Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau's Flowers

Robin Vuchnich is showing In Search of Thoreau's Flowers at the Frist Art Museum from September 25, 2026, through January 3, 2027. The exhibition is in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, at 919 Broadway in Nashville.

Vuchnich is a new-media artist, and the whole show starts with the herbarium of Henry David Thoreau—the nineteenth-century philosopher and naturalist. Thoreau left behind a collection of pressed plants, now kept at the Harvard University Herbaria, and Vuchnich uses it to build interactive, light-based installations about environmental stewardship and biodiversity loss. The first part of the show, This is and No Mistake—a title taken from a Walden quote—projects a grid of those pressed plants. They're color-coded to show scientific research on species decline in Concord, Massachusetts: of the 648 specimens Thoreau left behind, more than half are now extinct or endangered in the region.

The second part, The Memory of a Season, is an immersive video projection of floral species in decline around Walden Pond. A motion sensor changes the projection in response to how you move through the space, a metaphor for how human presence alters nature. An ambient soundscape recorded on site rounds it out. Vuchnich works with projection mapping, video art, and creative coding rather than artificial intelligence, and he collaborated on the project with ecologist and entomologist Emily Meineke, whose lab at UC Davis studies how climate change affects plants and the insects that eat them.

Gallery admission is free for guests 18 and younger and for members, and $20 for adults. The show runs through January 3, 2027, at the Frist.