The Frist Art Museum in Nashville announced Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman on August 4 — a group exhibition of 16 contemporary artists working across analog and emergent technologies, opening in the Ingram Gallery on September 25 and running through January 3, 2027. The roster includes several names well known to anyone tracking tech-and-art crossover specifically: Ian Cheng, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rachel Rossin, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Libby Heaney, and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, alongside Nancy Baker Cahill, Marguerite Humeau, Katja Loher, Josefa Ntjam, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Saya Woolfalk, Marina Zurkow, Chalet Comellas, Kite, and the collaborative pairing Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.
The premise: technology as entangled, not opposed
The show’s stated territory is the interconnectedness between humanity, other living things, and the environment — explicitly framed around the intersections of dreams and reality, the physical and the virtual, human creativity and nonhuman intelligence. That’s a deliberately non-binary curatorial position: rather than staging technology as either a tool for ecological repair or a threat to it (the two most common framings for tech-and-environment shows), Shimmer appears built to hold both readings open across 17 different artists’ individual arguments, rather than resolving toward one thesis.
The curatorial team is the credibility signal here
The exhibition is led by Mark Scala, the Frist’s chief curator, in conversation with Christiane Paul — curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the most consistently cited authorities in institutional digital-art curation — and moderated by Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, a widely-recognized historian of art and technology. Pairing a regional museum’s chief curator with the Whitney’s dedicated digital-art curator for a joint symposium is a specific, legible signal: it’s the Frist explicitly borrowing (and building) credibility in exactly the curatorial specialty — art made with or about emergent technology — that this show depends on.
Why a Nashville museum announcing a September show is worth covering in August
Museum exhibition announcements usually aren’t news the moment they’re announced — the interesting date is usually the opening. This one’s worth flagging early for a specific reason: the six-week lead time between the August 4 announcement and the September 25 opening, paired with a named symposium and named curatorial pairing, gives readers real runway to plan around it rather than finding out after the fact. It’s also a useful marker of a broader pattern worth tracking — mid-size regional museums (not just the Whitney, MoMA, or the major coastal institutions) increasingly building their own digital-art programming with serious external curatorial partnerships, rather than treating tech-and-art work as an occasional traveling show.
Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman runs September 25, 2026 – January 3, 2027 at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, before traveling in 2027 to the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University Qatar (Doha) and the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State. An accompanying 166-page hardcover catalogue, Shimmer: Artists Dream a Posthuman World, is published by MIT Press and co-edited by Mark Scala and Nora N. Khan.
Related Reading
- Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman — Frist Art Museum (official)
- Frist Art Museum Presents Immersive Exhibition of Contemporary Artists Who Reimagine Humanity’s Relationship with the Environment — GlobeNewswire
- Frist Art Museum Announces 2026 Schedule of Exhibitions Marking 25th Anniversary — PR Newswire
- Shimmer: Artists Dream a Posthuman World — The Shop at Matter