is not for the community,“ he says, ”but with the community that we serve.“

Rynd has already more than earned his stripes in community building. Settling in the Seattle area in 1975, he established the first major noncommerical contemporary art gallery in the Pacific Northwest and served twice as chairman of the groundbreaking Seattle Arts Commission, which now stands as a model for other such commissions throughout the country. In 1992, he became director and CEO of the Tacoma Museum of Art, where he served for six years before coming to the Frist. Such professional experience positions him not only to oversee the workings of the Frist, but to help direct a new vision for Nashville through the visual arts.

”Twenty-five years ago, Seattle really had nothing, not even restaurants. If you wanted to dine, you had to fly to San Francisco. Now it’s the other way around,“ Rynd says. ”A big ingredient in the turnaround was the strong public/private partnership that helped educate the corporate community to understand how the arts were an important part of their business.... What Seattle’s corporate community came to realize was that by investing in the arts, they were investing in the growth of their community.“

Such was the foundation on which the Frist Foundation established the Frist Center in 1998. Its direction was first set forth in a report by the Toronto-based consulting firm Lord Cultural Resources Planning and Management Inc., which was hired to analyze the overall feasibility of establishing a major arts institution in the region. Recommending the formation of a visual arts center rather than a collecting institution, Lord’s advice was based on at least two primary observations. The first was that the creation of a collecting institution in the 21st century was financially impractical if it were to include anything beyond contemporary art. The second was that Nashville already had a number of strong private and public art collections, but many lacked adequate exhibition space to display the wealth they had in storage.

Lord posited that what was needed—and what would thrive—in Middle Tennessee was a visual arts center with the financial backing, space, and staff to stage major traveling exhibitions and to showcase what the community already had on hand. This would give the people of Middle Tennessee access to the full breadth of the visual arts, and in turn would go a long way toward invigorating the city. The Frist Center’s recent announcement of its four inaugural exhibitions, sponsored by AmSouth Bank, confirms the center’s commitment to its stated purpose.

The center kicks off its grand opening on April 8, 2001, with a blockbuster show, ”European Masterworks: Paintings From the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.“ Like the Center itself, the show owes its genesis in part to Lord Cultural Resources, which found out that the Art Gallery of Ontario was closing down in 2001 for major renovations. In fact, the exhibition is mutually beneficial both to the Frist and to the Canadian gallery: The latter institution gets to improve its international reputation, while the former gets a show of works that few art museums would normally loan out in such a sizable group. The result is a short survey of the tradition of Western art encompassing Tintoretto, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Monet, Degas, van Gogh, and Picasso.

”European Masterworks“ will act as an interesting counterpoint to the yet-to-be-announced work on view in the Frist’s Contemporary Artists Project (CAP) Gallery, which will also open on April 8. Under the direction of the Frist’s recently appointed curator of American art, Mark Scala (formerly chief curator of Roanoke’s Art Museum of Western Virginia), the CAP Gallery will become Nashville’s newest venue for well-known and emerging artists. ”Here contemporary artists will not only be able to present their work in a museum-like setting, but will become their own curators,“ explains Scala, who hopes to receive a number of proposals from local and regional artists. ”Two changing exhibits a year will be chosen via an ongoing review of proposals and will include the gamut of creative expression.“

On opening night, the center will fulfill yet another of its directives: to showcase works from Nashville’s many private and public collections. Although the list of approximately 125 works to be displayed has not yet been confirmed, the selection process for ”An Enduring Legacy: Art of the Americas From Nashville Collections“ is already well under way by the Middle Tennessee guest curator, Susan Knowles, who is working in conjunction with Frist curators Scala and Candace J. Adelson, a European specialist and an internationally recognized scholar of Renaissance and decorative art.

The show will draw from works long held in storage by Nashville’s broad-based art institutions, including the Tennessee State Museum (TSM), Cheekwood, the Fisk University art galleries, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, the Parthenon, Belle Meade Mansion, and The Hermitage. Although each tends to display its most significant pieces, Vanderbilt’s collection alone, for example, includes some 4,000 works that infrequently see the light of day. Add to this pieces from the many private collections here in town, and the show can be expected to offer up some extraordinary surprises.

Also on board for opening night is ”From Post Office to Art Center: A Nashville Landmark in Transition.“ An architectural history curated by Scene contributor Christine Kreyling, the show follows the transformation of Nashville’s Art Deco-styled downtown post office into the new home of the Frist Center. The show promises to reference the building as the sole work in the permanent collection of the Frist.

Further exhibitions have been scheduled as well, including ”Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian Art Museum,“ which will come on board when ”European Masterworks“ is retired in July 2001. And beginning Sept. 27, 2001, ”Realms of Faith: Medieval and Byzantine Art From the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore“ and ”Leaves of Gold: Treasures of Manuscript Illumination From Philadelphia Collections“ will be on view concurrently through late 2001.

”You need to look at the soul, not just the skeleton, of a city,“ Chase Rynd says—and feeding the soul is precisely what the Frist Center is poised to do. By presenting the broad sweep of art history while acknowledging the wealth of Nashville’s own treasures and talents, the center’s first year of exhibitions promises not only to stimulate the cultural life of the city, but to make Nashville a better place to live.